HM - 6-1

Karl Marx as a Conservative Thinker

Alan Shandro

According to a long-standing conservative critique, the proponents of fundamental or revolutionary social change necessarily fail by sacrificing the organic complexity of society and the individual upon a procrustean bed of dogmatic and rigid universal principles. I will argue that Marx's concept of proletarian self-emancipation is not only compatible with this conservative critique but is appropriately understood as a variant of it. The self-emancipation of the working class is the core of Marx's critique of the utopian socialists, for whom socialism is the instantiation of universal ideals rather than the product of class struggle. This critique should be construed, not as a theoretical promissory note for the realisation of these ideals through the agency of the workers, but as a criticism of the very project of founding political ethics on the basis of universal ideals. Marx's political thought bears a structural similarity to conservative thought in that each seeks to ground its political programme upon the study of society as it actually exists, rather than upon a vision of human nature considered apart from society. If Marx's critique of utopian socialism holds water, the intellectual roots of Stalinist authoritarianism may be traced, not to the failure of Marx fully to outline the ideal communist society, but to the assimilation of elements of his thought to the utopian style and tradition of political thought. There should be no surprise, therefore, when attempts to transcend Stalinism by basing radical politics upon sanitised versions of a socialist utopia or socialist renditions of such universal liberal principles as human rights prove counter-productive.

To characterise Marx's political thought as conservative is paradoxical.1 It is not, however, novel - the present argument will take off from Andrew Collier's contention, in his Socialist Reasoning: An Inquiry into the Political Philosophy of Scientific Socialism, that the style of Marx's thought is 'methodological conservatism'/ that his revolutionary position is based upon an immanent or internal account of capitalist society and not upon the inadequacy of this society when measured against a transcendent or external standard. This contention is open to a number of objections; it may be challenged both as an accurate interpretation of Marx's political

1 But, see Bevan 1973. 2 Collier 1990, p. 9.

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Historical Materialism

thought and as an appropriate way of theorising a revolutionary political position. It may be argued, in particular, that Marx must address the ethical problems of revolutionary action either by identifying the interests of the protagonist of his revolutionary drama, the proletariat, with the universal interests of humanity, or by subordinating non-proletarian interests, in utilitarian fashion, to the revolutionary project of the workers. Thus, either a transcendent ideal is surreptitiously imported into a purportedly immanent or conservative justification of revolutionary change, or the defence of revolution is indeed conservative in the sense that it is grounded solely upon existing interests (in this case, those of the working class), but only at the unacceptable cost of substituting, like more traditional conservatisms, the prejudice of entrenched interests for the impartiality of moral reason. I will argue that Collier's failure to grapple seriously with this sort of objection prevents him from making a persuasive case for Marx's 'methodological conservatism'. I will suggest, however, that a more careful consideration of the nature of the political practice entailed by Marx's conception of proletarian self-emancipation could defuse these objections and so rescue the main lines of Collier's reading. The argument I propose is, therefore, twofold: that Marx's political thought exhibits, in significant respects, a conservative cast; and that this conservatism is expressed in a distinctive style of political intervention.3

3 While my characterisation of Marx's thought as conservative is derived from Collier, it should be noted that Collier himself, citing unspecified 'political connotations' of conservatism, eschews the use of this language in favour of 'realism'. And it is true that the relevant methodological or metaethical issue might well be characterised as counterposing realism and utopianism or immanence and transcendence. Writing in the context of the Canadian polity, where the principal party of government for the past century has been the 'centrist' Liberals and the term 'red tory' is a commonplace of the political culture, used loosely to acknowledge affinities between (some) conservatives and (some) socialists, I am perhaps used to seeing the political connotations of conservatism as less determinate, more open to struggle. Thus I see no decisive political reason to follow Collier in dropping the language of conservatism. Two considerations weigh in favour of retaining it. First, the plausible attribution to Marx of a realist or immanent (or methodologically conservative) approach to the ethics of revolutionary action requires, I will argue, an account of his relation to the working-class movement in 'communitarian' terms, an appreciation that Marx's various ethical (and anti-ethical) pronouncements are unified, not by an abstract moral principle, but simply by the thread of a life lived in relation to the community of the working-class movement (thus will someone who finds himself in the position of an outsider, a newcomer, an advisor, a leader or an old-timer quite properly construe in different and sometimes

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Shandro/Marx as a Conservative Thinker

Marx's critique of utopian thinking

Marx's critique of utopian socialism is a cntlque of the Enlightenment's naive faith in the power of reason to reshape the social and political world in its own image. One can acknowledge this and still read Marx, as he is perhaps most often read today, as a child of Enlightenment optimism. His historical materialism would constitute a scientific socialism in that it would provide a realistic diagnosis of the failure to realise the ideals of the Enlight enment within capitalist society and identify an agent with the power and interest to make good that failure in the form of socialist society. But Andrew Collier has argued that Marx's

contradictory terms the ethical commitments of political action). The communitarian terms of this argument suggest additional affinities with the language of conservatism, although the extent of these affinities could not be specified without a more concrete account than I give here of the nature of the community of the working-class movement and of the relation of Marx to it. Second, the language of conservatism, used with reference to Marx, is admittedly provocative but I would hope that the provocation is so obvious as not to be misleading. It is, I think, warranted. Currently influential readings of Marx as the (perhaps unconscious) bearer of a transcendental ethical position that casts communism in a liberal mould as the substantive realisation of the merely formal universality of moral rights can appeal to legitimate concerns. But their plausibility rests upon an assumption that a reading consistent with the immanent (or 'conservative') terms of Marx's own presentation of his position would merely give theoretical sanction to short-sighted expediency or narrow prejudice. The apparent self-evidence of this assumption, I believe, expresses the hegemony of radical liberalism over the Left, including much of Marxism, and the arrogance of those pettybourgeois propagators of radical liberal ideology who can discern in the resistance of the masses to their abstract radicalism nothing other than subordination to bourgeois ideology. The hegemony of this stratum within the Left, sometimes advertised as 'counter-hegemony', is, in fact, one form of proletarian subalternity. Making a perfect foil for ruling-class appeals to working-class communitarianism (or conservatism), it plays a significant role in the hegemonic strategy of the bourgeoisie. Revolutionary communist politics can be embraced for liberal or libertarian reasons but also for communitarian or conservative reasons. Marxists have no more reason to feel ill at ease with the language of community, conservation, virtue, and practical wisdom than they have to be embarrassed by the language of rights and freedom. Which of these or other sorts of reasons ought to weigh more heavily in particular decisions is a matter for concrete analyses of concrete situations and for the political processes of discussion and negotiation in communities organised in and around the working-class movement. The concrete process of judgement involved is resistant to theorisation in transcendental, though not in immanent (or conservative), terms.

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critique goes much further than this; that it is not primarily a criticism of lack of realism in assessing the means and conditions necessary to achieve a shared ideal, nor even of lack of realism in the formulation of the ideal to be achieved, but rather, most fundamentally, it is a critique of a style of political thought which consists in formulating ideals or utopias to be realised. The claim of Marx's theory to the appellation 'scientific socialism' is elitist only to those who, following Bakunin, assume that the people are incapable of comprehending scientific concepts. It is, if anything, the opposite of a claim to esoteric knowledge as to the course of future history. For, as Marx indicated in his marginalia in Bakunin's Statism and Anarchy, the term was 'used only in opposition to utopian socialism, which tries to impose new hallucinations and illusions on the people instead of confining the scope of its knowledge to the study of the social movement of the people itself.4 Thus, Marx's claim to scientificity actually functions as a restriction upon the appropriate scope of claims to socialist knowledge, excluding, in particular, knowledge of an end to be realised by the movement. As Collier presents it, the issue between Marx and such utopian socialists as Saint-Simon does not concern the value of scientific knowledge, but how the aim of socialist politics is to be understood and, consequently, the scope and nature of the knowledge relevant to it: should this aim be seen, after the fashion of the utopians, as 'the construction and administration of the best sort of society for human beings' or, with Marx, as 'securing a successful outcome of the workers' struggle against the constraints of capitalism'?s Collier goes on to suggest that each response to this question should be seen as the gauge of a distinctive style and tradition of political thought. In one of these traditions, the central task of political theory is seen as the attempt, purportedly in abstraction from the merely contingent features of existing society, to outline an ideal state against which real societies may be measured and judged. In a variant of the same tradition abstract concepts, such as justice, may be proposed 'as principles upon which society could be reconstructed'; concrete practices and institutions are justified or condemned in the name of the ideal, and the practice of political theory consists in the definition of these abstract ideas and the specification of their mutual relations.6 This style of political thought, which is characteristic of radicals and liberals, might be

4 Marx 1978c, p. 546. 5 Collier 1990, p. 3. 6 Collier 1990, p. 4.

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termed transcendenta� since its political practice consists essentially of attempting to bring political reality into conformity with an ideal that transcends it.

The other tradition of political thought may be characterised, by contrast, as immanent. Here, the aims and interests of an existing society, group or institution are taken for granted as the appropriate frame of reference for political theory, whose task is essentially to determine 'how the political world works, as a condition of telling how to produce certain effects, the effects being the flourishing of an

existing political institution'? For obvious reasons, this style of political theory has proved congenial to conservatives and, for the same reasons, it must appear uninviting to those who hold fundamental objections to the existing order. But, by no means need it be impervious to pressures for necessary changes; it is just that changes are justified not as the realisation of an ideal, but as the remedy for an evil. Transcendental thinkers are quick to assert the inadequacy, and often the dishonesty, of this sort of approach: if an

abuse is indeed an e� they reason, surely it is so because it violates an ideal. Thus, the appropriate remedy for the evil is to reorganise society as a whole in conformity with the ideal rather than merely to palliate a particularly glaring, isolated abuse.s Since Edmund Burke, English conservatives have replied with arguments which, like the following, express an immanent understanding of the tasks and possibilities of political theory:

Principles and ideals don't fall from the sky: they are the products of some aspects of the society in which they arise. We need to know more about existing society before we know whether there are any ways to realise them, and indeed whether anyone really wants to realise them. For ideals often arise from limited aspects of a society and cause harm if generalised. Public ownership and free access is an excellent way to run a road, but a lousy way to run a bathroom. Individual free choice is the best basis for marriage but the worst for environmental planning. Everyone taking their turn is a good way of arranging annual holidays, but a bit dodgy in surgical operations. Utopias tend to be one-sided affairs, one persons' dream but another's nightmare; and abstract ideals like justice and liberty are only meaningful when put in context - but then, the context will tell you what is needed, without the ideal.9

7 Collier 1990, p. 4. 8 Collier 1990, p. 4. 9 Collier 1990, p. 5.

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Collier claims that this sort of response is available not only to conservatives but also to scientific socialists who, like the former, base their programme upon the study of society as it actually exists rather than upon an abstract, unhistorical vision of human nature. Indeed, he claims that this stance dictates Marx and Engels's refusal to speculate about the future as well as the contempt with which they treat attempts to ground socialist politics upon such abstract ideals as justice or equality. 10 The attribution of this kind of contextual or methodological conservatism to revolutionaries like Marx is far from absurd: Marx does share with conservatives a sense of the organic complexity of society and, if an abuse or an evil is deeply enough rooted in the social organism, perhaps surgery, rather than aspirin and bandages, may be the necessary remedy. But particular problems confront a Marxist employment of a contextual critique of transcendent ideals. For the context in which ideals must be interpreted and evaluated is the existing capitalist society. Now, the 'abuses' that Marx is concerned to remedy - exploitation, alienated labour, class conflict - are traceable to a specific evil of capitalist society: the existence of bourgeois private property. However, according to Marx's own account, this evil is the organising principle of capitalist society as a whole. There would seem, then, to be no way that Marx could invoke the capitalist social context in condemning abuses of capitalism. For, if capitalism is the abuse, what could constitute the context in terms of which it is judged to be such?

The kind of rejoinder available to Marx, Collier suggests, is determined by the context of his analysis of capitalist society, in particular by the dialectical character of that analysis and by the centrality of the working-class movement within it. Capitalist society, on Marx's analysis, is essentially contradictory; that is, its very structure is ridden by conflict, is generative of tendencies which undermine its own effective operation. Like any society, capitalism structures relations between individuals so that they can meet their needs through interaction with the material environment. Capitalism could not survive unless it met, to a considerable extent, the needs of its members. However, its dynamic force, the self-expansion of value, is indifferent to these needs. Thus, for example, the tension between the social character of the productive apparatus and individualised appropriation expresses itself though an anarchy of production in periodic crises of overproduction. The critical edge of this Marxist claim is not that capitalism restricts the satisfaction of basic human needs, if by the latter is meant a natural standard of needs that exists independently of capitalist society. It is, rather, that

10 Collier 1990, p. 5.

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capitalism fails to meet the needs it creates itself. In this sense, Marx's critique is an immanent one; capitalism stands condemned, if not by its own standard, at least by standards that are internal to it.ll The internal contradictions of capitalism generate an opposition to the institutions and practices of capitalism out of the very essence of these institutions, primarily in the form of the working-class movement. For Marx, then, the appropriate context of political evaluation is the working-class movement; solidarity with the working class in its struggle takes the place of loyalty to a society or a nation. It is the dialectical relation of capitalism and the working class that permits Marx to launch a revolutionary critique, without reference to transcendent ideals, on the basis of a contextual or methodological conservatism. In his meta-political reflections, Marx does, indeed, consistently counterpose the interests of the workingclass movement, as the context and basis of his critique of capitalism, to abstract ideals or utopian formulas. Thus, he wrote with Engels in the Communist Manifesto,

The Communists ... do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement ...

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.

They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.12

And, again, in The Civil War in France, he characterised the revolutionary political orientation of the Parisian workers in similar terms:

The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par dieret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transfurming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realise, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant.13

11 See Collier 1990, pp. 10-5. 12 Marx and Engels 1978b, pp. 483-4. 13 Marx 1978b, pp. 635-6.

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As these passages suggest (and as Collier underlines), Marx's rejection of the ideals of transcendent political theory is not just an epistemological quibble or the reflection of a political pose of hardheaded realism. It is also, and crucially, a critique of the authoritarian political practice implicit in utopianism and, more generally, in transcendent ideals. 14

Part of the value of contextual or methodological conservatism is that it involves one starting politically where one is: the aims one sets oneself are rooted in existing institutions and movements. The politics of ideals are, by contrast, teleological: one begins from an end one seeks to realise and, if reality (and one's intended constituency) prove recalcitrant, it is the latter that must give way. Marx hits utopian thinking in general when he directs the following barb at Feuerbach:

The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that it is essential to educate the educator himsel£ Hence, this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionising practice.15

The politics of realising ideals or utopias may assume the relatively benign form of an educational process, but. the progressive elite which holds the ideal out to the people, for that very reason, is responsible for authoritarian complacency, which, if the people do not assimilate the ideal as easily as expected or, indeed, offer resistance, is bound to degenerate into the terrorism of an educational dictatorship. Collier argues that the transcendental understanding of socialist politics as geared to a final end, 'licenses the most destructive idea in the history of modern socialism: the teleological conception of the transition to socialism. The view, that is, that treats the transitional period and its institutions as a means to an as yet unrealised end, rather than as governed by its own structural laws and moved by currently existing needs'.16 The upshot is twofold: the evils of the present are excused by the promise of the

14 See Collier 1990, pp. 15-8. 15 Marx 1978a, p. 144. 16 Collier 1990, p. 17.

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ideal future and the imposition of currently unnecessary, even unworkable projects, is dictated as a prefiguration of the end. Thus, for example, as long as the revolutionary measures advocated by the Bolsheviks were practical responses to practical problems ('Land, Peace, Bread'), they served to unify the people around the revolutionary movement, but, when they sought to introduce elements of the communist goal (the abolition of private trade), the result was mass coercion and civil war. 'Terrorism is the practical expression of a politics which is out of step with its time, as utopianism is the theoretical expression of it', Collier writes and he suggests that, despite the general methodologically conservative thrust of Marx's thought, 'utopian residues' in it (for example, the anticipation of the withering away of the state) have served as a sanction for the politics of revolutionary terrorism: 'What is really wrong with Marx is not that he said too little about socialism, but that he said too much' .17

Ethical dilemmas of revolutionary politics

Thus far, Collier's Marx. His reading is subject to two sorts of objection. It can be challenged as an interpretation of Marx and the adequacy of the position it attributes to Marx can also be questioned. In the first place, it may be argued that those utopian or ideal elements of Marx's thought that Collier dismisses as residual are not marginal but integral to his revolutionary critique. Adequate consideration of the interpretive debates around this argument would dwarf this article, but one not unrepresentative example of it can be noted. Will Kymlicka has claimed that 'the idea of moral equality is basic to Marx's thought'.18 He reads Marx's dissection of equal right in the Critique of the Gotha Programme as a vindication of the ideal of equality of regard. 'Equal right' is the term Marx uses to characterise the practice, which he attributes to the earliest phase of communist society, of paying individuals equally according to the amount of labour they contribute. This standard, Marx suggests, is profoundly defective, for

equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. It recognises no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognises unequal individual endowment and thus productive capacity as natural privileges. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its

17 Collier 1990, pp. 18, 16. 18 Kymlicka 1987, p. 163.

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content, like every right. Right by its very nature can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard in so far as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one difinite side only, for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored ... To avoid all these defects, right instead of being equal would have to be unequal.19

Kymlicka asserts that this passage endorses a principle of equal consideration or regard, rejecting juridical equality as an inadequate means of implementing this principle. Marx's characterisation of the way equal right functions, that the application of an equal standard necessarily treats people unequally inasmuch as it abstracts from the totality of their attributes, is a criticism, Kymlicka claims, on the assumption that individuals are morally entitled to equal concern -only on this assumption do the remaining inequalities constitute 'defects'.20 However, this claim is simply wrong, for it assumes that Marx is a transcendental political thinker, that he thinks the best way to remedy a defect is to realise an ideal. This is a large part of what is at issue between those, like Kymlicka, who see Marx as an egalitarian and those, like Allen Wood, who reject this view.21 In fact, this passage is more easily read as a kind of Hegelian reductio ad absurdum of the ideal of equality. That is, just as Hegel demonstrated that the unswerving pursuit of the ideal of freedom undermines itself, in Sisyphean fashion, inasmuch as it uproots the community context within which alone freedom gains its meaning, Marx's analysis suggests that the pursuit of equality as an end in itself is similarly self-defeating. For, if the single principle of labour contribution is an inadequate viewpoint from which to establish the equality of individuals, then either the project of combining an indefinite number of viewpoints into a complex standard of equal treatment is nothing other than the construction of a procrustean bed (for 'they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal'), or equality of respect, or concern, or consideration, or treatment means nothing more than appropriate respect, or concern, or consideration, or treatment, where appropriateness is determined by the indefinite number of considerations that constitute the relevant context, while the use of the term 'equality' adds nothing to the notion of

19 Marx 1978d. 20 Kymlicka 1987, pp. 162-3. 21 See Wood 1986.

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appropriateness, other than appeasement of liberal sensibilities. While the Critique oj the Gotha Programme does not make explicit the sort of connection that Collier (and Hegel) establish between (at least certain forms of) transcendental political thought and the employment of revolutionary terror, its conceptual analysis lays out an intellectual background against which this connection is plausible. In any case, this reading of the passage coheres with the persistent criticism that Marx, in his meta-ethical reflections, directed against the politics of abstract ideals, while Kymlicka's interpretation does not. This raises a question as to why it is so often assumed, both by those sympathetic to Marx and by his critics, that Marx's politics must be based upon a utopian vision or a moral ideal. Even as careful a student of Marx as Norman Geras, who has raised an empiricist eyebrow at Althusser's symptomatic reading, is capable, when it comes to Marx's political ethics, of such contortions as 'Marx did think capitalism was unjust but he did not think he thought SO'.22 The persistence of attempts to interpret Marx as a transcendental political thinker despite his repeated repudiation of any such position derives, I think, from a belief that the methodologically conservative political ethics attributed to him by Collier is vitiated by problems so serious and so obvious that no thinker of Marx's stature and commitment could have embraced it reflectively.

The most damaging objection that can be directed at Collier's Marx is that the risk of unwarranted revolutionary violence cannot be attributed simply to utopianism, to the teleological political theory of the revolutionaries. In the first place, while a teleological theoretical structure may constitute a temptation to impose transcendent targets upon an unready society, it is unclear why this temptation must prove irresistible, why, that is, one may not pursue ideals pragmatically. In the second place, the risk of terror, of unwarranted violence, is endemic in the revolutionary situation. To suppose that a methodologically conservative approach to revolution could eliminate this risk is to suppose a broad consensus around a rough schedule of social needs. However, this is to suppose that a revolution is impossible, because unnecessary. Revolutions are inseparable from the conflict of class interests, hence from the potential of violence and the threat of terror. Even if one conceives revolution as the remedy for an evil or series of abuses rather than as the means to the realisation of an ideal, it is the sheer scale of the abuses and consequently of the appropriate remedy that invites peremptory measures and violence. Collier's conservative political ethics of revolution does not come to grips with the ineliminable character of

22 Geras 1985, p. 70.

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the danger. By substituting the interests of the proletariat, however tangibly these are conceived, for any moral ideal as the justification of revolutionary politics, this approach forsakes any moral limitation upon the pursuit of these interests. It would seem, then, that in principle, 'anything goes' in the conduct of the proletarian class struggle. If Marx's approach to politics is not transcendental, it must be a kind of utilitarian, or at least consequentialist, Realpolitik. of the proletariat. This is not, of course, to suggest that Marx anticipated that the achievement of working-class interests might have to proceed through a series of bloody disasters and thought this a reasonable price to pay. The suggestion is, rather, that this possibility simply did not occur to Marx or that he did not take it seriously; he simply assumed that the working class would not or could not employ such means to secure its interests. This assumption is tantamount to Marx's making his support for the working-class movement conditional upon its acting in accordance with an ideal (whether it does so consciously or not is of secondary importance) that does impose moral restrictions upon its pursuit of its ends. In this sense, it may be suggested that an ideal is implicit in Marx's thought (as in any revolutionary thought), that his thought has a transcendental structure which is hidden, because the function of a utopia or moral ideal within this structure is effectively performed by his concept of the working class. What are properly moral debates over what course of action to pursue are transmuted into sociological debates over the class character of different policies and practices.

Chomsky, Foucault, and the logic of revolutionary violence

This argument emerged with quite striking clarity during a discussion on Dutch television in the early 1970s between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky.23 Chomsky was discussing the role of civil disobedience in the opposition to the US war on Vietnam when Foucault posed the question as to whether one commits an illegal act 'in virtue of an ideal justice, or because the class struggle makes it useful and necessary?' Foucault himself assumes a Maoist position (one supposes he does so 'playfully'), arguing that 'if justice is at stake in a struggle, then it is as an instrument of power; it is not in the hope that finally one day, in this or another society, people will be rewarded according to their merits, or punished according to their faults'. Chomsky's rejoinder begins with an insistence that 'surely you

23 See Elders 1974, pp. 135-97, especially 178-87.

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believe that your role in the war is a just role, that you are fighting a just war, to bring in a concept from another domain. ... If you thought that you were fighting an unjust war, you couldn't follow that line of reasoning'. Foucault replies in terms he characterises as Spinozist, asserting that Chomsky's position rests upon an inversion of the theoretical and practical relation between justice and power: 'the proletariat doesn't wage war against the ruling class because it considers such a war to be just. The proletariat makes war with the ruling class because, for the first time in history, it wants to take power. And because it will overthrow the power of the ruling class it considers such a war to be just. '" One makes war to win, not because it is just.' At this point the debate takes on a sharper edge and Chomsky raises the rhetorical stakes:

... if I could convince myself that attainment of power by the proletariat would lead to a terrorist police state, in which freedom and dignity and decent human relations would be destroyed, then I wouldn't want the proletariat to take power. In fact, the only reason for wanting any such thing, I believe, is because one thinks, rightly or wrongly, that some fundamental human values will be achieved by that transfer of power.

Foucault's response spells out some of the political implications of the primacy of power over justice. Thus, the possibility that the proletariat will exercise its power over the classes whose rule it has ended in 'violent, dictatorial and even bloody' forms is one that cannot be excluded in principle. Foucault raises the alternative possibility that power is exerted in these forms against the proletariat itself, only to dismiss it as follows: 'this could only occur if the proletariat hadn't really taken power, but that a class outside the proletariat, groups of people inside the proletariat, a bureaucracy or petty-bourgeois elements had taken power'. For Chomsky, even if one accepted the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, it could be justified only on the grounds that it would lead to a more just society. 'No Leninist or whatever you like,' he says, 'would dare to say "We, the proletariat, have a right to take power, and then throw everyone else into crematoria".' For Foucault, the aim of the proletarian conquest of power is not 'in itself a greater justice' but rather 'the suppression of the power of class in general'. And, when Chomsky argues that this aim must be spelled out not only in terms of power but also in terms of justice, Foucault replies that the concept of justice is the invention of a certain civilisation and might not be used in a classless society. Chomsky expresses his conviction that there is 'an absolute basis ... ultimately residing in fundamental

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human qualities, in terms of which a "real" notion of justice is grounded', although he acknowledges that he is unable to sketch out this basis. The problem, as Foucault sees it, is that, since our notions of human nature and of justice have been formed within a form of civilisation, of knowledge and of philosophy that is part and parcel of the class system, 'one can't, however regrettable it may be, put forward these notions to describe or justify a fight which should -and shall in principle - overthrow the very fundaments of our society'.

The Chomsky-Foucault debate is very useful because it lays out before us some of the structure of moral choice that arises from the moral concerns of revolutionary activity. Chomsky's transcendental position owes some of its force to its proponent's inoral and intellectual honesty and rigour. However, since Chomsky professes himself unable to provide the kind of solid intellectual groundwork for a non-relativist concept of justice that would withstand Foucault's sceptical probings, its attraction must consist more in the apparent failure of alternative positions to establish any effective moral constraint upon revolutionary violence. Foucault's gloss upon Mao portrays the violence of revolution as an outcome of a strategic logic that is so relentless as to be almost fatalistic or naturalistic; whatever one's regrets, there is no intellectual space for moral concern and, consequently, for moral intervention. If this is what Foucault found attractive about the 'Maos', it is little wonder that his flirtation with them soon flickered out. Yet, there is a structural homology between Foucault's position here and that of Collier's methodologically conservative Marx. In each case, the possibility of violence is understood to be implicit in the strategic logic of the revolutionary situation: it is no accident that, in expressing this, Collier recurs to the Maoist metaphor, 'You can't skin a tiger claw by claw'.24 In each case, the possibility of any justification of revolutionary measures other than one in terms of the existing needs and interests of the proletariat is denied. Consequently, in each case a key question of justification is whether measures of repression are directed at the proletariat or at other classes; thus, it is assumed in each case that the interests of the proletariat have been identified. To address the problem of revolutionary violence within this optic is to distinguish and segregate proletarian and non-proletarian interests and to make sure that repressive measures directed at the latter do not 'spill over' onto the former. Thus, for each, non-proletarian interests are of purely instrumental significance. Where Collier differs from Foucault is in introducing historical considerations to

24 Collier 1990, p. 22.

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attempt to mitigate the problem. 'The key to a "political ethics" of scientific socialism,' he writes, 'is that there can be no great temporal distance between means and ends'.2S The workings of capitalism within history are so arranged as to effect a rapprochement between proletarian ends and means. The progressive growth of the proletariat in capitalist society and its unification into an effective social and political force place the conquest of working-class political power ever more insistently upon the historical agenda, giving the workers the confidence to dispense with utopian and idealistic daydreams and consequently with the authoritarian disposition necessary to impose these and possibly striking the bourgeois with such awe that they are capable of no more than feeble resistance -the tiger, it seems, turns out to be a kitten.

The difficulty with this account as a revolutionary alternative to a transcendental political ethics is that it reduces ethically significant political activity to a matter of being able to tell what time it is on the historical clock of revolution. That is, the threat and even the practice of revolutionary violence may be justified when (but only when) the disposition of class forces is favourable enough so that the scope of repressive measures practised by the revolutionary forces will not expand to include the proletariat itself. But this supposes that the disposition of class forces can be read relatively straightforwardly from an objective sociological map. And this is simply wrong, for the balance of class forces depends upon the workers' knowledge of their class interest in the overthrow of capitalism and their conviction as to the possibility and the necessity of acting in accordance with this interest, and these, in turn, depend upon the workers' ability to subordinate other potentially conflicting interests they may have (such, for example, as their interest in not having" their homes, families and neighbourhoods torn apart in civil war) to their interest in revolution and upon the confidence of each that the others will act similarly in this. But, this is to suppose a level of class consciousness that both Marxist theory and revolutionary experience demonstrate is the product of, rather than the precondition for, revolutionary practice. Perhaps as pertinently in the present context, it is to suppose that proletarian interests are so clear, simple and easily ordered as to belie the complexity of society and social interests that Collier himself invokes in defence of methodological conservatism. Alternatively put, it is to smuggle a transcendent moral ideal, in the form of a simplified and idealised concept of the proletariat, into a professedly immanent and contextual approach to political ethics. Now, if the requisite knowledge of class forces is unattainable ()r

25 Collier, pp" 22-3.

1 7


unavailable, then one cannot know what time it is historically, whether or not the revolutionary dynamic is mature enough historically to confine violence within tolerable limits. But, if one cannot have this kind of historical knowledge, then, on Collier's account, one is in no position coherently to enact a political ethics.

On the form of Marx's political thought

The failure of Collier's reading of Marx as a methodological conservative to generate a coherent and effective political ethics of revolution suggests, as well, its interpretive inadequacy. I would like to suggest, however, that the core of Collier's account can be saved both as an interpretation of Marx and as a substantive position. But this can be done only by extending the sense in which Marx is claimed to be a conservative theorist, or perhaps by following through, more consistently than Collier has done, the implications of the methodologically conservative reading. The weakness of Collier's position consists in its failure to take account of the complexity of working-class interests and, consequently, to draw a clear line of demarcation between measures of revolutionary repression directed at the proletariat and those directed at other classes. In counterposing justification by reference to proletarian interests to justification by transcendent ideals, Collier, like Foucault, treats proletarian interests as simple, because he treats them as singular. It is as though there is one, or at least one fundamental, proletarian interest: the interest in overthrowing capitalism through socialist revolution. Indeed, it is as though the working class were homogeneous, or there were just one proletarian. This way of writing may simply be a way of affirming the unity of the workers as a class, but, if this unity is not conceived in such a way as to be compatible with significant political diversity, it will have been purchased at the price of reducing the working-class movement to a mere bearer of an ideal. One way in which the notion of unity in diversity is expressed is through the concept of community. The diversity of the workingclass movement is important, for it suggests that the movement can be treated as a kind of political community. I will suggest that Marx did treat it in this way; that he did so is essential to a proper appreciation of his political theory and political practice. Marx's politics cannot be reduced either to the advocacy of a set of principles or to the representation of a set of interests. It was also, and crucially, a particular style of intervention within the working-class community. This essentially 'communitarian' character of Marx's politics may be seen as a further ramification of a methodologically

18


conservative approach to politics. But, once it is grasped, it can be seen to embody a way of recognising and addressing in practice the ethical dilemmas of revolutionary politics without recourse to transcendent ideals. That it is superior to transcendental alternatives is something I cannot demonstrate here, but that it exists undermines the principal objection to the interpretation of Marx as a methodologically conservative thinker.

The approach I adopt here makes Marx's politics central to his thought as a whole. To those for whom Marx's political thought is sketchy, superficial or even non-existent,26 this approach may seem paradoxical. To this I would reply that the apparent superficiality of Marx's political theory may be a kind of optical illusion, dependent upon a perspective that takes for granted some questionable assumptions about what political theory ought to be. In this, I am borrowing a leaf from Cynthia Farrar's admirable book, The Origins oJDemocratic Thinking.Xl Farrar argues that surprise at the failure of Athenian democracy to generate a democratic political theory to rival those of Plato and Aristotle is misplaced, resting upon the unwarranted belief that such a democratic theory would be a kind of democratic version of Platonic or Aristotelian theory. She suggests that a political theory that respected the autonomy of democratic decision-makers, as any democratic political theory must do, should not attempt to provide a comprehensive answer to all the important theoretical questions about politics. Any such answer would prejudice the autonomy of the citizen-participants in the process of democratic decision-making. An appropriately democratic political theory must be open-ended in important ways; it must be open both to the concrete diversity of the demos and to the sheer unpredictability of the outcome of democratic political debate. Once this point about the form of political theory is appreciated, Farrar argues, it is possible to see in Protagoras, in Democritus and especially in Thucydides's History oJthe Peloponnesian War important instances of, and contributions to, democratic theory.

There is no Marxist Leviathan, no Marxist Contrat social and even, despite Gramsci's efforts, no Marxist II Principe. The absence of a systematic treatise outlining the theoretical foundations of politics and formulating the rules of political practice that follow therefrom has often been bemoaned. The apparently underdeveloped state of Marxist political theory has often been regarded as a grave and damaging lacuna within the Marxist corpus. But, for much the same reasons as those invoked by Farrar in her defence of Athenian

26 See, for example, Bobbio 1987. 27 Farrar 1990.

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democratic theory, the form of political theory absent from Marx would be incongruous were it present. For Marx's core theoretical and political commitment is, as we have seen, to the selfemancipation of the proletariat. The axioms and corollaries of political theory in the grand style risk squeezing the process of selfemancipation onto a procrustean bed, repressing the political creativity and the practical diversity and liveliness of the workingclass movement. If Marx did not give us a political theory in the grand style, he did write copiously about politics: journalism, occasional pieces, interventions in political and organisational controversies, renderings of contemporary political history, manifestos. In light of his concept of proletarian self-emancipation, it may be suggested that this form of political writing and political intervention embodies a distinctive political theory. This practical, occasional and unsystematic form of political theory is not appropriate if the task of political theory is to persuade the as-yetunconvinced of the truth and desirability of an ideal or vision. In this case, the incomplete, fragmentary and context-bound character of the presentation of the ideal (communist society, for example) in this style of political intervention will prove distinctly unsatisfactory, as witness complaints, repeated ad nauseum in the critical literature, about the inadequacy of Marx's portrait of the communist future. If, however, the task of political theory is not to produce unanimous agreement (at least among the powerful or the theorist's allies) around a theory or vision but to develop the political judgement of the theorist's interlocutors, their ability independently to think through political decisions - if it is not to conclude discussion, but to continue it, develop it; if the stance of the political theorist is not that of the advisor to the prince but that of the citizen, of the concerned member of the community - then it is not only appropriate but, perhaps, even essential that political theory takes shape in and through practical interventions in concrete questions of politics.

Political theory in context: Marx and the working-class movement

Is Marx to be regarded as a failure at political theory in the grand style or, possibly, as quite a successful practitioner of a different form of political theory, what one might term practical democratic theory? The answer depends, I think, upon how Marx situates himself in relation to the working-class movement; does he see himself as an advisor to a potential proletarian prince or as one voice in the

20


political community of the working-class movement? The difference does not turn upon how strongly Marx urged his views upon others -after all, what honest political actor does not suppose his or her policies superior to those of opposing parties? The difference turns, rather, upon whether he thought that the existence of a diversity of points of view within the working-class movement was a regrettable but terminable necessity, or a normal and natural state of affairs whose indefinite continuation could be safely presumed as a context for the elaboration of political ideas. Marx's views as expressed in the Communist Manifesto suggest that the latter was his position. Thus, in characterising the relation of the communists to the proletariat as a whole, he writes, 'The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working class parties . . . . They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement' .28 What distinguishes communists from other working-class parties, Marx claims, is simply that the former 'represent the interests of the movement as a whole', independently both of nationality and of any particular phase of the movement. While the Manifesto expresses a communist claim to leadership in the working-class movement, this claim does not imply the disappearance of other working-class parties; indeed, these parties are said to share the same immediate aim as the communists in organising the workers in a class, putting an end to the supremacy of the bourgeoisie, and aiding the proletarian conquest of political power.29 The nature of Marx's political practice points in the same direction: he would go out of his way to maintain unity with groups of very diverse political orientation, provided only that they represented a significant current of opinion within the proletarian movement, as was the case in the First International; conversely, when an organisation lost touch with the actual movement of the workers and risked capture by a sect, he displayed no qualms about abandoning it. A theme that consistently informs Marx's political practice is its positioning in the context of continuing debate over the aims, strategy, tactics and organisation of the working-class movement. That is, its context is this movement understood as a unity in diversity, as a political community.

The expectation of a Marxist political theory in the grand style draws sustenance from the pervasive interpretation of Marx's 'vision' of communist society as a seamless harmony, the end of history, a vision perhaps most famously evoked by the passage in the posthumously published German Ideology where, says Marx,

28 Marx and Engels 1978b, p. 483. 29 Marx and Engels 1978b, p. 484.

2 1


communism enables me 'to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic'.3O Unconstrained by private property and the division of labour, all human desires are spontaneously and harmoniously reconciled. On this reading, Marx's politics can only appear as utopian or demagogic, consisting essentially in making explicit an ideal of spontaneous human harmony that is implicit in the class situation of the proletariat, in educating the workers to this ideal and to the means required to attain it.

But even the hunter-critic idyll permits, and I think requires, another reading. For, my exercise of this freedom over my activity presumes a prior social decision: 'society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning', etc. Capitalist society is less free than communist society because, since 'activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man's own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him'.31 Here, the description of the division of activity as voluntary cannot be understood to characterise only individual decisions; it must characterise the social decisions that 'regulate the general production' and organise the context for individual decisionmaking. However, to characterise social decisions as voluntary is to imply the possibility of disagreement or conflicting agendas for production and social organisation. Moreover, with this possibility, communism must be grasped not as some final state of affairs, but as a process, a movement: 'the real movement which abolishes the present state of things'. 32

Read in the framework of Marx's understanding of this historical movement, the movement of the working class, his relatively rare statements about communist society may be understood not as pieces in a theoretical jigsaw puzzle which, when complete, would constitute a blueprint of the society of the future, but as means of organising the workers' movement and structuring and guiding debate in and around it. When Marx argues here that capital stands as a barrier to the development of the productive forces, and there that it cannot but sap the original sources of all wealth, labour and the land; here that capital cannot exist without exploiting labour, and there that it represents in distorted form the socialisation of production; here that capital erodes social connection, and there that

30 Marx and Engels 1978a, p. 160. 31 Marx and Engels 1978a, p. 160. 32 Marx and Engels 1978a, p. 162; see Shandro 1989.

22


it enslaves individuals to its lust for profit, etc., etc., there is no need to suppose implicit some master plan in which the concerns of productivity, nature, health, justice, decommodification, community, liberty, etc., are somehow resolved without contradiction or residue. If we remember the audiences Marx sought to address, we can understand what he was saying in the context of what he was doing. And, one of the things Marx did was to invite his readers and interlocutors to consider whether their distinct concerns were not most effectively addressed in the context of a working-class movement, which bore a potentially revolutionary challenge to capital as the organising principle of society. In so doing, he understood, and could suppose his audience also understood, that engagement with the movement implied an openness to disagreement and to reassessing one's initial aims in the course of debate and in relation to the logic of the process as a whole. This practice of theoretical intervention can help to organise the workingclass movement and, through this work of organisation, to construct appropriate contexts in which to debate its aims and activities, 'political form[s] under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour'.33 There is, thus, an irreducible complexity and reflexivity to Marxist politics: it necessarily includes a practice of educational intervention, but can never simply be identified with it.34 For this intervention presumes a political context, a community in struggle, whose existence and effectiveness cannot, however, be assumed - it must be organised and its organisations defended, strengthened, developed. And, this process of organisation is an aspect of Marxist politics that, in turn, cannot be understood simply as a process of education. For Marxist education must be responsive, certainly in form but also in substance, to the political process of constitution of the working-class movement as a community of struggle.35

But how does situating Marx's political thought in the context of the working-class movement considered as a political community enable a reply to criticism of the ethical inadequacy of methodological conservatism? If I am right in supposing that Marx eschewed, rather than neglected, political theory in the grand style, since this kind of theory cast a shadow of closure over debate within the working-class movement and hence darkened the prospect of proletarian self-emancipation, then the adoption of an alternative theoretical style, organised around intervention in debates over

33 Marx 1978b, p. 635. 34 See Lenin 1962. 35 See Shandro 1997-98.

23


practical issues of working-class politics, expresses a deep-seated commitment to the promotion of political debate within the movement. Participation in political debate is crucial in ' the development of political judgement, of prudence; it fosters this capacity inasmuch as it requires participants to consider alternative points of view, to weigh conflicting considerations, to determine how different rules of conduct must be brought to bear under various concrete circumstances. But political prudence is not simply a cognitive virtue; it is also a virtue of character - it involves patience, a sense of proportion and the ability to understand diverse perspectives, that is, empathy. If this is so, then a style of political theory and practice that promotes debate within the working class will tend to enhance these virtues of character among the workers; and these virtues are such as to facilitate a more broadminded, sensitive and compassionate practice of politics. Thus, Marx's methodologically conservative style of political theory can express itself in a form of practice that yields some purchase upon the ethical dilemmas of revolutionary politics. This kind of purchase, because it turns upon the formation of proletarian political character, will not likely seem sufficient to adherents of transcendental political theory, for even exemplary character is no guarantee against blameworthy action or tragic error. However, it is not obvious that theoretical guarantees with little practical purchase are preferable.

References

Bevan, Ruth 1973, Marx and Burke: A Revisionist View, La Salle: Open Court Publishing.

Bobbio, Norberto 1987, 'Is There a Marxist Theory of the State?', in Which Socialism?, edited by Norberto Bobbio, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Collier, Andrew 1990, Socialist Reasoning: An Inquiry into the Political Philosophy of Scientific Socialism, London: Pluto Press.

Elders, Fons (ed.) 1974, Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind, London: Souvenir Press.

Farrar, Cynthia 1990, The Origins of Democratic Thinking: The Invention of Politics in Classical Athens, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Geras, Norman 1985, 'The Controversy About Marx and Justice', New Left Review 150: 47-85.

Kymlicka, Will 1987, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Lenin, Vladimir 1. 1962, 'On Confounding Politics with

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Pedagogics', Collected Works, Volume 8, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Marx, Karl 1978a (1845), 'Theses on Feuerbach', in Tucker 1978. Marx, Karl 1978b (1871), The Civil War in France, in Tucker 1978. Marx, Karl 1978c (1874-5), 'After the Revolution: Marx Debates

Bakunin', in Tucker 1978. Marx, Karl 1978d (1875), Critique of the Gotha Program, in Tucker

1978. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1978a (1845), The German Ideology,

in Tucker 1978. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1978b (1848), Manifesto of the

Communist Party, in Tucker 1978. Roemer, JC;;hn (ed.) 1986, Analytical Marxism, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press. Shandro, Alan 1989, 'A Marxist Theory of Justice?', Canadian

Journal of Political Science, 22, 1: 27-47. Shandro, Alan 1997-98, 'Karl Kautsky: On the Relation of Theory

and Practice', Science & Society, 61, 4: 47�501. Tucker, Robert C (ed.) 1978, The Marx-Engels Reader, second

edition, New York: Norton. Wood, Allen 1986, 'Marx and Equality', in Roemer 1986.

25

Marx's 'Truly Social' Labour Theory of Val ue: Part I, Abstract Labour in Marxian Val ue Theory

Patrick Murray

To make abstractions hold good in actuality means to destroy actuality.1

Marx's theory of value addresses a multitude of ways in which labour performed within the force-field of capitalist social relations can be abstract. The root of this multiplicity is the profound abstractness of capital's urge endlessly to accumulate surplus-value, as measured in money. The various ways that Marx conceives labour to be abstract due to the power of capital continue to perplex interpreters and so stand in need of identification and disentangling, tasks I undertake in this two-part article. Marx wasn't joking when he wrote of the commodity: 'it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subdeties and theological niceties'.2

The key to understanding Marx's thought on these topics is to grasp the role that social form plays. In thinking about wealth we commonly pose one or two questions: how much wealth is there? or how is wealth distributed? In this snippet of dialogue between two schoolgirls in his novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens forcefully brings home the simple reason why the first question does not suffice:

'And he said, Now, this schoolroom is a Nation. And in this nation, there are fifty millions of money. Isn't this a prosperous nation, and a'n't you in a thriving state?' 'What did you say?' asked Louisa. 'Miss Louisa, I said I didn't know. I thought I couldn't know whether it was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state or not, unless I knew who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine. But that had nothing to do with it. It was not in the figures at all,' said Sissy, wiping her eyes.'3

1 Hegel 1955, p. 425 2 Marx 1977a, p. 163. 3 Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen quote this passage at the beginning of the introduction to their co-edited book, The Quality of Life. They go on to

27


What the 'How much?' and 'How distributed?' questions neglect to raise is a fundamental, if elusive, question: what is the social form and purpose oj wealth? Asking this third question presupposes a conception of human wealth as an intrinsically social phenomenon: wealth always has a specific social form and purpose. And what these are matters.

This presupposition is the quintessence of Marx's much misunderstood historical materialism.4 Marx insists on it in principle, as, for example, when he writes in the Grundrisse, 'All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society'.s And he insists on it in practice when he comes to study specific historical phenomena. Thus, Capital is largely a study of the nature, inner connections, and powers of value-forms (commodity, money, capital, wages, etc.), that is, the specific social forms constitutive of the capitalist mode of production. This means that Capital is not a work in economics -'Marxist economics' is a misnomer - rather, Capital is what Marx said it was, a critique of economics. The heart of that critique comes to this: economics pretends to do what cannot be done, to provide a scientific account of the production and distribution of wealth in utter abstraction from historically specific social forms. Of course, in order to explain things, economists turn around and sneak them back in, usually under cover of slurring the difference between specific categories like capital or wage-labour and general ones like productive resources or labour.6

The failure to grasp the nature of Marx's theory of value matches the failure to recognise Marx as a critic of economics rather than a radical economist. Instead of seeing Marx's theory as a radical departure from the classical, or Ricardian, labour theory of value, commentators often see it as an improved, more consistent and

say why, in judging the quality of life, we want to know more than just how much wealth there is and how it is distributed. 4 For a critique of the standard, 'technological', misunderstanding that conceives of the 'forces of production' as asocial, see The Violence of Abstraction, Derek Sayer's book-length rejoinder to G.A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History, and see Martha Campbell's remarks on pp. 144-6 of Campbell 1993b. 5 Marx 1973, p. 87. 6 The consequences of Marx's conception of social form for the social sciences extend beyond economics. In his eye-opening study Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology, Simon Clarke shows how the conceptual shortcomings of economics, specifically, neoclassical economics, crossed over to modem sociology in the work of Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, and other leading sociologists.

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Murray ITruly Social labour

radical version that lays bare, through the theory of surplus-value, the exploitative class structure of capitalism. But Marx's theory of value is not so much a theory of wealth and labour as it is a theory of the peculiar social form of wealth and labour in capitalism. Indeed, Marx's theory of value is nothing but his theory of the distinctive social form of wealth and labour in capitalism. Where the classical labour theory of value is a completely asocial theory of value, Marx's is a thoroughly social one.

Ironically, we find commonly attributed to Marx precisely the asocial conception of value that he overthrew. James Bernard Murphy puts this upside down claim as plainly as possible: 'Value, for Marx, is not determined by our relations to persons but by our relations to natural objects.'7 Jiirgen Habermas asserts that, for Marx, labour is instrumental action, which Habermas characterises as a 'monological' (asocial) relation of humans to nature.8 This likewise saddles Marx with precisely the asocial conception of labour and value that he overturned.

Many passages from Marx might be added to the following two to demonstrate that he actually held a 'truly social' conception of labour and value:

Since the exchange-value of commodities is indeed nothing but a mutual relation between various kinds of labour of individuals regarded as equal and universal labour, i.e., nothing but a material expression of a specific social form of labour, it is a tautology to say that labour is the only source of exchange-value and accordingly of wealth in so far as this consists of exchange-value. 9

Hence he [Wagner] would have found that the 'value' of a commodity only expresses in a historically developed form, what exists in all other historical forms of society as well, even if in another form, namely, the social character of labour ... 10

Notice, what is true of all historical societies is not that labour produces value but that labour always has some definite social form. Value, for Marx, is the consequence not of asocial 'labour' but of a

7 Murphy 1993, p. 223. Richard Winfield's critique of Marx's theory of value as asocial is premised on the same inverted reading. See Winfield 1988. For a critique of Winfield see Smith 1993. 8 See Habermas 1971. Seyla Benhabib adopts this interpretation in Benhabib 1986. 9 Marx 1966, p. 35. 10 Marx 1975, pp. 206-7.

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specific social form of labour. This places Marx's theory of value far from the discourse of economics.

Capital is wealth possessed of an imperious social form with an icy purpose. Tendencies to abstraction are endemic to capital. Indeed, Marx characterises the novelty of the capitalist epoch as the surpassing of regimes of personal dependence by the domination of all by abstractions of their own making. Marx conceives of the uncanny power of the capital form in terms of the different ways it subsumes and transforms wealth, its production, and its distribution. Wealth and its production and distribution always have some specific social form; with his concepts of the formal, real, ideal, and hybrid types of subsumption under capital, Marx distinguishes different ways in which the social forms bound up with capital exercise their power.11 These four categories of subsumption organise Marx's thinking about the various ways in which capital's propensities toward abstraction work themselves out.

Beyond these categories for sorting the ways capital makes labour abstract, I will draw on Marx's notion of a 'shadow form' derivative from the capital form. I will identify two, utility and instrumental rationality. In calling these 'shadows', I mean that they are produced by the actual, capitalist forms of social life, but they can appear to be independent actualities, like Peter Pan's shadow. Thtis, utility and instrumental action have only a 'shadowy' existence, and the common conceptions of them are best thought of as 'pseudoconcepts';12 nonetheless, these 'shadows' and 'pseudo-concepts' have their own reality and effects. Any gardener knows that shade matters. Labour may become abstract by coming under these 'shadows' of capital. Like shadows, 'pseudo-concepts' such as utility and instrumental action can be cast more widely than the actual forms they mimic: thus, they get applied to human activities that are not subsumed under the forms bound up with capital, such as unpaid domestic activities. Such overshadowing can ease the transition to ideal or formal subsumption under value categories.

The present essay, the first of a two-part article, will focus on the meanings of 'abstract labour' to which Marx appeals in explicating his theory of value in the first chapter of Capital. This thorny topic concerns the type of labour that produces value. The second part of

11 On these four types of subsumption see Marx 1977b, 1019ff: 12 Alasdair MacIntyre calls utility a 'pseudo-concept' in his book After Virtue. Tony Smith argues on the basis of texts from Max Weber that the concept of instrumental reason is derivative from the concept of value. See the Conclusion to Smith 1990, pp. 197-8. See also the section 'Labour and Instrumental Action', in Postone 1993, pp. 179-83.

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Murray ITruly Social Labour

the article, to appear in a later issue, will span the remaining forms of subsumption, including the 'shadow forms'. Because of the inherent interest of the topic of unpaid domestic labor, as well as its usefulness as a foil, I will also consider in Part II whether or not it can be considered abstract in any ways pertinent to Marxian value theory.

Only 'practically abstract' labour produces value

In opposition to Samuel Bailey's polemics against Ricardian 'intrinsic value', Marx argued that, though exchange-value is the necessary expression of value, it is not identical with value (as Bailey held). In thinking through what value could be, if it is not exchange-value, Marx concluded that it can only be labour, that is congealed labour, but, more precisely, congealed 'abstract labour' - since concrete labours are incommensurable. Just what does Marx mean here by 'abstract labour' and what do different answers to that question tell us as to whether Marx's theory of value is social or asocial?

It has widely been assumed that 'abstract labour' is simply identical with value-producing labour. This assumption, which I previously shared, sets up what I will discuss below as 'Rubin's dilemma'. I will argue that, while the concept of value-producing labour depends upon that of abstract labour, it is not the same concept. In fact, it is not the same sort of concept. Whereas labour of any concrete and historically specific social type can be viewed as labour in the abstract, only a historically specific sort of labour is abstract in practice, that is, receives its social validation precisely insofar as it counts as abstract labour. This concept of 'practically abstract' labour as a definite historical type of labour, namely, the labour that produces commodities and is socially validated once those commodities are exchanged for the universal equivalent (money), builds conceptually on the generally applicable notion of abstract labour. For we can tell whether labour is abstract in practice only if we first know what it means to be abstract. To judge whether a particular figure is a triangle, I need to know what a plane is. The fact that the concept of abstract labour is generally applicable does not imply that labour of every social sort produces value. Not all plane figures are triangles. Though labour can produce value only insofar as it is abstract, not every sort of labour produces value insofar as it is conceived of abstractly. Only 'practically abstract' labour produces value.

Correctly understanding Marx's theory of value depends upon making this distinction between the concept of abstract labour and that of 'practically abstract' labour. If one simply equates the concept

3 1


of value-producing labour with the (general) concept of abstract labour, an asocial, naturalistic concept of value is inescapable. That's one horn of 'Rubin's dilemma'. The second is this: if we identify abstract labour with value-producing labour and insist, rightly, that value-producing labour is of a historically specific social sort, then we must say that abstract labour is historically specific. The trouble here is that we get tripped up by the many passages in which Marx speaks of the general applicability of the concept of abstract labour. In other words, if we equate abstract labour with a historically specific sort, what can we make of Marx's talk of a generally applicable concept of abstract ('physiological') labour? But, when we recognise that: (i) Marx introduces the general, analytical category of abstract labour as a necessary step in expounding the concept of 'practically abstract' labour; and (ii) 'practically abstract' labour, not 'abstract labour', is value-producing, we escape 'Rubin's dilemma' and remove misgivings about whether Marx's theory of value is 'truly social'.

The concept of abstract labour is 'analytical' because it identifies an aspect of any sort of actual labour rather than identifying a sort of actual labour, as the concept of 'practically abstract' labour does. There is no actual labour that is abstract as opposed to some other actual labour that is concrete. All actual labour is concrete and can be viewed as abstract. Thus Ernest Mandel misunderstood the nature of these concepts. He argued that service labour cannot be value-producing because all such labour must be concrete, but service labour is not. In fact, however, all actual labour, service labour included, is concrete.13

Gerlach, a would-be critic of Marx discussed by Rubin, thought he could refute Marx through experiments showing that 'human labour is always accompanied and conditioned by consciousness' so 'we must refuse to reduce it to the movement of muscles and nerves'.14

But this only proves Marx's point: the concept of abstract ('physiological') labour abstracts from actual human labour, which is always consciously purposive (concrete). Actual labours, then, cannot be sorted into the concrete and the abstract (not in the sense of these terms presently under discussion). 'Practically abstract' labour, by contrast, is a sorting concept, it sorts actual labours into those that are 'practically abstract' and those that are not. Abstract labour and 'practically abstract' labour are not just different concepts, they are different kinds of concepts. Abstract labour is like extension; 'practically abstract' labour is like wax.

Drawing this distinction between abstract labour and 'practically abstract' labour clarifies Marx's relation to classical political

13 See my critique of Mandel in the Appendix to Murray 1997b, pp. 57-61. 14 As quoted in Rubin 1972, pp. 132-3.

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economy. First, and most importandy, this distinction reveals the profound difference between a generally applicable, asocial labour theory of value and a theory of value-producing labour as the historically specific social form of labour in capitalism, a 'value theory of labour' as Diane Elson terms it. There is a world of difference between the two. Second, this distinction properly locates Marx's acknowledged debt to classical theorists such as Smith and Ricardo. Marx credits the classical theorists with coming up with the concept of abstract labour, which his own very different conception of 'practically abstract' labour presupposes. Third, this distinction gives us pause in how we speak of Marx's distinction between the two sorts of labour involved in commodity-producing labour. Marx declared this to be the conceptual point on which the proper understanding of political economy turns; he regarded it as his own discovery and one of the best points in his book. If we understand the point to be simply the distinguishing of abstract from concrete labour, we reduce Marx's theory of value to a more lucid version of Ricardian value theory. IS That makes it hard to see where Marx

IS This appears to be the view that Paul Sweezy adopts. He writes, 'Abstract labor, in short, is, as Marx's own usage clearly attests, equivalent to "labor in general"; it is what is common to all productive human activity' (Sweezy 1942, p. 30). He follows up with an observation on Marx's relation to the classicals: 'In this, as in many other cases, Marx started from a basic idea of the classical school, gave it precise and explicit expression, developed it, and utilized it in the analysis of social relations in his own original and penetrating fashion' (p. 31). The trouble here is that Sweezy is pinned down by the assumption that there is just one idea in play, and that is the generally applicable concept of abstract labour. Consequendy, Sweezy. can conceive of Marx's advance over the classicals only in terms of cleaning up this one thought and putting it to work in a radical critique of capitalist social relations. Thus, as Marxists have so often done, Sweezy makes a left Ricardian of Marx.

It might not seem so, for Sweezy goes on to quote Lukacs to the effect that abstract labour is an abstraction 'which belongs to the essence of capitalism' (p. 31). And Sweezy calls attention to the sort of labour mobility characteristic of capitalism as if he is moving toward an idea of abstract labour as something specific to capitalism. Still, the trouble is that he is r assuming there is just one idea here, and he has already made it plain that it is generally applicable. So he is restricted to making this point in summation of his account of abstract labour: 'we may say that the reduction of all labor to abstract labor enables us to see clearly, behind the special forms which labor may assume at any given time, an aggregate social labor force which is capable of transference from one use to another in accordance with social need, and on the magnitude and development of which society's wealthproducing capacity in the last resort depends. The adoption of this point of view, moreover, is conditioned by the very nature of capitalist production

33


thought his great innovation lay. Inasmuch as Marx granted that the classicals pioneered the concept of abstract labour, we have to wonder what he thought all the hubbub was about.

But the double-character of commodity-producing labour is not adequately expressed by talk of abstract versus concrete: commodityproducing labour is concrete and 'practically abstract'. The concept of 'practically abstract' labour piggybacks on the concept of abstract labour arrived at by the classical economists, so Marx was right to think of himself as standing on their shoulders. But Marx's idea that value comes not from labour but from a historically specific social form of labour, 'practically abstract' labour, is more than foreign to classical political economy; it thrusts the embarrassingly asocial presuppositions of economics into the light of day. 16

In his 1993 essay 'The Difficult Labour of a Social Theory of Value', Geert Reuten argues that the theory of value presented in Capital is beset with ambiguity due to Marx's failure to recognise fully how fundamental was his own incipient break with the classical (Ricardian) labour theory of value. Reuten's essay is especially noteworthy for tWo reasons: first, Reuten is very sympathetic toward Marx's project in Capital, and he is a 'value-form' theorist himself (that is, he takes the theory of value to be a theory of the historically specific form of wealth in capitalist societies). Second, Reuten recognises both that Marx does invoke a generally applicable concept of abstract labour and that such

' a concept cannot serve as the basis

for a 'truly social' theory of value. In this, Reuten challenges the assumptions behind what I am calling 'Rubin's dilemma'. Reuten

which promotes a degree of labor mobility never before approached in earlier forms of society' (p. 32). Here, we have expressed a thoroughly Ricardian (and Enlightenment) observation, which speaks of 'wealth' and 'aggregate social labour' but is deaf to questions as to the specific social form of wealth and of labour. To this is stapled the interesting point in the sociology of knowledge - one Marx makes - that the peculiar social practices of capitalism give rise to the generally applicable concept of abstract labour.

Though Sweezy admirably goes on to discuss the fetishism of commodities and even quotes Marx as saying that this fetish character originates in 'the peculiar social character of the labor which produces commodities' (Marx as quoted by Sweezy, p. 35), he has put himself in no position to make sense of this. Because his thinking is penned in by 'Rubin's dilemma', Sweezy cannot but represent Marx's theory of value as fundamentally Ricardian and therefore not 'truly social'. Sweezy cannot put the puzzle together because, without knowing it, he is missing a piece: he lacks the concept of 'practically abstract' labour. 16 For an account of how radically Marx's theory differs from both classical and neoclassical economics see Campbell 1993b.

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argues that Marx's theory is open to the interpretation that it is an 'abstract labour-embodied' theory of value and that such a theory does not differ fundamentally from Ricardian theory. It still conceives of value as asocial. This is so because, Reuten argues, in contrast to the determinate notion of 'value-producing labour' required by a true 'value-form' theory of value, 'abstract labour' is a general concept. 17

Reuten's discrimination between a 'concrete labour-embodied' theory and an 'abstract labour-embodied' theory seems to take into account Marx's advance over Ricardo (at least if we believe that Marx's innovation was to distinguish between concrete and abstract labour), while concluding that Marx did not unambiguously surpass Ricardo's asocial theory of value. If convincing, Reuten's interpretation would put the claim that Marx holds a 'truly social' theory of value under a question mark. So it forces readers who, like myself, reject any assertion that Marx at best held confusedly and ambivalently a 'truly social' labour theory of value to think further about abstract labour and value in Capital.

I will argue that Reuten is right to observe that Marx employs a notion of abstract labour that is general, and thus lacks the determinacy of value-producing labour, but wrong to think that Marx ever meant to identify this general notion of abstract labour with his concept of value-producing labour. Though the general notion of abstract labour is applicable to all human labour, it is only in a society where, as a rule, wealth takes the commodity form that the notion of abstract labour has practical significance. Only in such a society is labour validated as equally human in the same stroke as society treats the particular concrete character and purpose of the labour with utter indifference.18 Is it any wonder why Americans have locked in on the phrase 'Whatever!'? Only such a society applies the category of abstract labour to itself in and through its own everyday practices. (This is not to say that members of such a society think of themselves as doing this; they do not.) For Marx, value-

17 On the distinction between general and determinate abstractions see Murray 1988, Chapter 10. 18 In the course of explaining why Aristode was unable to solve the riddle posed by the expression of value, Marx observes: 'The secret of the expression of value, namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour because and in so far as they are human labour in general, could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion. This however is possible only in a society where the commodity-form is the universal form of the product of labour, hence the dominant social relation is the relation between men as possessors of commodities'. (Marx 1977a, p. 152.)

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producing labour is 'practically abstract' labour, which is labour of a peculiar social sort.

Reuten associates the ambivalence he detects in Marx's theory of value with alleged confusions in Marx's mode of presentation: is Capital really a work in systematic dialectics or not? Reuten sees it falling well short of his expectations, which are Hegelian. I think Reuten is right to link the interpretation of Marx's theory of value to the question of how Marx has organised his presentation in Capital. But I think Reuten is wrong: first, to presume a stricdy Hegelian standard, when, in Capital, Marx renews his early criticism of the Hegelian expectation of 'presuppositionlessness' in scientific presentation, and, second, to reach such a negative judgement regarding Capitals claim to be a work of scientific dialectics.

The questions involved in understanding and assessing Marx's method do not pull away cleanly from the doctrines of Capital; how we answer them will guide us in how we read Capital. Consequently, I will offer a short guide to Marx's method before returning to Marx's theory of value, 'Rubin's dilemma', and Reuten's challenge.

Phenomenology, essentialism, and systematic dialectical presentation: a package deal

To explain what I mean by phenomenology, that is, the experiencebased inquiry into what things are,19 I begin with two heroes of analytic philosophy, George Berkeley and David Hume. Specifically, I take up Hume's notion of a 'distinction of reason', which he expressly derives from Berkeley's theory of abstraction. Hume's notion of a distinction of reason calls attention to the fact that, in experience, we find situations where we can conceptually distinguish aspects of something perceived, but these aspects cannot be separated in experience or even in imagination. Hume gives the example of a white marble globe: we can distinguish its whiteness from its spherical shape, but we cannot imagine having the one stand apart from the other. To give another example, Hume's theories of belief and of the {exclusive} division of our perceptions into impressions and ideas rely on the different 'manners' exhibited by our perceptions. These 'manners' are not separable from the perceptions they are the manners of - the vivacity or dullness of a perception does not stand apart from it - consequently, the notion of the manner of a perception involves a distinction of reason.

19 Phenomenological investigation is the 'redoubled' part of what I called Marx's 'redoubled empiricism' in Murray 1997a.

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Murray/Truly Social Labour

In allowing for distinctions of reason, Hume presupposes an experience-based mode of inquiry capable of making judgements about how things are concrete. By something being concrete I mean that it necessarily involves more than one conceptual determination or distinction of reason, as, for example, a sound involves tone and intensity or a commodity involves use-value and exchange-value. The properties that make something concrete in this sense are inseparable from it and can be identified as its essential properties. These are the properties that we ask for with the question: 'What is it?'20 The experience-based inquiry that is presupposed by the claim that we can differentiate between a distinction of reason and the idea of a separable object is what I mean by the term 'phenomenology'. So, phenomenology is the experience-based inquiry into the essence (or nature or form) of things. If essentialism is the belief that there are essences (or natures or forms), phenomenology is based on that belief, phenomenology is essentialist.21

If 'phenomenology' is the name for the experience-based inquiry into the essence or nature of things, 'systematic dialectical presentation' (or 'systematic dialectics') is the name for the most appropriate way to present the findings of phenomenology. So, dialectical presentation is rooted in experience; it is not a matter of spinning webs a priori. Briefly, what the term 'dialecticaf points to is that a presentation of this sort will show that those aspects of the object that phenomenology has revealed to be essential (that is, actually inseparable from it) are essential and inseparable. Thus, for example, in Capital, Marx shows that value and price are inseparable and also that generalised simple commodity circulation is inseparable from the circulation of capital Such a presentation serves as a much needed corrective to 'non-dialectical' ones, by which I mean presentations that rely on poor phenomenology, operating as if aspects of the object under study that actually are essential to it are not. Thus, Capital corrects the poor phenomenology underlying economics, which imagines that value and price are actually separable, that simple commodity circulation does not presuppose the circulation of capital, and, more generally, that human needs, labour, and wealth are separable from their social forms and the representations of those forms.

20 Hegel stresses the primacy of this question, writing, 'But neither we nor the objects would have anything to gain by the mere fact that they possess being. The main point is not that they are, but what they are ... Laying aside therefore as unimportant this distinction between subjective and objective, we are chiefly interested in knowing what a thing is: i.e., its content, which is no more objective than it is subjective' (Hegel 1975, pp. 70-1). 21 On Marx as an essentialist, see Meikle 1985.

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The term 'systematic' refers to a presentation's being orderly, coherent, and complete. (With that last qualifier in mind, it is evident that there is at least one sense in which Capital fails to come up to the standard for systematic dialectics. ) The orderliness requirement echoes Descartes's writings on method - as does the Grundrisse section on method - by calling for the introduction of concepts synthetically, that is, in order of their conceptual concreteness: simpler categories come before more complex ones. The (broadly) Hegelian conception of 'systematic dialectics' adds to the systematicity of Descartes's mode of presentation by having the structure of presupposition runs in both directions.22 Not only do the complex categories presuppose the simple ones, which is the analytical point, the simple categories presuppose the complex ones, which is the phenomenological point. This two-way directionality of dialectical systematicity expresses the phenomenologically ascertained inseparability of multiple aspects of the object under examination.

This feature introduces a circularity into a systematic dialectical presentation that seems disturbing. And, it is at this point that Marx parts company with the Hegelian notion of systematic dialectics. Marx does not leave the circle of Hegelian systematic dialectics unbroken; he objects to the 'presuppositionlessness' of Hegelian systematic dialectics and insists that science has premises, which he and Engels sketched in The German Ideology. These premises, which are given by nature and are not themselves subject to being incorporated as 'results' of some more cosmic systematic dialectic, reappear in Capital and testify to Marx's

· explicit and frequently

reaffirmed divergence from stricdy Hegelian systematic dialectics (at least as he, questionably, understood Hegel).

In Capital, Marx offers both a general phenomenology of the human predicament and a specific phenomenology of the plight of humanity under capitalism. In this he does precisely what he roasts Jeremy Bentham for not doing:

To know what is useful for a dog, one must investigate the nature of dogs. This nature is not itself deducible from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would judge all human acts, movements, relations, etc. according to

22 On this structure of mutual presupposition in Capital, see Bubner 1988 and Arthur 1997.

In his treatment of Descartes's theory of the order of scientific presentation, James Collins argues that Descartes himself recognised a certain mutual reinforcement of the concepts and claims introduced in an orderly fashion. See Collins 1972, pp. 68-71.

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Murray!Truly Social Labour

the principle of utility would first have to deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as historically modified in each epoch. Bentham does not trouble himself with this.23

The brunt of Marx's spare general phenomenology comes in his tellingly brief remarks on use-value in Chapter One (where he says little out of respect for the diversity and historicity of human needs) and his lengthier general observations in Chapter Seven on the labour process. Supplementing those two accounts with observations that crop up elsewhere in Capital, we get the following general phenomenology of the human predicament: human beings are needy, se!f-conscious, symbolising, social, sexually reproducing animals who are in (and of) non-human nature, which they purposively transform according to their perceived wants. This general phenomenology comprises the truth of historical materialism. (i) It establishes a point of reference for judging all accounts of human life and activities: when they depart from the full phenomenological complexity represented here they err (as economics does on a grand scale). (ii) In exposing the self-conscious, symbolising, sexualised sociality of human beings, it shows why no general, ahistorical account of human phenomena will be adequate to them. Rather, the study of human life and activities will always require investigating specific social forms of human life (and its reproduction) and the ways participants in different societies represent their common life to themselves.

To see why we can take the preceding observations as a gloss on the section of the Grundrisse introduction devoted to the method of inquiry and the method of presentation,24 we need a bridge from Hume's eighteenth-century terminology to the nineteenth-century terminology of Hegel and Marx. The term 'moment' provides this bridge. Geert Reuten accurately defines the Hegelian (and Marxian) notion of a 'moment' as follows: 'A moment is an element considered in itself that can be conceptually isolated and analysed as such but that can have no isolated existence'.2S So a Hegelian 'moment' is a Humean 'distinction of reason'. The difference between Hume and Hegel (and Marx) is that, though he engages in it, Hume allows no place in his official philosophy for phenomenology, whereas Hegel and Marx explicitly embrace it. Thus, I take it that, when Marx states '[t]he concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse',26 he is making a

23 Marx 1977a, pp. 758-9. 24 Marx 1973, pp. 100 ff. 2S Reuten 1993, p. 92. 26 Marx 1973, p. 101.

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phenomenological claim according to which these many 'determinations' are recognised as 'moments' or 'distinctions of reason', not as a bundle of separable elements. Commenting on this passage, Geert Reuten observes: 'Contingent phenomena cannot be explained as codetermining the internal unity of many determinants?7 appropriately making the link between the determination of 'moments' and essentialism. For, to grasp the unity of these diverse determinations is to grasp the essence or nature of this concrete object of study. Marx's 'method of inquiry' includes phenomenology.

But phenomenology presupposes analysis; properly conceived, analysis is a moment of phenomenology. Better yet, analysis and phenomenology are coeval. Thus, in that same text, Marx recognises that making appropriate distinctions of reason, which is the 'analytical' work indispensable for knowing, belongs to the 'method of inquiry'. Objects of knowledge may be presumed to be implicidy concrete, but it is the task of investigators to make that implicit complexity explicit through careful analysis, that is, by making good distinctions of reason. So Marx acknowledges his debt to thinkers in the tradition of political economy for having done so much of this analytical work. The problem with that tradition, however, was of the kind that so troubled Berkeley, namely, the tendency to hypostatise distinctions of reason, to think as though moments stand on their own. One way that Marx expresses this general complaint about the tradition of political economy is to chastise it for failing to attend to exchange-value, money, and capital as historically specific social forms. Instead, economics falsely proceeds as if wealth and its production were something actual in abstraction from specific social forms. By contrast, the object of Capital is a society of a certain type (a type still in the making as Marx wrote and still as we read), one whose social form of production (in an inclusive sense) is capital, and the book's task as a work of systematic dialectics is, in an orderly, coherent manner, to articulate that social form in its perplexingly abstract concreteness.

The present account of Marxian systematic dialectics holds that 'Marx's dialectic' is not solely a historical dialectic.28 Capital is a work of systematic dialectics, but Marx does not believe that there is any a priori 'dialectical logic' for him to follow - an idea for which he pounced on Lassalle. Neither is Capital a work in stricdy Hegelian systematic dialectics. On the contrary, I have argued that Marxian

27 Reuten 1993, p. 92. 28 For a contrasting view see Mattick Jr 1993. On the difference between historical and systematic dialectics, see Smith 1990.

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systematic dialectics is simply the most appropriate mode of presentation for the results of phenomenology, that is, an experience-based investigation of some specific object of knowledge (capitalist society in the case of Capita!), and that, in identifying the naturally given presuppositions of capitalist society, Marx rejects the presuppositionlessness of Hegelian systematic dialectics.

We can summarise the chief features of Marxian systematic dialectics, then, as follows. (i) A systematic dialectical presentation will have identifiable premises or presuppositions given by nature.29 (ii) It will represent the moments of the object under study in their inseparability as uncovered by the analytical and phenomenological inquiry into that object. In so doing, it discloses the essence (or nature or form) of what is under study. (iii) In introducing those moments, the presentation will proceed from the conceptually simpler to the conceptually more complex. (iv) Though the conceptual development proceeds from the conceptually simpler to the conceptually more complex, the former are presented, at least implicitly, as presupposing the latter.

In Marx, phenomenology, essentialism, and systematic dialectics come as a package deal.

In order to illustrate the significance of this way of understanding Marx's method and to establish a key Marxian doctrine that will set us on the right course as we interpret Marx's theory of abstract labour and value, I will consider how a generalised circulation of commodities, a market society, is related to the circulation of capital.

Marx's whole presentation oj the commodity and generalised simple commodity circulation presupposes capital and its characteristic form oj circulation. It is perhaps the foremost accomplishment of. Marx's theory of generalised commodity circulation to have demonstrated -with superb dialectical reasoning - that a sphere of such exchanges cannot stand alone; generalised commodity circulation is unintelligible when abstracted from the circulation of capital.30 In

29 This requirement of Marxian systematic dialectics appears to be incompatible with the more strictly Hegelian requirements as identified and embraced by Geert Reuten: 'All axioms are eschewed. Rather, anything that is required to be assumed, or anything that is posited immediately (such as the starting point), must be grounded. But it should not be grounded merely abstractly (i.e., giving arguments in advance), because this always leads to regress. That which is posited must be ultimately grounded in the argument itself, in concretizing it' (Reuten 1993, p. 92). I do not think that the sort of presuppositions Marx has in mind can be justified internally the way called for here. 30 'Circulation considered in itself is the mediation of presupposed extremes. But it does not posit these extremes. As a whole of mediation, as total

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other words, properly conceived, the notion of generalised commodity circulation marks a distinction of reason from the circulation of capital; it does not designate a form of life that could exist on its own. There is no sphere of generalised commodity production independent of capital.31 Consequently, when Marx begins with the commodity and commodity-producing labour in Chapter One, the actual objects of inquiry are commodity capital and surplus-value-producing labour. It is just that, to respect the synthetic order of a systematic dialectical presentation, conceptually simpler categories must be introduced first.

Marx's elegant argument demonstrating why the circulation of capital is presupposed by the generalisation of the commodity-form of wealth goes as follows. If we assume that wealth generally takes the commodity-form, then wealth will be produced and sold as commodities. But the wealth required to produce commodities (means and materials of production along with labour-power) will, on our assumption, likewise be in the commodity-form - it will have to be purchased before being put to use. This means that, in the course of the production of all goods and services, there will be a stretch that begins with money (spent to purchase the elements of production, since they are in the commodity-form) and ends with money (returned upon the sale of the newly produced commodity). On these assumptions, for commodities to be produced, some party who has money - and, since this party is acting as a commodity exchanger, we assume a self-interested agent - must spend it to initiate a process that will terminate in the return of money. What would motivate a self-seeking possessor of money to initiate such a circuit? The prospect of getting more money at the end of the cycle. When wealth is generally in the commodity form, only capitalists will, as a rule, undertake to produce it.32 It is the circulation of capital, then, that makes intelligible the generalised circulation of commodities.

process itself, it must therefore be mediated. Its immediate being is therefore pure guise. It is the phenomenon of a process going on behind its back' (Karl Marx, Urtext, as cited in Murray 1988, pp. 172-3). 31 Chris Arthur makes a persuasive argument for this in Arthur 1997. For a contrasting view, see Winfield 1988. 32 Martha Campbell sees Marx as demonstrating this point with his answer to the question: 'What social purpose is served by generalising the commodity form of wealth?' 'It can only be the accumulation of surplusvalue.' See Campbell 1993a.

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Johnny Paycheck meets USX: 'practically abstract' labourl3

Marx credits himself with having made a great discovery by distinguishing between concrete labour and abstract labour and then observing that it is abstract labour alone that creates value. What makes this a historic discovery and what does Marx mean here by 'abstract labour'?

Following the logic of Marx's thinking in the first chapter of Capital and· drawing on remarks about abstract labour that he makes in the introduction to the Grundrisse, I propose that we read Marx as distinguishing between a generally applicable, analytical concept of abstract labour as 'physiological' labour and a concept of historically specific, 'practically abstract' labour. Marx's theory of value, then, claims: 'practically abstract' labour, and only 'practically abstract' labour, is value-creating labour. By making a distinction of reason, we may consider labour of any social type in the abstract. But, by 'practically abstract' labour, a term of my own device for which there is ample warrant in Marx's thoughts and words, I mean labour that a society treats as abstract - in the sense identified by the analytical concept of abstract labour - in practice.34 'Practically abstract' labour is socially validated in a way that shows society's actual indifference toward labour's specific character, that is, toward labour's specific ways of transforming nature and toward the specific use-value characteristics

33 USX is the corporation formerly known as US Steel. 34 In a passage from the Grundrisse to which we will return, Marx observes that, in capitalism, 'this abstraction of labour as such is not merely the mental product of a concrete totality of labours' (Marx 1973, p. 104) and 'for the first time, the point of departure of modem economics, namely the abstraction of the category "labour", "labour as such", labour pure and simple, becomes true in practice. The simplest abstraction, then, ... achieves practical truth as an abstraction only as a category of the most modem society' (p. 105).

In commenting on these passages in his Dialectics of Labour, Chris Arthur picks up on this idea of labour whose products are socially validated in the market as labour that is abstract in practice. Though his interpretation comes closer to Rubin's than to the present one, several of his formulations add credibility to the concept and terminology of 'practically abstract' labour. For example, he writes: 'In commodity exchange these individual labours are not mere fractions at the start; they become fractions of the total labour of society only insofar as their universal character achieves practical truth in the value relations of the products entering into commodity exchange' (Arthur 1986, p. 99). See also pp. 100 and 103.

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of its end product.35 This, then, is a historically determinate social sort of labour, which shows that Marx's theory of value is not 'asocial' but a theory of social form. Hence Marx's theory of value must be understood as a contribution not to economics, which purports to bracket historically determinate social forms, but to the critique of economics.

What sort of social practice would validate labour in a way that fits this description of 'practically abstract' labour? What sort of society would actually be thoroughly indifferent to the specificity of use-values and therewith to the specificity of the labour needed to produce desired use-values? The Whatever!' world of generalised commodity circulation is such a society, the only one.

Think about generalised commodity circulation, the social arrangement that makes labour 'practically abstract'. To treat all wealth as commodities is to make the judgement that no particular use-values - and, since commodities are, as a rule, products of labour, no particular types of concrete labour - have any privileged social standing: society is stoically indifferent toward the specific usevalue aspects of human needs and labour. The market, where 'all that is holy is profaned', gives meaning to the term '"practically abstract" labour' by subjecting the products of labour to its grinding indifference. Now, the further question arises, what would make a society so indifferent to the specificities of human needs and to the sorts of labour required to satisfy those needs?36 And how would participants in such a society represent the point of it to themselves? Consider two answers, the liberal answer and Marx's.

The classical liberal answer (which is also the answer of economics) is that society's indifference proves that there is no collective good being pursued in the marketplace; rather, the participants in the market act freely to satisfy their individually determined, self-seeking needs. Moreover, this indifference on society's part is admirable because, only by society's self-restraint in positing no collective good, is individual liberty attainable.37

Marx answers: there are no social systems of production lacking a collective goal' social action always has its purposes.38 The 'free market' is

35 As previously noted, all actual labour is concrete in the sense marked by Marx's contrast between concrete and abstract labour in Chapter One of Capital. 36 Here, I follow Martha Campbell's line of thought in Campbell 1993a. 37 According to Friedrich Hayek, this is perhaps the greatest discovery mankind has ever made. 38 Compare Martha Campbell's observation that, for Marx, 'property relations are relations for the collective use of both the elements and results

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no exception to this rule: at most it appears to be. But what odd collective good is it that requires complete indifference on the part of society to the specific nature of human needs and to the labour required to satisfy them? The collective goal of accumulating surplus-value, which necessarily takes the form of endless moneymaking, fits the bill perfecdy - uniquely, I believe. Indeed, we have seen how Marx argues that capital accumulation is precisely the collective goal that makes sense of generalised commodity exchange (the 'free market').

Market practices belong to the social arrangements that render labour abstract; they function as a sort of 'labour-processing' plant. The 'free market' is not an independent phenomenon; it is a moment of capital's circulation. Consequendy, any thought that the market alone makes labour 'practically abstract' misconceives the status of generalised commodity circulation in relation to the production process as a whole.39 What it comes to is this: workers whose labour is 'practically abstract,' ie., workers who produce value, work for a wage for capitalists, who produce in order to make a profit. Johnny Paycheck, meet USX; it's a marriage made in heaven.

Clearly, 'practically abstract' labour is a historically determinate social form of labour. Non-capitalist modes of production are not based upon the market's actual indifference toward the specific characteristics of needs, labour, and wealth.40 That is not because in those forms of production labour is concrete, as opposed to being abstract - as we have seen, this distinction between concrete and abstract labour does not sort actual types of labour - but because they have collective goals that do not require labour to be treated as abstract. So, if Marx means that only 'practically abstract' labour produces value, then he means that only a specific social form of labour produces value. In that case, his theory of value is 'truly social.'

This is what he does mean, I conclude, but the matter is complicated and potentially confusing. For Marx has in play three different concepts, in fact, three different sorts of concepts, and they

of production. This collective use assumes different forms, each with its own goal' (Campbell 1993b, p. 146). r9 Alfred Sohn-Rethel commits this error in his Intellectual and Manual Labour. For a critique of Sohn-Rethel along these lines see Postone 1993, pp. 177-9.

Isaac Rubin anticipates and criticises the error of thinking that value is ffoduced by exchange alone. See Rubin 1972, pp. 147-58.

Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieffs essay in their co-edited book Wealth and Virtue tells the bloody tale of how European societies moved from taking privately produced grain and distributing it publicly to treating grain with all the indifference due a true commodity. See Hont and Ignatieff1983.

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are liable to be run together in the mind of the reader. The three are: (i) the concept of abstract labour, (ii) the concept of 'practically abstract' labour, and (iii) the general concept of labour. The ftrst and last are different, but both are generally applicable, while the second identiftes a historically speciftc social sort of labour. Value is the product not of labour, not even of abstract labour (though labour produces value only insofar as it counts as abstract), but of 'practically abstract' labour, and only of 'practically abstract' labour.

The concept of abstract labour differs from the concept of 'practically abstract' labour precisely in being generally applicable. Marx maintains that, though this general notion of abstract labour comes into full view only when society becomes actually indifferent to the speciftcities of labour and labourers (which explains why Aristotle could not solve the riddle of the value-form), it is nonetheless applicable across all forms of social labour. 41 Its general applicability, however, does not imply that all social forms of labour involve actual social practices that validate particular labours as abstract labour. Only in societies with such practices do we ftnd 'practically abstract' labour. It turns out that only in capitalism are particular labours validated by a practice that treats them as labour in the abstract. So 'practically abstract' labour is specific to capitalism.

Now, how does the concept of abstract labour differ from the general concept of labour that Marx sets forth in the seventh chapter of Capital, 'The Labour Process and the Valorisation Process'? Marx spells out the general concept of labour as follows:

The labour process, as we have just presented it in its simple and abstract elements, is purposeful activity aimed at the production of use-values. It is an appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements of man. It is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, and it is therefore independent of every form of that existence, or rather it is common to all forms of society in which human beings live.42

41 On Aristode, see Marx 1977a, pp. 151-2. See also below. 42 Marx 1977a, p. 290. Marx's restatement of his point at the end, 'or rather .. .' is meant to ward off the sort of misunderstanding widespread today due to the unfortunate legend of Marx's asocial, 'monological' theory of labour and production. At the close of the ftrst paragraph of the section on the labour process, Marx observes: 'The fact that the production of usevalues, or goods, is carried on under the control of a capitalist and on his behalf does not alter the general character of that production. We shall therefore, in the ftrst place [Marx's term is zunaechst, which is meant to alert

46


Though general, this concept is not nearly so abstract as the concept of abstract labour, which is identified in Chapter One. The concept of abstract labour in Chapter One abstracts altogether from society, from specific purposes of production, and from nature to get down to 'pure labour'. By contrast to the thinness of that notion, the concept of labour in Chapter Seven is thick, though general. It explicitly incorporates, though in a general way, society and nature; as stated earlier, it presents Marx's general phenomenology of human labour, whereas Chapter One's concept of abstract labour abstracts

his reader to the fact that in discussing the labour process in abstraction from all specific social forms he is making a distinction of reason. PM], have to consider the labour process independently of any specific social form' (po 283). Then comes a sentence that begins: 'Labour is, first of all [zunaechst, PM], a process between man and nature . . .' which is echoed immediately following the summary already cited: 'We did not, therefore, have to present the worker in his relationship with other workers; it was enough to present man and his labour on one side, nature and its materials on the other' (po 290). The misinterpretation of such passages has bolstered the legend of Marx the 'monological', asocial theorist onabour.

What Marx is saying throughout is that some general observations regarding the distinctively human labour process can be made independently of, that is, in abstraction from, all specific social forms of the labour process. (Compare Marx 1973, p. 85, on 'production in general'.) But, in making these observations, Marx is drawing a distinction of reason, attending to certain features that pertain, as he says, 'to all forms of society'. I call this a distinction of reason because, while Marx believes that some general observations regarding actual labour processes can be made in abstraction from their specific social form, he definitely does not believe either that there are any actual labour processes that lack a specific social form or that one can properly understand an actual labour process independently of its specific social form. As he puts it in the introduction to the Grundrisse, though we can make general observations regarding production, 'there is no production in general ... it is always a certain social body, a social subject' (Marx 1973, p. 86). The legend of Marx's asocial conception of labour would have us believe he thought otherwise.

But the proof is in the pudding. Once Marx has presented, by drawing certain distinctions of reason, what he has to say in a general way about human labour, he proceeds, in the second part of Chapter Seven, to examine the specific social form of the labour process in capitalism. For Marx's account of the valorisation process is his account of the specific social form of the labour process. The idea of offering an account of any actual labour process in abstraction from its specific social form and then trying to pawn that off as a properly scientific account - as economics does - never enters Marx's mind.

47


entirely from the (actually inseparable) social and natural conditions oflabour to get to 'pure labour' {labour 'in itself}.43

The general concept of labour is a different sort of concept than either the concept of abstract labour or the concept of 'practically abstract' labour. The general concept of labour identifies and gathers, in a general way, the essential features of any actual act of human labour. This concept pulls together the results of a general phenomenological inquiry into human labour. As such, this concept obviously does not pick out any particular sort of labour. The general concept of labour might be compared to the general concept of, say, physical object or body.

The concept of abstract labour, by contrast, attends not to the manifold of essential features of human labour but narrows its focus to one aspect, the expenditure of human energies. In abstracting altogether from the sociality, conscious purposiveness, and natural conditions characteristic of all human labour, the concept of abstract labour makes a distinction of reason: the pure expenditure of human energies is nothing actual. Consequently, the concept of abstract labour is not a concept that separates actual labours into sorts. It is not as though some labours are abstract (in this sense) while others are not. In this sense, there simply is no abstract labour. If the general concept of labour is like the concept of physical object or body, the concept of abstract labour is like the concept of extension. We who inhabit capitalist societies live in perverse imitation of the residents of St. Augustine's two cities: no matter what our passport, we all live in the social Flatland ruled by capital's valorisation process.

The concept of 'practically abstract' labour does refer to actual l�bour of a specific type; it sorts actual labours into those that are 'practically abstract' and those that are not. It can be compared to the concept of wax: wax is one sort of physical object.

In distinguishing between the concepts of labour in Chapters One and Seven in the course of a commentary44 on some sticky passages on abstract labour in the Introduction to the Grundrisse (pp. 102-5), I asserted that 'the' concept of abstract labour in Chapter One is a determinate abstraction, unlike the general concept of labour of Chapter Seven. Now I think I was wrong and that my

43 This means that Sweezy was wrong in saying: 'Abstract labor, in short, is, as Marx's own usage clearly attests, equivalent to "labor in general"; it is what is common to all productive human activity' (Sweezy 1942, p. 30). The general concept of labour encompasses all that is common to productive activity; the concept of abstract labour is narrower than that. 44 In Murray 1988, pp. 127-8.

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mistake lay in a failure to distinguish between the concept of abstract labour, which I now claim is general, and the concept of 'practically abstract' labour, which is historically determinate. Where, previously, I did not see a distinction to be made between these two, and I simply identified the concept of abstract labour with that of valueproducing labour (which surely is historically specific), now I distinguish the general concept of abstract labour from the determinate concept of 'practically abstract' labour and identify only the latter with value-producing labour. The present interpretation, which sorts three concepts: (i) the (general) concept of abstract labour, (ii) the (determinate concept) of 'practically abstract' labour, and (iii) the general concept of labour, sticks to the main idea, that value-producing labour is of a historically specific type, while making better sense of certain passages in the Grundrisse and Capital. To confirm this, let us look at a passage or two from each work.

The concluding paragraph of Section 2 of Chapter One of Capital, the section entitled 'The Dual Character of the Labour Embodied in Commodities', reads as follows: .

On the one hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power, in the physiological sense, and it is in this quality of being equal, or abstract, human labour that it forms the value of commodities. On the other hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power in a particular form and with a definite aim, and it is in this quality of being concrete useful labour that it produces usevalues.45

I take Marx to say here that there is a generally applicable concept of abstract labour (labour 'in the physiological sense') a�d that labour produces value only insofar as it is abstract in this sense. But, if this concept of abstract labour is general, if it is applicable to all human labour, would that not imply that all human labour is valueproducing? No. Marx does not say, 'abstract labour' produces value. Rather, he says that labour is value-producing only insofar as it is abstract. lflabour is to be value-producing, it will be so only insofar as it is taken in abstraction from its 'particular form' and 'definite aim'. In fact, Marx shows that there is a category mistake involved in the very proposition that all abstract labour produces value, for 'abstract labour' (in the sense relevant here) is not a sort of labour. The concept of abstract labour relevant here is not a sorting one; it is an analytical one pertinent to all human labour.

45 Marx 1977a, p. 137.

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Neither should we forget what is the subject of inquiry in Section Two of Chapter One. The subject is not human labour in general, no more than the topic of Section 1 is wealth in general; it is the specific social sort of labour that produces commodities. Only that sort of labour, 'practically abstract' labour, is value-producing. Nonetheless, to make the point that commodity-producing labour produces value only insofar as it is abstract, Marx needs to develop the generally applicable concept of abstract labour.

The passage in Capital that most compellingly supports the present interpretation comes toward the beginning of the famous conclusion to the first chapter of Capital, 'The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret'. Lucio Colletti, in his important essay 'Bernstein and the Marxism of the Second International', rightly observed, 'Marx's theory of value is identical to his theory of fetishism', to which he correctly added, 'it is precisely by virtue of this element ... that Marx's theory differs in principle from the whole of classical political economy'.46

By the 'fetishism of the commodity', Marx points to the fact that, in capitalism, use-values, the products of labour, come to be transubstantiated as values, objects possessed of peculiar. social powers. Marx asks: ' What gives rise to the fetishism oj the commodity?' Following Colletti, we see that this amounts to the question, 'What gives rise to value?' Marx rules out several possible responses. He says that the fetish character of the �ommodity comes neither from the use-value of the products nor from 'the nature of the determinants of value'. Among those rejected determinants, Marx cites three. The second is the duration of the labour process, a consideration which Marx observes must concern any society. The. third is the fact that labour always has some social form: 'as soon as men start to work for each other in any way, their labour also assumes a social form'.47 The first determinant that Marx rules out takes us right back to the closing paragraph of Section 2: 'however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, it is a physiological fact, that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles, and sense organs'. 48 In other words, Marx flatly asserts that value, or the fetish character of the commodity, is not a consequence of 'abstract labour', that is, labour

46 Colletti 1972, p. 77. Despite these ringing declarations, Colletti ultimately failed to figure out just how radically Marx broke with political economy. For a critique of Colletti along these lines, see Postone 1993, pp. 146-8. 47 Marx 1977a, p. 164. 48 Marx 1977a, p. 164.

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does not produce value simply because it can be viewed as an expenditure of human capacities. The reason he rules out the three 'determinants of value' is precisely because they are general: human labour always has a specific social form; the duration of the labour process · always matters, though in different ways under different social forms; and human labour can always be regarded abstracdy, as 'physiological' labour.

This passage demonstrates that: (i) Marx does have a general concept of abstract labour (which he distinguishes from his general concept oflabour) and (ii) Marx holds that, although labour is valueproducing only insofar as it is abstract in this 'physiological' sense, the fact that all human labour may be thought of in this abstract manner does not imply that all human labour is value-producing labour. If Marx thought that value was 'abstract labour-embodied' in the general sense of abstract labour (as Reuten claims), he would have already found the answer to his question as to the origin of the fetishism of commodities . Marx's account of the fetishism of commodities will not square with the notion that he held an asocial 'abstract labour-embodied' theory of value.

What, then, is the source of value, the fetish character of wealth in the commodity form? Marx answers:

Clearly, it arises from this form itsel£ The equality of the kinds of human labour takes on a physical form in the equal objectivity of the products of labour as values; the measure of the expenditure of human labour-power by its duration takes on the form of the magnitude of the value of the products of labour; and finally the relationships between the producers, within which the social characteristics of their labours are manifested, take on the form of a social relation between the products of labour.49

There it is. Value is a consequence of the peculiar social form of wealth and labour in societies where wealth generally takes the form of commodities. The human labour whose equality with other forms of human labour is validated by the social practice of equating the products of those labours to one another in the market, through money, is abstract not in a general way; it is 'practically abstract' labour.

So as not to leave the slightest doubt as to whether or not this is a 'truly social' theory of value, Marx goes on to say, 'the commodityform and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of

49 Marx 1977a, p. 164.

5 1


the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes, here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things'. so

One of the passages on abstract labour from the Grundrisse that I commented on in Marx's Theory of Scientific Knowledge was this: 'The simplest abstraction, therefore, which modern economics sets at the peak, and which expresses an ancient relation, valid for all forms of society, appears in this abstraction practically true, however, only as [aJ category of the most modern society'.51 I claimed that this 'simplest abstraction . . . valid for all forms of society .. .' was what I there called the 'abstract category oflabour' and here call the 'general concept of labour', that is, the conception of labour that Marx expounds in Chapter Seven. The category of abstract labour that was 'in this abstraction practically true' only for modern society I called the concept of abstract labour. And, I further claimed that this was a determinate category and that abstract labour was value-producing labour. This appears wrong to me now.

We can make better sense of that passage by drawing the distinctions I now make among: (i) the general concept of labour, (ii) the concept of abstract labour, and (iii) the concept of 'practically abstract' labour. With these three different concepts in mind, we can see that this passage is not about the general concept of labour at all. That is not the 'simplest abstraction'; the concept of abstract labour is the simplest. It is the concept that modern economics 'sets at the peak', for only labour that counts as abstract in this sense is valueproducing - and modern economics is all about value. This concept of abstract labour is general, since it is 'valid for all forms of society', but it is 'practically true' only in modern (market) societies. I take that to require the concept of 'practically abstract' labour as I have presented it. Though Marx has an analytical, generally applicable concept of abstract labour, it should be clear that he holds that only a historically specific social sort of labour, 'practically abstract' labour, produces value.

Escaping 'Rubin's dilemma'

In his seminal book, Essays on Marx's Theory of Value, Isaac Rubin opens the chapter devoted to abstract labour with an observation that still has bite today: 'When we see the decisive importance which

so Marx 1977a, p. 165. 51 Marx 1973, p. 105.

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Marx gave to the theory of abstract labour, we must wonder why this theory has received so little attention in Marxist literature'. 52 But Rubin is disappointed by what he finds among those who do pay abstract labour some mind. Typical is Kautsky's approach, which Rubin describes as follows: 'Abstract labour is the expenditure of human energy as such, independendy of the given forms. Defined in this way, the concept of abstract labour is a physiological concept, devoid of all social and historical elements.'53 For Rubin, this way of thinking of abstract labour dead-ends in an asocial, Ricardian theory of value that shows utter disregard for the 'truly social' theory of value that Marx sets forth in Capital.

Rubin forcefully states the apparent dilemma Marx's interpreters face:

One of two things is possible: if abstract labour is an expenditure of human energy in physiological form, then value also has a reified-material character. Or value is a social phenomenon connected with a determined social form of production. It is not possible to reconcile a physiological concept of abstract labour with the historical character of the value it creates.54

To choose the first possibility, as so many Marxists and nonMarxists alike have done, is, as Rubin says, 'to arrive at the crudest interpretation of the theory of value, one which sharply contradicts Marx's theory'. 55 Rubin is thereby constrained to argue that there is no real dilemma here: abstract labour cannot be 'physiological labour'; in order to produce value, it must be a historically specific sort oflabour.

I will not attempt to do what Rubin righdy calls impossible, namely, to 'reconcile a physiological concept of abstract labour with the historical character of the value it creates'. Instead, I will suggest why the dilemma Rubin poses is both more troublesome than he allows and altogether avoidable. The apparent dilemma is stickier than Rubin thinks, because his solution forces us to say either that Marx did not have a generally applicable concept of 'physiological' labour or that he had one, but it ought not be called a concept of abstract labour. Neither of those options is supportable, so Rubin's solution is not satisfactory.

52 Rubin 1972, p. 131. For example, Jon Elster is silent on the topic of abstract labour in his Making Sense o/'Marx. 53 Rubin 1972, p. 132. 54 Rubin 1972, p. 135. 55 Rubin 1972, p. 135.

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There is a way out of 'Rubin's dilemma', however. It is to reject the presupposition that gives rise to it. The presupposition is this: Marx has a single concept of 'abstract labour' in play in treating the dual character of commodity-producing labour, so 'abstract labour' must be flatly identified with 'value-producing labour'. I claim that Marx has two different concepts in play - indeed, two different kinds of concepts - namely, the generally applicable concept of abstract ('physiological') labour and the historically specific concept of 'practically abstract' labour. While it is true that labour produces value only insofar as it is abstract in the 'physiological' sense, it is a simple fallacy to turn this around and claim that labour of whichever social sort produces value because the concept of abstract labour is generally applicable. Only 'practically abstract' labour may be identified with value-producing labour. So, while Rubin is right to insist that the generality of the concept of abstract labour, understood to be 'physiological labour', is incompatible with the historically specific character of the value it is supposed to produce, he is wrong to think that such a claim is forced upon one who says Marx's concept of abstract labour is a generally applicable one. If we get our concepts and terminology straight, 'Rubin's dilemma' does not arise.

Does this put me in the unwelcome position of defending those whom Rubin criticises? I do agree with them that Marx's concept of abstract labour is generally applicable. However, because they share Rubin's mistaken assumption that Marx has one concept in play here, they are then forced into the egregious error of flatly identifying abstract labour (in this generally applicable sense) with value-producing labour. For that, Rubin rightly lambasts them.

My position is substantially in agreement with Rubin: what he calls 'abstract labour' is what I call 'practically abstract' labour. But this terminological difference is still significant. First, Rubin's terminology gets in the way of convincingly answering those who say that Marx conceives of abstract labour as a generally applicable concept, so that, if abstract labour simply is value-producing labour, value cannot be a socially specific form of wealth. It is not persuasive either to deny that Marx has a generally applicable concept of 'physiological' labour or to deny that it deserves to be called a concept of abstract labour. Second, Rubin's terminology distorts his interpretation of what Marx is doing. Thus, Rubin writes of the 'physiological' concept of labour as 'the simplified conception of abstract labour' and as a 'preliminary definition'.56 These phrases, especially the former, suggest that Rubin thinks that there is one

56 Rubin 1972, p. 135.

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Murray ITruly Social labour

concept in play, abstract labour, so that the concept of 'physiological' labour must be a simplification of the concept Marx is after. The concept of 'physiological' labour is simpler than the one Rubin calls 'abstract labour', but it is not a simplified version of that concept. It is a different concept, indeed a different sort of concept.

Failure to see this gets Rubin into a tangle. He says: 'Whoever wants to maintain Marx's well-known statement that abstract labour creates value and is expressed in value, must renounce the physiological concept of abstract labour'.57 But what exacdy are we to renounce? That there is a legitimate, generally applicable 'physiological' concept of labour? That such a concept deserves to be called a concept of abstract labour? That such a concept should be identified with the concept of value-producing labour? I agree with Rubin that the concept of 'physiological' labour should not be identified with the concept of value-producing labour. But Rubin himself accepts the legitimacy and general applicability of the concept of 'physiological' labour. His constrictive terminology, however, does not allow him to call it a concept of abstract labour; he has reserved the term 'abstract labour' for value-producing labour. That unwarranted move causes confusion.

Rubin writes: 'But this does not mean that we deny the obvious fact that in every social form of economy the working activity of people is carried out through the expenditure of physiological energy'. 58 What is this but to admit that there is a legitimate, generally applicable concept of 'physiological' labour? But he follows this admission with some special pleading: 'Physiological labour is the presupposition of abstract labour in the sense that one cannot speak of abstract labour if there is no expenditure of physiological energy on the part of people. But this expenditure of physiological energy remains precisely a presupposition, and not the object of our analysis'. 59 This fails to make the point that the concept of abstract labour is presupposed by the concept ofvalue-producing labour {what Rubin calls simply 'abstract labour' and what I term 'practically abstract' labour}: we need to know what it means for labour to be abstract before we can tell whether or not a certain social type of labour is abstract in practice. So the 'physiological' concept of labour is a necessary object of analysis, even though it is not the ultimate object of analysis. Rubin has to pooh-pooh its significance because his concepts and terminology do not provide him the room to give it its due. Rubin's resolution of the dilemma he poses is not snarl-free.

57 Rubin 1972, p. 136. 58 Rubin 1972, p. 136. 59 Rubin 1972, p. 136.

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But, by distinguishing between Marx's generally applicable concept of abstract ('physiological') labour and his concept of 'practically abstract' labour, we escape 'Rubin's dilemma.'

On Reuten: might Marx have held an 'abstract labour-embodied theory of value'?

By now, I hope to have presented a compelling case for the claim that Marx offers a 'truly social' labour theory of value. However, in his 1993 essay 'The Difficult Labour of a Social Theory of Value,' Geert Reuten contends that ambiguities exist in Chapter One of Capital that allow for an interpretation that Marx held an 'abstract labour-embodied theory of value'. That would mean that Marx did not escape the orbit of Ricardian theory. In this closing section, I attempt to answer the points that Reuten makes in support of his contention.

Reuten distinguishes three basic types of value theory swirling around in Marx and Marxism: (i) concrete labour-embodied theory, (ii) abstract labour-embodied theory, and (iii) value-form theory. Though Reuten detects traces of the concrete labour-embodied theory in Marx, interpreting his theory as such would not begin to do justice to Marx's innovations in value theory. By contrast, the abstract labour-embodied theory takes into account Marx's insistence that only abstract labour is value-producing. Since Reuten recognises that Marx employs a generally applicable concept of abstract labour, he argues that a theory of value founded upon abstract labour in this general sense would fail to break with classical theory. Reuten emphasises that, if value were simply embodied abstract labour, it would have no inherent connection with the market. Such a theory would fail to provide a 'truly social' theory of value, which only the value-form theory of value can offer.

I agree with Reuten that an abstract labour-embodied theory is an asocial one that represents no fundamental break with classical political economy. But the evidence shows that Marx never held that theory, which is at such cross purposes to his objectives in Capital. Where Reuten's reasoning goes wrong, I believe, is in its failure to recognise that there are two concepts in play in Chapter One, the general concept of abstract labour and the concept of 'practically abstract' labour.60 And Marx's account of value-producing labour is

60 Reuten does entertain a notion of 'practically abstract' labour, indeed, he devotes a section of his essay to it, 'The Abstract-Labour Theory of Value: Abstraction in Practice'. However, he seems to take the notion of 'practically

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completed only with the latter: 'practically abstract' labour, not 'abstract labour' produces value. And, as we have seen, 'practically abstract' labour is inherently connected with the market.

Reuten makes three main points in support of his claim that Marx failed to achieve unambiguously a 'truly social' theory of value: (i) Marx repeatedly spoke of labour being 'embodied' in commodities; (ii) Marx repeatedly invoked the 'metaphor of substance'; and (iii) Marx is unclear about his method: he does not make clear whether his abstractions are analytical or dialectical. For Reuten, these first two points combine to show that Marx failed to break unequivocally with the naturalism of classical value theory. I find these first two points prima facie unpersuasive for this simple reason: I do not see how to avoid reading Capital, and the first chapter in particular, as an all-out assault on precisely the proposition that Reuten suggests Marx slips into defending, namely, that value is some asocial property of wealth.61 As Marx sardonically comments in wrapping up the first chapter, 'so far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond'.62 I cannot reconcile the clarity and confidence with which Marx ridicules the very proposition that Reuten contends he might have been propounding with the idea he was ever propounding it.63

Still, why does Marx talk about 'embodiment' and 'substance'? I believe that Marx expects us to be shocked by the ludicrousness of the very proposition that abstract labour is 'embodied' in

abstract' labour as a way of interpreting the concept of abstract labour as a determinate one, whereas I am arguing for two separate concepts, one �eneral (abstract labour) and one determinate ('practically abstract' labour). 1 In commenting on Cornelius Castoriadis's essay 'From Marx to Aristotle:

Moishe Postone observes that Castoriadis 'imputes an implausible degree of inconsistency to Marx. He implies that, in one and the same chapter of Capital, Marx holds the very quasi-natural, non-historical position he analyses critically in his discussion of the fetish' (Postone 1993, p. 171, n. 1 10). Though Reuten's claims are qualified, thus he finds Marx's text ambiguous and offers the 'abstract labour-embodied' reading only as a p:ossible interpretation, they remain unlikely for the same reason. 2 Marx 1977a, p. 177.

63 Though I disagree with Reuten that Marx was 'enmeshed in the physical substance-embodiment metaphor' (Reuten 1993, p. 110) - on the contrary, I think that Marx, with brilliant irony, exposed the fetishism involved in taking value to be a physical substance that 'transcends sensousness' -Reuten is surely right to link the (profound misunderstanding of the) metaphor to the failure of many Marxists to recognise the theory of value as the theory of capitalist social forms. Even if Reuten's suspicions about Marx are unsustainable, he sheds light on how Marx came to be so widely misunderstood, including by Marxists.

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commodities: how can abstract labour be embodied? Is not the bodily the antithesis of the abstract? Marx says as much when he writes:

If I state that coats or boots stand in a relation to linen because the latter is the universal incarnation of abstract human labour, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots bring these commodities into a relation with linen, or with gold or silver (and this makes no difference here), as the universal equivalent, the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of society appears to them in exactly this absurd form.64

When Marx begins to speak of the fetish character of the commodity, he says that when something becomes a commodity 'it changes into a thing that transcends sensuousness';65 commodities are, then, 'sensuous things that are at the same time supersensible, social'.66 But the supersensible cannot be sensible, bodily; Marx does not believe in incarnation. Marx calls this 'embodiment' of 'congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour' a 'phantomlike objectivity'.67 Did Marx believe in ghosts�8 To treat commodities as if they 'embodied' abstract labour is to reifjr a distinction of reason; it is to treat an analytical abstraction as if it picked out some actual, natural or natural-like property of a product. Here, we face one of those 'metaphysical subtleties'69 to which Marx alerts us. In a capitalist society we act as though abstract labour were

64 Marx 1977a, p. 169. 65 Marx 1977a, p. 163. 66 Marx 1977a, p. 165. 67 Marx 1977a, p. 128. 68 In a qualified way one may answer 'yes' to this question. Recalling Marx's observation that to understand value 'we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own' (Marx 1977a, p. 165), consider this passage from Marx's notes to his dissertation: 'The ontological proof means nothing but: that which I actually present to myself, is an actual presentation for me that has its effect on me, and in this sense all gods, pagan as well as Christian, possess a real existence ... Kant's example [of the one hundred talers] could have made the ontological proof more forceful. Actual talers have the same existence as imagined gods [have]' (as quoted in Murray 1988, p. 49). The 'ghostly objectivity' of value is real in the sense that it is posited by the actual practices of a capitalist society, and this positing of value has real effects. But this way of looking at the objectivity of value does not show that Marx mistook it for something natural; rather, it confirms that he held a 'truly social' labour theory of value. 69 Marx 1977a, p. 163.

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'embodied' in products; the bizarreness of this social practice - even when seen through - does not stop it.

Marx's treatment of the fetishism of commodities in Section 4 amounts to a commentary on the results of Section 3's investigation of the value-form, the necessary, polar form of expression of value in exchange-value. There, Marx points up three 'peculiarities' of the value-form: (i) value is expressed as use-value, (ii) abstract labour is expressed as concrete labour, and (iii) private labour is expressed as directly social labour. It is the second that is most pertinent here.

The body of the commodity, which serves as the equivalent, always figures as the embodiment of abstract human labour, and is always the product of some specific useful and concrete labour. This concrete labour therefore becomes the expression of abstract human labour. If the coat is merely abstract human labour's realisation, the tailoring actually realised in it is merely abstract ... Tailoring is now seen as the tangible form of realisation of abstract human labour.1°

This is very peculiar precisely because of the absurdity of thinking that tailoring just is abstract labour incarnate. Talk of 'embodiment' and 'substance' cannot be avoided in writing a critique of capitalist society, but let's not lose the irony.71

Rather than capitulating to naturalism, Marx's talk of abstract labour being 'embodied' bears directly on his theory of value as social form, as can be seen from his account of what gives rise to the fetishism of the commodity. The 'metaphysical' notion of abstract labour 'embodied' in products comes up precisely because Marx is dealing with a particular social form of production (capitalism) that validates actual labour only through the interaction of the products of labour. It is that peculiar social form oflabour that forces upon us the weird notion of 'abstract labour embodied'.

We read earlier what Marx thinks of the idea that value is a bodily property of products (commodities): 'the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the · material relations arising out of this. It is

70 Marx 1977a, p. 150. 71 Reuten illuminatingly observes (Reuten 1993, p. 97) that, when Marx introduces the concept of value, he makes an unmistakable reference to the transubstantiation of the bread and wine at the Consecration of the Mass. This observation fits in well with my contention that Marx's talk of value 'substance' is laced with irony, but it is at sixes and sevens with Reuten's contention that Marx thought value was some sort of natural substance.

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nothing but a definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things'.72 I know of no place in Capital where Marx wavers from this view. When he speaks of 'substance', he qualifies it as 'social substance',73 an expression that is inexplicable on the assumption that he is enmeshed in a naturalistic understanding of value. The fact that Marx speaks of 'substance' and 'embodiment' and 'congealed labour' only means that he is doing what is necessary to present a critique of a society that acts as if such ideas made good sense. At the same time - this is a critique, after all - Marx's use of 'substance' is taunting. What a topsy-turvy sort of society it must be that is organised such that its social relations appear to be natural properties of things! Time for Ghostbusters!

I believe that there are further connotations to Marx's use of the term 'substance' in connection with value. As I argued in Marx's Theory of Scientific Knowledge,74 Marx's account of the 'value substance' as the 'residue' that remains once all the concrete, natural properties of commodities have been abstracted away,15 intentionally mimics Descartes's famous derivation of material substance (res extensa) from his analysis of the bit-turned-blob of wax at the end of the second Meditation?6 Like Berkeley, Marx took a dim view of this sort of abstract, 'metaphysical' materialism, for it hypostatises 'distinctions of reason', extension, flexibility, moveability, and number, into 'abstract ideas'. Where abstract material substance makes a fetish of our abstractive capacities in thinking about natural objects, acting as though there actually were pure thought and objects of pure thought, value makes a fetish of the market's practical abstraction from the specific useful properties of commodities and from the concrete labour that produces them, treating 'congealed abstract (or pure) labour', as if it were something actual, instead of what it is, a socially enacted distinction of reason. Since we know that Marx was no fan of Cartesian materialism, we can see that he is deliberately undermining the naturalistic conception of value by invoking this Cartesian connotation of the word 'substance'.

In Hegelian language deriving from Aristotle, a society may be called a substance insofar as it possesses sufficient autonomy to reproduce itsel£ Marx was familiar with this usage and appealed to it in the course of writing his doctoral dissertation. He took the

72 Marx 1977a, p. 291. 73 Marx 1977a, p. 128. 74 Murray 1988, pp. 149-50, and Chapter 18. 75 Marx 1977a, p. 128. 76 See also Postone 1993, pp. 142 and 175.

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Hellenistic philosophies (Stoicism, Scepticism, Epicureanism) to be outcomes of the breakdown of the substantial Greek societies that gave rise (in their decline) to Plato and Aristotle. Since Marx thought that the capital form was its own barrier, he saw limits on capitalist society's capacity to reproduce itself; nevertheless, especially in the unpublished Results of the Immediate Production Process and in Volume II of Capital, Marx made a point of demonstrating how capitalism is capable of reproducing itself materially and formally. So, value deserves the name 'social substance' because self-expanding value is the social form of capitalist production, and that social form is capable of reproducing itself - it is substantial. Obviously, this connotation of 'substance' indicates that Marx's theory of value pertains to the form of the society that posits it, not to a natural property of products of human labour.

Regarding Reuten's claim that Marx is confused as to whether or not his abstractions are analytical or dialectical and, more generally, as to whether Capital is a work of systematic dialectics, 1 will address just two issues. First is the question of the status of the abstractions involved in Marx's value theory in Chapter One; the other concerns whether or not the commodity is the proper starting point for a systematic, dialectical account of capitalist society.

Worries over the apparent confusion as to the status of the abstractions involved in Marx's value theory are, 1 contend, rooted in a failure to see that Marx has three concepts going: the general concept of labour, the concept of abstract labour, and the concept of 'practically abstract' labour. The first two concepts are general, which means that they are analytical abstractions (and we have seen that the Marxian conception of systematic dialectics calls for the incorporation of such abstractions); while the determinate concept of 'practically abstract' labour, which is equivalent to the concept of value-producing labour, is a dialectical one. That this is so becomes . clear in the course of the double movement of thought in the first chapter. Once Marx has arrived at the concept of value by starting from exchange-value, he turns around in Section 3 and shows that exchange-value is the necessary form of appearance of value, which counts as a prime piece of dialectical reasoning.77

Reuten asks, 'is this, the commodity, the most abstract allembracing concept for the capitalist mode of production?'.78 He answers: '1 doubt it.' He adds that 'Marx certainly develops from it

77 On this double movement, from exchange-value to value and then from value to exchange-value, see Murray 1993. It is a telling fact about Reuten's essay that he does not talk about Section 3. 78 Reuten 1993, p. 96.

6 1


the form of capitalist production (from Chapter 4 onwards)', but he claims that 'from a systematic dialectical point of view, this is not convincing.' I believe that the commodity, understood (as it is presented in the opening sentence of Capital) as the form that wealth generally takes, is just the right starting point for Marx's systematic dialectical presentation of capitalist society. Chiefly, this is because of Marx's demonstration that generalised commodity circulation and the circulation of capital presuppose one another, which explains why Marx can make a dialectical argument that develops the concept of capital from that of generalised commodity circulation.79

References

Anderson, Elizabeth 1993, Value in Ethics and Economics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Arthur, Christopher J. 1986, Dialectics oj Labour: Marx and His Relation to Hegel, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Arthur, Christopher J. 1997, 'Against the Logical-Historical Method: Dialectical Derivation versus Linear Logic', in Moseley and Campbell 1997.

Becker, Gary 1976, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Benhabib, Seyla 1986, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study oj the Foundations of Critical Theory, New York: Columbia University Press.

Berkeley, George 1948, The Works oj George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, edited by A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop, London: Nelson.

Bubner, Rudiger 1988, 'Logic and Capital: On the Method of a "Critique of Political Economy"', in Essays in Hermeneutics and Critical Theory, translated by Eric Matthews, New York: Columbia University Press.

79 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the seventh conference of the 'International Symposium on Marxian Theory', held in Tepozlan, Mexico, in June of 1997. I would like to thank the other participants, Chris Arthur, Riccardo Bellofiore, Martha Campbell, Paul Mattick Jr, Fred Moseley, Geert Reuten, and Tony Smith for their comments. A version of the section on phenomenology and systematic dialectics was presented at the Radical Philosophy Conference held at San Francisco State University in November, 1998. I want to thank Jeanne Schuler and Peter Fuss for helpful comments. I would also like to thank the editors of Historical Materialism for their encouragement and well-considered suggestions.

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Campbell, Martha 1993a, 'The Commodity as Necessary Form of Product', in Economics as Worldly Philosophy: Essays on Political and Historical Economics in Honor of Robert L. Heilbroner, edited by Ron Blackwell et al., New York: St. Martin's Press.

Campbell, Martha 1993b, 'Marx's Concept of Economic Relations and the Method of Capital, in Moseley 1993.

Clarke, Simon 1982, Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology, London: Macmillan.

Cohen, Gerald A. 1978, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Colletti, Lucio 1972, 'Bernstein and the Marxism of the Second International', in From Rousseau to Lenin, translated by John Merrington and Judith White, New York: Monthly Review Press.

Collins, James 1972, Interpreting Modern Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Descartes, Rene 2000, Philosophical Essays and Correspondence, edited by Roger Ariew, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Elson, Diane 1979, 'Marx's Value Theory of Labour', in Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism, edited by Diane Elson, London: CSE Books.

Elster, John 1985, Making Sense of Marx, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Habermas, Jiirgen 1971, Knowledge and Human Interests, translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro, Boston: Beacon Press.

Hegel, G.W.F. 1955, Lectures on the History of Philosophy III, translated by E.S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson, New York: The Humanities Press, Inc.

Hegel, G.W.F 1975, Hegel's Logic, translated by William Wallace, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hont, Istvan, and Michael Ignatieff (eds.) 1983, Wealth and Virtue: the Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Horkheimer, Max 1974, Eclipse of Reason, New York: Seabury Press. Hume, David 1978, A Treatise of Human Nature, second edition,

edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Likitkijsomboon, Pichit 1995, 'Marxian Theories of Value-Form',

Review of Radical Political Economics, 27, 2: 73-105. MacIntyre, Alasdair 1984, After Virtue, second edition, Notre Dame:

University of Notre Dame Press. Mandel, Ernest 1978, 'Introduction to Capital, Volume II', in Marx

1978.

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Marx, Karl 1963, The Poverty of Philosophy, New York: International Publishers.

Marx, Karl 1966, Critique of the Gotha Programme, edited by C.P. Dutt, New York: International Publishers.

Marx, Karl 1970, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy., edited by Maurice Dobb and translated by S.W. Ryazanskaya, New York: International Publishers.

Marx, Karl 1971, Theories of Surplus-Value, Part III, translated by Jack Cohen and S.W. Ryazanskaya, edited by S.W. Ryazanskaya and Richard Dixon, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Marx, Karl 1973, Grundrisse, translated by Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Marx, Karl 1975, 'Notes (1879-80) on Adolph Wagner', in Karl Marx: Texts on Method, translated and edited by Terrell Carver, New York: Harper and Row.

Marx, Karl 1977a, Capital' Volume One, translated by Ben Fowkes, New York: Vintage Books.

Marx, Karl 1977b, 'Results of the Immediate Production Process', in Marx 1977a.

Marx, Karl 1978, Capital' Volume Two, edited by Friedrich Engels and translated by David Fernbach, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Marx, Karl 1981, Capital: Volume Three, translated by David Fernbach, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels 1956-73, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Werke (MEW), 39 Volumes, Berlin: Dietz Verlag.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels 1976, The German Ideology, in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 5: Marx and Engels: 1845-1847, New York: International Publishers.

Mattick Jr, Paul 1993, 'Marx's Dialectic', in Moseley 1993. Meikle, Scott 1985, Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx,

LaSalle: Open Court Pub. Co. Moseley, Fred (ed) 1993, Marx's Method in 'Capital' : A

Reexamination, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. Moseley, Fred, and Martha Campbell {eds} 1997, New Investigations

of Marx's Method, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. Murphy, James Bernard 1993, The Moral Economy of Labour:

Aristotelian Themes in Economic Theory, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Murray, Patrick 1988, Marx's Theory of Scientific Knowledge, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press.

Murray, Patrick 1993, 'The Necessity of Money: How Hegel Helped Marx Surpass Ricardo's Theory of Value', in Moseley 1993.

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Murray, Patrick 1997a, 'Redoubled Empiricism: Social Form and Formal Causality in Marxian Theory', in Moseley and Campbell 1997.

Murray, Patrick (ed.) 1997b, Reflections on Commercial Life: An Anthology of Classic Texts from Plato to the Present, London: Roudedge.

Nussbaum, Martha, and Amartya Sen (eds.) 1993, The Quality of Life, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Postone, Moishe 1993, Time, Labour, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Reuten, Geert 1993, 'The Difficult Labor of a Social Theory of Value', in Moseley 1993.

Reuten, Geert 1995, 'Conceptual Collapses: A Note on Value-Form Theory', Review of Radical Political Economics, 27, 3: 104-10.

Reuten, Geert, and Michael Williams 1989, Value-Form and the State, London: Roudedge.

Rubin, Isaak Ilyich 1972, Essays on Marx's Theory of Value, translated by Milos Samardzija and Fredy Perlman, Detroit Black & Red.

Sayer, Derek 1987, The Violence of Abstraction, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Simmel, Georg 1971, On Individuality and Social Forms, edited by Donald N. Levine, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Smith, Tony 1990, The Logic of Marx's 'Capita!: Replies to Hegelian Criticisms, Albany: State University of New York Press.

Smith, Tony 1993, Dialectical Social Theory and its Critics, Albany: State University of New York Press.

Sohn-Rethel, Alfred 1978, Intellectual and Manual LafJor: A Critique of Epistemology, translated by Martin Sohn-Rethel, London: Macmillan.

Sweezy, Paul 1942, The Theory of Capitalist Development, New York: Modern Reader Press.

Williams, Bernard 1973, 'A Critique of Utilitarianism', in Utilitarianism For and Against, edited by ].J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Williams, Bernard 1985, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Winfield, Richard Dien 1988, The Just Economy, London: Roudedge.

65

Critical Stratagems in Adorno and Habermas: Theories of Ideology and the Ideology of Theory

Deborah Cook

In one of his many metaphorical turns of phrase - a leitmotif in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity - Jiirgen Habermas speaks of the path not taken by modern philosophers, a path that might have led them towards his own intersubjective notion of communicative reason. Habermas is especially critical of his predecessors, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, because, he believes, they repudiated the rational potential in the culture of modernity. Whenever Adorno and Horkheimer heard the word 'culture', they apparendy reached for their revolvers. By the 194Os, their confidence in modern culture had allegedly succumbed to bitter disillusionment. Indeed, on Habermas's view, the confidence of these early critical theorists had been shaken so badly by the emergence of Nazism and Stalinism that their scepticism finally embraced reason itself, 'whose standards ideology critique had found already given in bourgeois ideals'. Consequendy, Adorno and Horkheimer were forced to call into question their own immanent critique of modernity: ideology critique itself came 'under suspicion of not producing (any more) truths'. These philosophers supposedly had litde choice but to render their now suspect critique 'independent even in relation to its own foundations' .1

This assessment of early critical theory is both polemical and selfaggrandising. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas effectively turns himself into the sole modern standard-bearer of reason, culture, and enlightenment while simultaneously consigning Adorno's work on ideology critique to the dust-bin of a misguided stage in the history of philosophy. On Habermas's reading of it, Adorno's critique of ideology constandy circles within a performative contradiction that Adorno could have overcome only by acknowledging the rational potential in secular bourgeois culture. I shall criticise this flawed interpretation of Adorno in the first section of this paper. While his conceptions of ideology and its critique are not without their problems, Adorno never denied the rational potential in modernity. Objecting to those Marxists who reduce culture entirely to the false consciousness of existing conditions, Adorno insisted on the value of culture in the face of the lie of the

1 Habermas 1987a, p. 116.

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exchange principle. In the flIst part of the paper, I shall also contrast Adorno's ideas with Habermas's claims about the rational potential of communicative action.

In the second part of the paper, Habermas's views about ideology will be examined. Although his notion of communicative rationality is intended to rehabilitate reason and could, in principle at least, ground a critique of ideology, Habermas jettisons ideology critique altogether in his Theory oj Communicative Action. In the course of a process which Habermas describes as the rationalisation of the lifeworld, modern culture has supposedly become incapable of tolerating ideological distortions. Since, on Habermas's account, ideologies of all stripes have evaporated, ideology critique has been left without an object. Yet, as I shall show in the third section of the paper, Habermas's claims about the death of ideology are grossly overstated. Ironically, perhaps, on his own definition of ideology, Habermas's recent work, Between Facts and Norms, is itself ideological in character. In this otherwise often inspiring theory of 'radical' democracy, Habermas attenuates the distinctions between the bourgeois ideals of liberal democracy and their empirical instantiation in Western states.

The rational potential in modern culture

Adorno's views about ideology critique are developed fully in Negative Dialectics, where such critique is both grounded theoretically and practically deployed. For Adorno, ideology ultimately consists 'in the implicit identity of concept and thing'.2

The coercive assimilation of objects by concepts, 'the claim that the non-I is finally the 1', has historically been 'the primal form of ideology'.3 Central to Adorno's entire philosophical enterprise is his critique of such ideological identity claims: negative dialectics involves the unrelenting attempt to 'break the compulsion to achieve identity'.4 Although this compulsion also animates liberal ideology, the primary target of negative dialectics is not bourgeois culture but rather its relatively new positivistic counterpart. Positivism is at once more transparent and more pernicious than liberal ideology. It is more transparent because it consists in the simplistic, tautological affirmation of existing conditions: what is, is. Yet, with its affirmative refrain - that's just the way things are, things are like this

2 Adorno 1973, p. 40. 3 Adorno 1973, p.148. 4 Adorno 1973, p. 157.

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Cook/Critical Stratagems

- positivist ideology implies that existing conditions are unassailable and unchangeable. In the face of this ostensibly incontrovertible tautology, resignation may appear to be the only available option.

Adorno found examples of positivist thinking everywhere: from Karl Popper's The Open Society, and the philosophy of pragmatism, to Hollywood movies and television scripts. Pseudo-realistic reproductions of reality on television and movie screens, 'neutral' scientific descriptions of the empirical world, and philosophical encomia to utility and efficiency serve important legitimising functions. Currently, the mere observation, description, or depiction of existing conditions is often considered sufficient to sanction them. What exists is self-endorsing; it has become its own ideology, an advertisement for itself that is almost as effective in terms of its legitimising effects as the more normatively-coloured ideologies of the past. In a 1954 essay on ideology, 'Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre', Adorno described the new ideology as one which exorbitantly duplicates existing states of affairs. In positivism, he wrote, 'nothin� remains of ideology but the recognition of that which exists itself. What exists is celebrated as morally right simply because it exists; the conditions under which we currently live thus tend increasingly to become their own norms.

Whereas liberal ideology could be unmasked merely by contrasting its normative claims with existing conditions, the pretensions of positivism are not exposed as easily. In a number of his works, Adorno spoke of the difficulties that attend a critique of the new ideology. In Minima Moralia, for example, he complains that, with positivism, the difference between ideology and reality 'has disappeared'. Since positivist ideology 'now resigns itself to confirmation of reality by its mere duplication', there is not 'a crevice in the cliff of the established order into which the ironist might hook a fingernail'.6 Still, positivism would pose an insurmountable problem for Adorno's immanent ideology critique only if it had succeeded in usurping its liberal predecessor completely. According to Adorno, it has not done so: liberal ideology continues to maintain an effective, though diminishing, hold on our self-understanding: individuals currently feel guilty because 'they are not what they should be and do not do what they should do according to their selfimage'? Notwithstanding the damage caused by positivism, liberal

5 Adorno 1972a, p. 477. 'Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre' also appears as Chapter 12 in Adorno 1972b. 6 Adorno 1974a, p. 211. 7 Adorno 1993, p. 32.

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ideas live on in our conflictive understanding of ourselves as free, equal, and autonomous.8

While recognising the waning power of liberal ideology, and the corrosive effect of positivism upon its emphatic concepts, Adorno continued to make use of these concepts as the foundation or ground for his own critique. Liberal notions of individuality, freedom, autonomy and spontaneity are rational inasmuch as they evoke the better potential that is latent in modernity. As Adorno put it in his essay on ideology, these notions are true 'an sieh' - in themselves.9 In spite of its false daims that such ideas already coincide with existing reality, liberalism does attest to the power of thought to conceive of something better, to think beyond the given. Liberal culture is implicitly self-critical; its normative claims can be held up against its own pretensions that reality is already like this, viz., free, equal, etc. This is why Adorno's critique of modern culture was directed almost exclusively against its positivistic tendencies. Under the 'spell' of positivism, culture is tending to degenerate into an uncritical endorsement of existing conditions, a mere imprint of reality that lacks the truth content of liberalism. As an antidote, Adorno deployed liberalism's moribund ideas against positivism's affirmative and tautological claims.

Adorno did not deny the rational potential in bourgeois culture after the 1940s. Throughout his work, he made constant use of the emphatic concepts of liberalism to ground his ideology critique. Like Marx, who maintained that religion has a truth content inasmuch as it posits a world that eclipses or exceeds the reality of industrial capitalism, Adorno claimed that liberal ideology also served as an index of truth. Indeed, he even argued that the ideational content of some concepts was not entirely a function of their historical genesis. To claim, as some Marxists have done, that all concepts merely express particular and historical (class) interests is 'to extirpate with the false, all that was true also, all that, however impotently, strives to escape the confines of universal practice, every chimerical anticipation of a nobler condition,.10 On the one hand, then, a concept like freedom, 'lags behind itself [bleibt hinter sieh zurtick] as soon as we apply it empirically'. Historical conditions falsify the concept. On the other hand, if this concept were to be stripped 'of what philosophical terminology used to call its idea', it would be

8 See Adorno 1993, pp. 23-4. 9 Adorno 1972a, p. 473. 10 Adorno, 1974a, p. 44.

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diminished arbitrarily 'for utility's sake, in comparison with what it means in itself.ll

As I shall proceed to show, the major difference between Adorno and Habermas lies, not in Habermas's recognition of the rational potential of modernity and Adorno's loss of faith in it, but rather in the conception each philosopher has of this potential. The theoretical cast of Adorno's conception can be illustrated by comparing briefly his views about liberal concepts to Kant's claims about the (equally liberal) concepts of pure reason. Appearing to echo Kant when he refers to liberal concepts as ideas in the philosophical sense that are also true 'in themselves', Adorno actually differs radically from the Konigsberg thinker. Whereas Kant had called concepts like freedom transcendental ideas, maintaining that they are neither furnished by experience nor objects of experience,12 Adorno flatly rejected Kant's claim that these concepts are 'unconditioned' by historical reality. Furthermore, for Adorno, such concepts are not regulative but speculative principles.13 More Hegelian than Kantian in character, liberal concepts refer to a potential that is partially embedded in existing conditions but has yet to come to fruition.

Against Kant, who never recognised that the concept of freedom was essentially historical, 'not just as a concept but in its empirical substance', Adorno contended that this concept (and others of the same ilk) arose at a particular stage in human history.14 Freedom continually arises 'in reality, in the guilty context of things as they are, brought about by that context'. We are able to conceive of a concept like freedom only because we currently experience ourselves 'as now free, now unfree'. 15 This fundamentally historical experience of freedom and unfreedom itself presupposes the historical advent of self-reflection or self-consciousness - 'which to Kant was a matter of course'. In the absence of self-consciousness, Adorno argued that it would be 'an anachronism to talk of freedom, whether as a reality or as a challenge,.16 Indeed, it is precisely because the idea of freedom

11 Adorno 1973, p. 151. 12 Kant 1929, p. 308-9. 13 As grateful as I am to Hauke Brunkhorst for the reference to Kant, I

disagree with his claim that, in Adorno's work., 'modernity regains the regulative force of Kant's idea of freedom' (see Brunkhorst 1992, p. 165). Nevertheless, when suitably qualified, this claim can be made about Habermas's notion of communicative reason. 14 Adorno 1973, p. 218. IS Adorno 1973, p. 299. 16 Adorno 1973, p. 218.

7 1


does not 'so far transcend the bounds of ... experience that no given empirical object can ever coincide' with it,17 that it can be held up against empirical reality in ideological-critical fashion. This idea evokes the better potential in existing conditions, even as its truth content indicts those conditions and holds them to account.

For Adorno, then, the liberal culture of modernity itself provides the rational standards against which it can be judged and found wanting. Of course, Habermas too claims that modern culture harbours a rational potential. Yet, in contrast to Adorno, Habermas argues that this potential has alwars been latent historically in 'the profane practice of everyday life'. 8 It eventually manifested itself more fully in modernity owing to the rationalisation of the lifeworld - a process that allegedly resulted in pronounced distinctions between the validity spheres of objective truth, normative rightness, and subjective authenticity or beauty. In place of the holistic authorities of myth and religion, which had formerly prescribed what was true, good, and beautiful, stepped the profane and enlightened authority of the force of the better argument, revealing the inherently rational core of our discursive practices. Habermas calls this core communicative reason: it represents 'the central experience of the unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing force of argumentative speech, in which different participants overcome their merely subjective views and, owing to the mutuality of rationally motivated conviction, assure themselves of both the unity of the objective world and the intersubjectivity of their lifeworld,.19 Despite the disproportionate weight they continue to give to the cognitiveinstrumental dimension of reason, individuals do actualise the rational potential in modernity insofar as 'they reciprocally raise claims that their utterances fit the world (objective, social, or subjective), and ... they ... criticize and confirm those validity claims, settle their disagreements, and arrive at agreements,.20

Communicative reason has been characterised by Habermas as a regulative ideal,21 a counterfactual, and a residue of metaphysics. In an arresting metaphor, Habermas goes so far as to describe it as a 'rocking hull' that does not 'go under in the sea of contingencies, even if shuddering in high seas is the only mode in which it "copes" with these contingencies'.22 Despite the waves of contingency that

17 Kant 1929, pp. 310-11. 18 Habermas 1987b, p. 194. 19 Habermas 1984, p. 10. 20 Habermas 1987b, p. 126. 21 See Baynes 1992, p. 113, and p. 210-11, n.137. 22 Habermas 1992b, p. 144.

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constantly threaten to submerge it, communicative reason is able to stay afloat because it enjoys what Habermas calls (in Kantian fashion) a 'moment of unconditionality'.23 At the same time, however, communicative reason also rocks or shudders in high seas; it shudders because it is 'at most an absolute that has become fluid as a critical procedure,.24 Unconditioned and absolute, communicative reason nonetheless shares with the high seas on which it struggles to remain afloat a pliant character. It owes its pliancy or flexibility to the fact that it is also already 'built into factual processes of mutual understanding'. An ideal or absolute, communicative reason also inheres in the real: it is 'by its very nature incarnated in contexts of communicative action'. 25

The Janus face of communicative reason makes it somewhat difficult to compare with Adorno's conception of liberal ideas. Yet commentators like Herbert Schnadelbach have drawn preliminary parallels between the two: 'Just as Critical Theory, following Marx, always referred to the freedom and equality of all human beings, and this was purportedly incorporated, at least in the form of a claim, into bourgeois society and drew its critical energy from this source, so Habermas attempts to use a normative concept of reaching understanding founded in communicative action itself as the basis for his "critique of given relations of reachint understanding" and the paradoxes and aberrations of Modernity'. Both Habermas and Adorno claim that modernity has a rational potential. Like Marx, who believed that existing economic conditions contain the seeds of a more humane order, both philosophers contend that modernity's better potential is partially embedded in modern culture. Reflecting Marx's concern for human emancipation, Adorno and Habermas associate emancipation with the Enlightenment ideals of freedom, equality, autonomy, spontaneity, or (to cite Habermas) with 'intact subjectivity'.27 Finally, for both philosophers, the rational potential in modern culture is capable of grounding a critique of existing conditions.

One of the major differences between Adorno's and Habermas's understanding of the rational potential of modernity can be found in their conception of its historical character. Where he had once expressly located this potential in history - specifically, in the

23 Habermas 1987a, p. 322. 24 Habermas 1992b, p. 144. 25 Habermas 1987a, p. 322. 26 Schnadelbach 1991, p. 20. 27 Habermas 1992b, p. 145.

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'rational-critical' debate of the bourgeois public sphere in the eighteenth century - Habermas now lays 'the normative foundations of the critical theory of society ... at a deeper level'. No longer 'idealizing' a 'public sphere ... specific to a single epoch', Habermas currently claims that modernity's rational potential has always been latent, or 'intrinsic in everyday communicative practices,.28 Nevertheless, Habermas also maintains that this potential has been realised more fully in modernity owing to the rationalisation of the lifeworld. On one reading of it, Habermas's conception of modernity's potential could be described as panentheist: immanent in discursive practices, communicative reason simultaneously transcends them. Endowing his notion of reason with a Kantian moment of unconditionality, Habermas speaks almost apologetically about 'the shadow of a transcendental illusion' that accompanies it.29

In contrast to Habermas's claims about the unconditioned moment of reason, Adorno maintains that the rational potential in modernity is entirely immanent in it. Adorno's radically historical conception of reason is nowhere more evident than where he conjures up the Orwellian nightmare that the rational potential in liberal ideas 'm�ht be wholly extinguished again, perhaps without leaving a trace'. On Adorno's view, the 'true substance' of concepts like Kant's intelligible character (a free, rational, human consciousness) 'would probably be the historically most advanced, pointlike, flaring, swiftly extinguished consciousness inhabited by the impulse to do right. It is the concrete, intermittent anticifation of possibility, neither alien to humanity nor identical with it,.3 (One is reminded here of Adorno's description of fireworks as ephemeral display, at once empirical and free from the. weight of empirical reality.32) Yet, it should also be noted that, precisely because the ideational content of liberal concepts is thoroughly historical and might even evaporate without a trace, the ground for Adorno's ideology critique is extremely unstable. The precarious basis of Adorno's critique in liberalism's evanescent Wahrheitsmomenten contrasts sharply with the transcendent and transhistorical grounding provided by communicative reason. Even rocking and shuddering, this 'hull' appears to offer a more secure bulwark against the vicissitudes of history.

28 Habermas 1992a, p. 442. 29 Habermas 1992b, p. 144. 30 Adorno 1973, p. 218. 31 Adorno 1973, p. 297 (translation altered). 32 Adorno 1974b, p. 113.

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Unlike Habermas's regulative conception of reason, Adorno's view of modernity's rational potential also has a speculative cast. Liberal ideas resemble Aristotelian forms33 to the extent that they intimate or evoke a condition that would be realised fully only if existing· states of affairs were utterly transformed. At the same time, however, Adorno claims that the ideas of liberalism are not utterly chimerical because they also have an existential basis in our experience and understanding of ourselves. Agreeing with Adorno that modernity's rational potential is not a pipe dream, Habermas advances different arguments to support this claim. First, communicative reason cannot be filled in substantively 'as the totality of a reconciled form of life'. Rather, reason is purely formal or procedural in character;34 it consists in those procedures that would need to be satisfied to achieve mutual understanding. Second, and more importantly, reason is already embedded in existing discursive practices; it is 'always already' there. Against Adorno's view of the persistently pathic character of reason in the modern world, Habermas claims that communicative reason has flourished there, albeit in a less than perfect form. So, whereas Adorno laments the insubstantiality of reason in modern culture, Habermas applauds its formal presence in argumentative speech oriented towards reaching understanding.

Criticism and critique

Habermas does not deploy communicative reason as the ground or foundation for a critique of ideology. Again in contrast to Adorno, he makes use of modernity's rational potential as the basis for social criticism. In a controversial move, Habermas even denies the viability of ideology in our rational secular culture. At one time, communication was distorted because restrictive religious and metaphysical world-views inflicted 'structural violence' on forms of understanding. Inhabiting the inscrutable realm of faith and belief, religion and metaphysics fused the 'ontie, normative, and expressive aspects of validity' in such a way that they were 'immunized against objections already within the cognitive reach of everyday

33 Adorno 1973, p. 150. 34 Habermas 1992b, p. 145. On the same page, however, Habermas also

implies that his conception of communicative reason does have a certain substance: the necessary conditions for mutual understanding allow us to develop 'the idea of an intact subjectivity', which offers a 'glimmer of symmetrical relations marked by free, reciprocal recognition'.

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communication,.3s For Habermas, this fusion (or confusion) of validity spheres is the very hallmark of ideology. Armed with this novel definition of ideology, Habermas also proceeds to announce the end of ideology: in modern culture, the objective, normative, and expressive spheres of validity have been differentiated to the point where '(c]ulture loses just those formal properties that enabled it to take on ideological functions'. 36

Since ideology is no longer viable, ideology critique becomes superfluous. In place of ideology critique, Habermas's analysis of modernity consists in part in a critique of the loss of meaning in modern culture, or of 'the cultural impoverishment and fragmentation of everyday consciousness'. Somewhat paradoxically, perhaps, Habermas attributes this impoverishment and fragmentation to the fact that consciousness has been 'robbed of its power to synthesize' - a power that once produced vital, totalling conceptions or global interpretations, including ideologies. Perpetrating this robbery are the economic and political 'subsystems' of late capitalism. These systems wrest from the lifeworld - which is 'always constituted in the form of a global knowledge intersubjectively shared by its members' - one of its central functions by preventing 'holistic interpretations from coming into existence'. Consequently, the economic and political systems now advance unmasked; they currently intervene directly in the lifeworld via their own 'functional equivalent for ideology': colonisation.37 Rather than targeting an allegedly defunct ideology, then, Habermas brandishes communicative reason to take aim at colonisation, or at the commodification and bureaucratisation of the lifeworld.

Of course, Adorno was himself concerned with the commodification of everyday life - though he believed that it was also reinforced ideologically. Like Georg Lulcics, Adorno observed that the exchange principle had permeated and transformed areas of life far beyond the economic sphere proper. Under its sway, everything and everyone had been reduced to quantified and commensurable values. As a result, suffering becomes the lot of most individuals: 'Even where they think they have escaped the primacy of economics - all the way down into their psychology, the maison to/eree of uncomprehended individuality - they react under the compulsion of the universal'. 38 Although he has moved so far from his Marxist origins that he questions the extent of such economic

3S Habermas 1987b, p. 189. 36 Habermas 1987b, p. 196. 37 Habermas 1987b, p. 355. 38 Adorno 1973, p. 311.

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subjection, maintaining that it cannot ultimately undermine the integrity of the lifeworld, Habermas's view nonetheless remains remarkably similar to Adorno's in a number of respects. On Habermas's reading: 'To the degree that the economic system subjects the life-forms of private households and the life conduct of consumers and employees to its imperatives, consumerism and possessive individualism, motives of performance, and competition gain the force to shape behavior'. 39

Echoing Hegel, Habermas observes that individuals today often adopt the 'utilitarian life-style of "specialists without spirit'" or the 'aesthetic-hedonistic lifestyle of "sensualists without heart.",40 As consumers and employees, our 'goals, relations and services, lifespaces and life-times' have acquired monetary value and significance. As citizens and clients of the welfare state, our 'duties and rights, responsibilities and dependencies' have also been redefined.41 Consequently, aspects of our private and public lives have split off from the lifeworld, making it all the more difficult for us to give our 'life histories a certain degree of consistent direction'. Once again, however, Habermas denies that such colonisation is legitimated ideologically; he believes that we are no longer capable of making the sort of category mistakes that once characterised ideology. As heirs to the process of rationalisation, we have become much too savvy to be duped by ideological mystifications or distortions. Habermas's end-of-ideology thesis ultimately rests on the view that we have gained a degree of intellectual maturity that cannot be revoked.

The view that we are too mature to be fooled by ideologies but are not yet capable of counteracting the far more visible and direct onslaught of colonisation is not only problematic, it can also be answered with the plausible claim that the colonisation described by Habermas continues to be reinforced ideologically, especially in advertising. That many of us are still taken in by modern culture's ideological legitimation of economic and political domination is certainly argued cogently by Adorno. Agreeing that domination has become more direct - a state of affairs that would, by itself, allow the economic and political systems to dispense with ideologies42 -Adorno maintained that ideology persists. What has changed is that it now often takes a weaker and more transparent form: ideology 'scarcely says anything more than that things are the way they are, so

39 Habermas 1987b, p. 325. 40 Habermas 1987b, p. 323. 41 Habermas 1987b, p. 322. 42 Adorno 1972a, p. 465.

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even its own untruth dwindles to the weak axiom that things could not be other than what they are'. In fact, positivist ideology is 'no longer a veil' cloaking economic doniination. Rather, merely by duplicating 'the world's threatening face' ,43 positivism implies that the sway of the exchange principle is natural and unassailable, thereby legitimising it. With equal plausibility, Adorno argued that liberal ideology also continues to perform legitimising functions (as is evident even today whenever Western nations attempt to justify their military interventions by appealing to freedom and democracy).

Although it is clear that his definition of ideology as a kind of category mistake is not entirely compatible with Adorno's, Habermas never directly challenges Adorno's conception of ideology as identity-thinking. And, despite his objections to Adorno's ideology critique (which are directed almost exclusively against Dialectic of Enlightenment), Habermas ignores completely Adorno's claims about positivism as the latest ideological legitimation of late capitalism. Indeed, Habermas simply contents himself with the bare assertion (not unlike an article of faith) that ideology evaporated with the demise of the latter-day ideological offspring of liberalism: anarchism, fascism, and communism. He even speaks of the demise of liberal ideology - or of the 'bourgeois ideology' of ' rational natural law, of utilitarianism, of bourgeois social philosophy and philosophy of history in general'. Accompanied as it is by the equally dubious claim that the modern form of understanding is now 'so transparent that the communicative practice of everyday life no longer affords any niches for the structural violence of ideologies',44 Habermas's end-of-ideology thesis lacks adequate empirical support.

Even accepting Habermas's somewhat idiosyncratic definition of ideology, one could show without much difficulty that, moribund though it may be, 'bourgeois' ideology continues to be used to legitimate existing conditions by 'fusing' spheres of validity. Responding directly to Habermas, Jeffrey Alexander takes this tack. Conceding that validity spheres are, in fact, more markedly differentiated today than they were in the past, Alexander also argues that 'the arbitrary, unconscious, fused, and, yes, irrational elements of culture have not ... disappeared'. Modern culture has not yet become completely disenchanted and enlightened: 'Modern, rational people continue to infuse values, institutions, and even mundane physical locations with the mystery and awe of the sacred'. 45 More generally, as Terry Eagleton protests, proclamations about the end of ideology

43 Adorno 1972a, p. 477. 44 Habermas 1987b, p. 354. See also p. 196. 45 Alexander 1991, p. 71.

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are 'vastly implausible:' if they were true, one could scarcely understand 'why so many individuals ... still flock to church, wrangle over politics in pubs, care about what their children are being taught in schools and lose sleep over the steady erosion of the social

• ,46 selVlces.

Habermas against himself

Once everyday communication has been 'cut off from the influx of an intact cultural tradition', it can be one-sidedly rationalised.47

According to Habermas, 'capitalist modernization follows a pattern such that cognitive-instrumental rationality surges beyond the bounds of the economy and state into other, communicatively structured areas of life and achieves dominance there at the expense of moral-political and aesthetic-practical rationality, and ... this produces disturbances in the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld'.48 Given his contentious views about the end of ideology, then, Habermas abandons ideology critique altogether, aiming his criticisms instead at this colonisation of the lifeworld by money and power. He wields the transcendent content of communicative reason - the counterfactual and ideal speech situation - against colonisation's pathological effects. On Kenneth Baynes's fairly uncontroversial interpretation of the critical dimension of Habermas's project, communicative reason is 'a "regulative" idea that can be used to criticize actual discourses'.49 Against the backdrop of this notion of reason, the critic may show how the imperatives of the economic and political systems insinuate themselves into communicatively structured areas of life.

Recently, communicative reason has also been given a more overtly political function. In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas recasts his views about reason when he outlines the conditions necessary for a thriving democratic political culture. Repeating almost verbatim his remarks in The Philosophical Discourse oj Modernity,so Habermas speaks about the moment of unconditionality in communication.s1 As Baynes has observed, this reference to 'a context-transcending reason existing in society ... is the origin of the

46 Eagleton 1991, p. 42. 47 Habermas 1987b, p. 327. 48 Habermas 1987b, pp. 304-5. 49 Baynes 1992, p. 113. 50 Habermas 1987a, p. 322. S1 Habermas 1996, pp. 20-1.

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tension between facticity and validity' in law and politics - the central theme of Between Facts and Norms.52 An 'internal' tension between facticity and validity affects law. As factually existing, the laws of democratic states have a coercive character that serves to maintain order, stabilising citizens' expectations. At the same time, these laws also acquire normative validity to the extent that their validity claims are redeemed discursively. However, in the critical commentary that follows, I shall focus on what Habermas calls the 'external tension' between facticity and validity - that is, I shall examine the 'tension' between empirically existing constitutional democracies and their worthiness to be recognised, or legitimacy.

I want to focus on the external tension between facticity and validity because it is here that communicative reason's Janus face resurfaces in its most problematic and perplexing form. In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas actually takes the 'risky decision' to 'absorb' the tension between facticity and validity.53 Whereas, in his social criticism, Habermas was prepared to deploy modernity's rational potential critically against the colonisation of the lifeworld by the economic and political systems, he appears to advocate a much more affirmative use of communicative reason in the context of his political theory. What Marcuse once said of Hegel's Philosophy of Right is apposite here: although he was generally prepared to make reality accord with reason, 'when such an attempt threatened the very society that hailed this as man's privilege, Hegel preferred to maintain the prevailing order under all circumstances,.54 Reason then lost its critical leverage. The realisation of reason was no longer a task but a fact: 'The rule of law was at hand; it was embodied in the state and constituted the adequate historical realization of reason'. 55

Taking the risky decision to portray existing liberal-democratic states as rational, Habermas refuses to allow them to be 'negated in principle'. 56 His decision is based on a cogent but suspect revision of his notion of communicative reason. Because he has insisted that communicative reason is already embedded in existing practices, and is embedded only in such practices, Habermas can also argue quite consistently that the real and the ideal are not actually opposed to each other. This is precisely what he does in the following passage:

52 Baynes 1995, p. 204. 53 Habermas 1996, p. 8. 54 Marcuse 1941, p. 177. 55 Marcuse 1941, p. 182. 56 Marcuse 1941, p. 177.

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The counterfactual presuppositions assumed by participants in argumentation indeed open up a perspective allowing them to go beyond local practices of justification and to transcend the provinciality of their spatiotemporal contexts .... This perspective thus enables them to do justice to the meaning of context-transcending validity claims. But with context-transcending validity claims, they are not themselves transported into the beyond of an ideal realm of noumenal beings. In contrast to the projection of ideals, in the light of which we can identify deviations, 'the idealizing presuppositions we always already have to adopt whenever we want to reach mutual understanding do not involve any kind of correspondence or comparison between idea and reality.'57

As I interpret this, the critical leverage once offered by the concept of communicative reason (which was already much less critical than many radicals would have liked) has been made to disappear by a theoretical sleight of hand. Since no salient distinction can now be made between the ideal dimension of reason and existing discursive practices, it becomes difficult to understand how communicative reason can continue to serve even as the normative basis for social criticism. In addition, the prospect of grounding a critique of the political order has grown much fainter. According to the recent Habermas, the problem of linking the notion of communicative reason to empirical assessments of liberal democracies does not 'imply an opposition between the ideal and the real'. There is no opposition between the ideal and the real because 'particles and fragments of an "existing reason" [are] already incorporated in political practices, however distorted these may be,.�8 Henceforth, sociology has the task of identifying or locating those practices in which reason is already embedded. Sociologists are to confirm what the philosopher Habermas apparently already knows: the real is rational. Indeed, as Marcuse observed with respect to Hegel's equally affirmative Philosophy of Right: at this point, critical philosophy effectively cancels itself out. 59

If, in his earlier work, Habermas was more inclined to stress the opposition between the ideal and the real, he now emphasises the immanence of reason to the detriment of its transcendent character. The ideal becomes merely what is factually presupposed: the tension between validity and facticity now 'enters the world of social facts'; it

57 Habermas 1996, p. 323. 58 Habermas 1996, p. 287. 59 Marcuse 1941, p. 252.

8 1


must be conceived as 'a moment of social facticity'.60 Of course, this shift in emphasis was always possible given the peculiar status of communicative reason - a status Habermas fully acknowledged when he told an interviewer: 'Paradoxically stated, the regulative idea of the validity of utterances is constitutive for the social facts that are brought about through communicative action

,.61 Transcendent yet

immanent, regulative but constitutive, communicative reason has always been a strange hybrid. Still, while the Janus face of communicative reason always permitted such a shift in emphasis, it is interesting that this shift should take place precisely where Habermas is developing his political theory. There is no opposition between the real and the ideal, not because communicative reason will not permit it, but because Habermas has taken the prior decision to accentuate the rational character of existing liberal-democratic states.

Commenting on Between Facts and Norms, Bernhard Peters suggests (without, unfortunately, developing this point at any length) that Habermas should have distinguished more clearly between 'normative theorizing and empirical reconstructions of [the] normative contents of cultural belief systems or social institutions

,.62

In other words, Habermas should have distinguished between the normative content he ascribes to constitutional democracies and its empirical manifestations in existing ideologies and institutions. While this peculiar conflation of fact and value does not prevent Habermas from criticising contemporary democracies - he is especially concerned about the vitality of civil society and the dearth of institutional channels for democratic deliberation and decisionmaking - his criticism is piecemeal. FurtherI.I1ore, while one may agree with Habermas that an ideal communication community could not rule by itself and would need to reckon with unavoidable societal complexity, this concession does not obviate all the problems with Habermas's affIrmative recasting of communicative reason. Although 'no complex society could ever correspond to the model of purely communicative social relations',63 the model is not invalidated as a mere thought experiment. The normative model should be permitted to retain its critical leverage.

60 Habermas 1996, p. 35. 61 Baynes 1992, pp. 210-1, n. 137. Baynes is translating this sentence. Habermas made this remark in an interview conducted by T. Hviid Nielsen which was subsequendy published in Die nachholende Revolution. 62 Peters 1994, p. 127. 63 Habermas 1996, p. 326.

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Acknowledging that his decision to portray existing democracies as rational is 'risky', Habermas seems to think that the risk he runs consists only in having to counter objections from those more 'ideological' and 'totalizing' Marxist theories whose demise he has already proclaimed. And dead men tell no tales. Still, even without recurring to a body of work whose death he greatly exaggerates, it can be objected that, on Habermas's own definition of ideology, Between Facts and Norms itself takes on ideological functions with respect to existing liberal-democratic states. Habermas ends by 'fusing' the normative and the objective spheres of validity, thus immunising liberal democracies from objections that are already within everyone's cognitive reach. The transcendent and idealising presuppositions of reason, upon which the validity of constitutional democracies ultimately rests, are now deemed by Habermas to be entirely 'innerworldly' - the shadow of the transcendental illusion that once accompanied communicative reason appears to have vanished without a trace.

Nearly twenty years ago, in The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas claimed that both religious and metaphysical world-views posited a fundamental order in a 'true' world behind the world of appearances. When they attempted to explain 'the orders of a stratified class society as homologous to that world order',64 these world-views were able to assume ideological functions. Yet, ironically perhaps, by 'detranscendentalizing,65 reason in Between Facts and Norms, Habermas gives to his concept of communicative reason an ideological function quite similar to that of the religious and metaphysical world-views he criticises. To invoke Habermas against himself: when it is possible to explain the order of contemporary liberal democracies as homologous to the ideal order postulated by communicative reason, reason itself begins to take on ideological functions. Having already declared his part; pris for lib�ral democracy, Habermas now expresses this preference in a new way: under cover of a reformulation of one of his central theoretical concepts. Once reformulated, communicative reason takes its place in the pantheon of all-too-living ideologies.

It is probably no accident that communicative reason - in the guise of the radical-democratic project of self-empowerment - is Habermas's answer to the now defunct tradition of natural law. The communicative core of liberal democracies shares with the religious foundation of natural law those characteristics that Marx ascribed to

64 Habermas 1987b, p. 189. 65 Habermas 1996, p. 19.

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religion over a hundred years ago. In Between Facts and Norms, communicative reason has become 'the general theory' of our inverted world, 'its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn completion, its universal ground for consolation and justification,.66 On earth as it is in heaven: for all their faults, which include an exaggerated resEect for 'the systemic logic of an economy steered through markets', 7 existing democratic states are said to carry with them a rational and normative core that only requires further elaboration and development to be fully realised. Communicative reason is the unlikely apotheosis of liberal democracies under the economic conditions characteristic of late capitalism.

Conclusion

Ostensibly concerned that empiricists and sceptics might make light work of the idealisations of pure communication, 'displaying the facticity of a world that is not set up in this way',68 and making his ideas look foolish,69 Habermas recasts his notion of reason in an ideologically suspect fashion. Indeed, Between Facts and Norms assumes ideological functions on Adorno's definition of ideology as well. For Adorno, once again: 'Real ideologies ... can be true "in themselves", as are the ideas of freedom, humani� and justice, but they behave as though they were already realized'. Identifying the ideal presuppositions of communicative reason with the real beliefs, practices, and institutions of Western political systems, Habermas behaves as though these presuppositions were already instantiated empirically to a greater or lesser extent, and he ends by legitimising existing liberal-democratic states. Rather than attempting to preserve and deploy in a more speculative fashion the critical leverage that he originally built into his notion of reason, Habermas uncritically and affirmatively predicates rationality of the real.

There may even be a positivist dimension to Habermas's ideologically freighted claims. It is, in fact, not entirely clear whether Habermas is asserting that existing liberal democracies constitute their own norms, or whether he is offering a more liberal ideological

66 Marx 1963, p. 227. 67 Habermas 1996, p. xlii. 68 Habermas 1996, p. 325. See also pages 136 and 461. 69 Habermas 1996, p. 461. 70 Adorno 1972a, p. 473.

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legitimation of politics in the West. This issue is even more difficult to decide given other remarks Habermas makes in Between Facts and Norms. On the one hand, as I have emphasised here, the tension between facticity and validity that once gave communicative reason its Janus face has supposedly been absorbed, allowing Habermas to preserve the link 'with the classical conception of an internal connection, however mediated, between society and reason'?! On the other, Habermas occasionally seems to want to maintain the opposition or tension between facticity and validity. For example, in his postscript to Between Facts and Norms, Habermas objects strongly to Onora O'Neill's assumption that 'the counterfactual idea that a norm deserves universal assent' is 'absorbed and neutralized by the facticity that attends the legal institutionalization of public discourse,.72

Habermas appears to have second thoughts here about confusing the ideal with the real. More importandy, for all its ideological prevarications, Habermas's conception of a thriving democratic political order, which derives its legitimacy from the exercise of free, egalitarian, and undistorted forms of communication, somehow manages to retain its emphatic normative content. Following Adorno, this is true of many liberal notions; they have a speculative dimension which belies the very conditions they may be used to affirm. To paraphrase Marx's more charitable views about religion, Habermas's stubborn appeal to reason expresses real distress about our fundamentally irrational world as well a powerfully articulated protest against such distress.73 Far from being merely illusory, then, the fantastic creation of false consciousness, communicative reason actually serves as an historically immanent intimation of modernity's better potential. It reminds the more ideology-proof reader that a fully rational democratic order is not a fact to be observed but a normative task that has yet to be accomplished. Where irrationality was, there reason shall be. To which Freudian aspiration Adorno would undoubtedly give his blessing.

References

Adorno, Theodor W. 1972a, Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.

71 Habermas 1996, p. 8. 72 Habermas 1996, p. 458.

73 See Marx 1963, p. 227.

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Adorno, Theodor W. 1972b, Aspects of Sociology, translated by John Viertel, Boston: Beacon Press.

Adorno, Theodor W. 1973, Negative Dialectics, translated by E. B. Ashton, New York: Continuum Books.

Adorno, Theodor W. 1974a, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, translated by E.F.N. Jephcott, London: Verso.

Adorno, Theodor W. 1974b, Theorie Esthetique, translated by Marc Jimenez, Paris: Klinksieck.

Adorno, Theodor W. 1993, 'Theory of Pseudo-Culture', translated by Deborah Cook, Telos 95: 15-38.

Alexander, Jeffrey 1991, 'Habermas and Critical Theory: Beyond the Marxian Dilemma?' in Communicative Action: Essays on Jurgen Habermas'ss The Theory of Communicative Action, edited by Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, translated by Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Baynes, Kenneth 1992, The Normative Grounds of Social Criticism: Kant, Rawls, Habermas, Albany: State University of New York Press.

Baynes, Kenneth 1995, 'Democracy and the Rechtsstaat. Habermas's Faktizitiit und Geltung, in The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, edited by Stephen K White, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brunkhorst, Hauke 1992, 'Culture and Bourgeois Society: The Unity of Reason in a Divided Society', in Cultural-Political Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, edited by Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer, translated by Barbara Fultner, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Eagleton, Terry 1991, Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso. Habermas, Jiirgen 1984, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1:

Reason and the Rationalization of Society, translated by Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press.

Habermas, Jiirgen 1987a, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, translated by Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Habermas, Jiirgen 1987b, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol II: Lifoworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, translated by Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press.

Habermas, Jiirgen 1992a, 'Further Reflections on the Public Sphere', translated by Thomas Burger, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Habermas, Jiirgen 1992b, The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of its Voices', in Postmetaphysical Thinking, translated by William Mark Hohengarten, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Habermas, Jiirgen 1996, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Luw and Democracy, translated by William Rehg, Cambridge, MA; MIT Press.

Kant, Immanuel 1929, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith, New York: St. Martin's Press.

Marcuse, Herbert 1941, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, London: Routledge & K.egan Paul, Ltd.

Marx, Kar1 1963, 'Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Righi, in Reader in Marxist Philosophy: From the Writings of Marx, Engels. and Lenin, edited by Howard Selsam and Harry Martel, New York: International Publishers.

Peters, Bernhard 1994, 'On Reconstructive Legal and Political Theory', Philosophyand Social Criticism 20, 4: 101-34.

Schnadelbach, Herbert 1991, 'The Transformation of Critical Theory', in Communicative .!ktion: Essays on Jurgen Habermas's The Theory of Communicative .!ktion, edited by Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, translated by Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones, Cambridge: Polity Press.

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The protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in November and December 1 999 surprised people across the globe.

Massive, militant actions took place in the United States, the stronghold of global capitalism, for the first time in decades. New alliances were built between labor and environmentalists, young and old, radicals and reformers. This special double issue of Monthly Review examines several facets of the movement that has seized the spotlight since Seattle and asks what is required for it to become truly internationalist. Articles cover a range of topics, including globalization; labor's role in the Seattle protests; a historical understanding of internationalism; and voices from the global South calling for unified strategies against capitalism.

Readers familiar with recent protests against international financial institutions and transnational corporations, including the ones against the

International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in April 2000, will find fresh analysis here and those who are new to the issues will discover clear, accessible approaches to some of the burning questions of our time. Written for a wide audience, this special issue of Monthly Review promises to be an invaluable resource for scholars as well as activists.

C O N T E N T S Toward a New Internationalism

by the Editors

Marx and Internationalism

by John Bellamy Foster

The Language of Globalization

by Peter Marcuse

Turtles, Teamsters, and Capital's

Designs by William K. Tabb

"Workers of All Countries, Unite"

by Michael Yates

The Future of the Labor Left

by Khalil Hassan

World Labor Needs Independence

and Solidarity by David Bacon

Strategic Thinking About Movement

Building by Martin Hart-Landsberg

Defunding the Fund, Running on the

Bank by Patrick Bond

Where Was the Color in Seattle?

by Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez

Address to the South Summit

by Fidel Castro

T O O R D E R

1 -4 copies: $10 each / 5-24 copies: $8 each / postage: add $3 for 1 -4 copies, $7 for 5-24 copi

MONTHLY REVIEW/1 22 West 27th Street, 1 0th floorlNew York, NY 1 0001 www.monthlyreview.,orgITolI-Free: 1 .800.670.9499

Marx's Concept of Intrinsic Value

And rew J . Kl iman

This paper aims to show that the concept of intrinsic value - value as distinct from exchange-value - became an increasingly important element of Karl Marx's critique of political economy.! The existence of the distinction is not unknown, but its importance to Marx's work is under-appreciated and the nature of the distinction is often misunderstood.

Section I illustrates that misunderstandings and lack of recognition of Marx's concept of intrinsic value are widespread, and it suggests that they are pardy responsible for the claims that his value theory is logically inconsistent. Section II traces the process by which Marx developed the distinction between value and exchangevalue, which had not been made explicidy in his work through the 1859 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Section III analyses the first section of Capital, showing that where Marx is commonly thought to be advancing a 'labour theory of value', his concern is rather to establish the existence of value as distinct from exchange-value. Section IV discusses the significance of the intrinsic value concept, suggesting that Marx employed it to transform value from a category referring to relations between things to one referring to relations between humans (workers) and things, and that the concept thus helped him unify his value theory, his analysis of capitalist production, and his theory of fetishism.

I. Common misconceptions

Many examples could be adduced to show that the concept of intrinsic value and the distinction between value and exchange-value are often misunderstood. I hope that four will suffice to illustrate the point.

Foley, for one, writes that 'the commodity ... can also be exchanged for other commodities. This characteristic of exchangeability Marx calls value. It is important to understand that Marx views value as a substance contained in definite quantities in

1 I wish to thank Kevin Anderson, Paresh Chattopadhyay, Peter Hudis, Ted McGlone, Patrick Murray, Alejandro Ramos Martinez, Bruce Roberts, and two anonymous referees for their unusually helpful criticisms and suggestions. The usual caveat applies.

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every commodity'.2 Actually, what Marx calls value is not the characteristic of exchangeability, but the common property all commodities possess. Things which (in his terminology) have no value and are thus not commodities, such as land and securities, are also exchangeable.3 It is unclear, moreover, what meaning can be ascribed to the notion that 'the characteristic of exchangeability' is 'contained' in commodities, much less in 'definite quantities'.

Mandel writes that '[m]oney ... is above all a commodity in the value of which all other commodities express their own exchange value' . 4 As a statement of Marx's view, this is rather muddled. Mandel seems to mean that 'money . . . is above all the commodity that is the socially recognised form oj value or exchange-value, in the body of which all other commodities express their own values', which, however, is something rather different.

Where Marx writes in Capital that 'exchange-value [is] the mode of expression, the "form of appearance", of a content distinguishable from it',s ie., value, Meek6 misconstrues this as a statement that the substance of value must be something distinguishable from the commodity, and not that value is distinguishable from exchangevalue? Given that this treatise on the labour theory of value does not recognise any difference between the concept of value as developed in the Critique oj Political Economy, in which value and exchangevalue were not distinguished explicitly, and the corresponding argument in Capital, this is perhaPs not surprising.8

Yet perhaps the most telling sign of the confusion that surrounds the relation between value and exchange-value in Marx's work is Schumpeter's ambivalent and self-contradictory statement that Marx's

theory of value is the Ricardian one ... There is plenty of difference in wording, method of deduction and sociological

2 Foley 1986, p. 13. 3 Marx 1977, p. 131, p. 197. 4 Mandel 1968, p. 242. 5 Marx 1977, p. 127. 6 Meek 1956, p. 160. 7 Taken in isolation, Marx's statement may indeed seem to suggest that the commodity, not value, is the 'content' that appears in the form of exchangevalue, but I do not think this reading makes sense in context. In any case, at a later point in the chapter, Marx clarified that exchange-value is the form of appearance of value itself: a commodity's 'value possesses its own particular form of manifestation . . . This form of manifestation is exchange-value' (Marx 1977, p. 152). These matters will be discussed in more detail below. 8 Meek 1956, p. 158.

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Kliman/Marx's Concept of Intrinsic Value

implication, but there is none in the bare theorem, which alone matters to the theorist of today. It may, however, be open to question whether this is all that mattered to Marx himself. He was under the same delusion as Aristotle, viz., that value, though a factor in the determination of relative prices, is yet different from, and exists independently of, relative prices or exchange relations. The proposition that the value of a commodity is the amount of labour embodied in it can hardly mean anything else. If so, then there is a difference between Ricardo and Marx, since Ricardo's values are simply exchange values or relative prices. It is worth while to mention this because, if we could accept this view of value, much of his theory that seems to us untenable or even meaningless would cease to be so. Of course we cannot.9

In accordance with the Whig interpretation' of the history of economic thought, Schumpeter suggests that 'value' in Marx's work means 'exchange-value', his own 'delusion' to the contrary notwithstanding, because that is what it means to 'the theorist of today' who possesses a truer understanding of the matter. Yet, as Schumpeter himself admits, he consigns himself to judge as 'untenable or even meaningless' much of Marx's theory that 'would cease to be so' were the opposite interpretation adopted.

Many others have also judged much of Marx's work as 'untenable or even meaningless' because they have translated it into 'modern' terms. His account of the transformation of values into production prices and his law of the tendential fall in the profit rate, in particular, have been shown to be self-contradictory if and when the issues and theoretical categories are translated into simultaneous equations.

A necessary element of that translation is precisely the reduction of the concept of value to exchange-value (relative price, ratio of exchange) alone. Bortkiewicz begins his famous critique of Marx by stating that, when referring to

the quantitative incongruity of value and price ... value can have no other meaning than that of a magnitude which indicates how many units of the good serving as a measure of value are obtained in exchange for a commodity .... In this sense, value is merely the index of an exchange relationship and must not be confused with . . . 'absolute value'.10

[emphasis added]

9 Schumpeter 1950, p. 23 and n. 23. 10 Bortkiewicz 1952, p. 5.

9 1


This premise underlies all the reV1SlOns intended to correct or complete Marx's account of the value-production price transformation, from that of Bortkiewicz to the present. Values and prices are conceived as two self-contained and discordant systems of exchange ratios. Marx's account therefore seems logically inconsistent because, although outputs exchange in the proportions that ensure uniform profitability, his account leaves inputs (the value of constant and variable capital advanced) 'in value terms', which is taken to mean that they exchange in proportion to the quantities of labour needed to reproduce them.

Once, however, value is understood as intrinsic value, as a quantum of abstract labour congealed in commodities (or the monetary expression thereof), the value of constant and variable capital advanced is no longer synonymous with the labour-time needed to reproduce the inputs acquired by means of these advances. If one accepts the demonstration in Capital, Volume 1, that exchange cannot alter the total value in existence, then, even though the inputs exchange at prices that differ from their values, the capital advanced for these inputs remains, to use Marx's ubiquitous expression, a sum of value. That he started from the 'value' of constant and variable capital therefore does not imply that he implicitly assumed that inputs exchange at their values.

The Okishio theorem, which purportedly refutes Marx's law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit, also reduces value to exchange-value. Okishio's profit rate is one in which only relative prices matter. Because the denominator of his profit rate is not the sum of value advanced for inputs before production, but their postproduction replacement cost, changes in their absolute prices over the course of the production period are removed. Hence, if prices fall during the period, due to technical change, for instance, Marx's profit rate - the rate of return on the actual capital advanced - can fall, even though Okishio's replacement cost-based rate must rise.

The point is not that the allegations of internal inconsistency can be dismissed merely by recognising that Marx had a concept of intrinsic value that is irreducible to exchange-value. These issues are much more complex than that. Nevertheless, it is partly on the basis of the distinction between value and exchange-value that the 'temporal single-system' interpretation of Marx's value theory has demonstrated that Marx's transformation account and law of the falling profit rate can indeed be understood in a manner that renders them internally consistent.ll

11 See, for examples, the work of Carchedi, de Haan, Freeman, Kliman, and McGlone in Freeman and Carchedi (eds) 1996; Kliman and McGlone 1999.

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II. Development of the value! exchange-value distinction

Classical political economy distinguished between two meanings of value, value in use and value in exchange. The concept of 'real' or 'absolute' value was also present, especially in the work of Ricardo, but it was not distinguished clearly from exchangeable value. Nor did it play a significant role even in Ricardo's thought. In this case, as in most others, Marx at first employed the economic categories as they had been presented by the classicists. Through the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy of 1859, his work did not distinguish between value (or intrinsic value) and exchange-value in any clear fashion. In Marx's writings of the next thirteen years, however, the distinction was increasingly sharpened and made into a focal point of his analysis. This section traces that process.

Rubin was perhaps the first to note in print the conceptual breakthrough contained in Capital's distinction between exchangevalue and value; A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy had made a 'smooth and imperceptible' passage between the two in its opening pages and had used the term 'exchange-value' to cover both concepts.1 Apparendy independendy, Raya Dunayevskaya later recognised the same thing, and suggested that 'as late as the publication of Critique of Political Economy in 1859, [Marx] still used exchange-value in the sense of [a synonym for] value and not in the sense of value-form. He still was "taking for granted" that "everyone knows" that production relations are really involved in the exchange of things'. 13

Dunayevskaya's textual analysis locates this change as part of a more general shift in emphasis on Marx's part. He had at first stressed the fantastical form of appearance of production relations under capitalism. Yet increasingly - and especially with the 1872 second German edition and the 1872-1875 French edition of Capital - written after his experience with the 'free and associated labour' of the Paris Commune - he came to emphasise the 'perverted' nature of capitalist production relations as what makes the fantastical appearance necessary.14

12 Rubin 1973, p. 107. 13 Dunayevskaya 1988, p. 100. 14 In the Civil War in France, Marx wrote that the Communards wanted to 'transform [ . . . ] the means of production, land and capital . . . into instruments of free and associated labour' (Marx 1968a, p. 61). In Chapter 1 of Capital I, he envisioned a society in which production 'becomes production by freely associated [persons (Menschen)], and stands under their conscious and planned control' (Marx 1977, p. 173).

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A formative element in Marx's change in emphasis was his reading of Samuel Bailey's Critical Dissertation. Rubin argues persuasively that Bailey, who had argued that a thing's value is merely the amount of another thing for which it is exchanged, was the 'opponent' Marx had in mind when he distinguished value from exchange-value in Capital. IS

The Critique oj Political Economy was published in June 1859. Only later in that year did Marx first excerpt the Critical Dissertation.16 His Economic Notebook of 1861-1863 contains an extended discussion of Bailey's work (and that of the anonymous author of Observations on Certain Verbal Disputes in Political Economy).

In these forty-plus pages, Marx for the first time begins to work out an argument that would later appear in different form in the opening pages of Capital. He endeavours to show that, since two commodities that exchange are qualitatively equal, they share a common property, and that what is meant by value is precisely this common property, substance, or 'third thing' that they both contain, not the one commodity or the other.17 A commodity's value thus 'belongs to' it, so to speak, rather than 'belonging to' the other commodity for which it exchanges. Hence, rather than establishing commodities' values, as Bailey had argued, the act of exchange only expresses the value that commodities have prior to and independent of this act. 18

This complex 'of issues will be discussed in greater detail in the next section, which deals with Capitafs opening pages. Here, I would like to focus on two other dimensions of Marx's critique, both of which concern Ricardo's distinction between 'absolute' and 'relative' value. Earlier in the 1861-1863 Notebook, Marx argued that Ricardo had not defined this difference clearly and had not held to it consistently, and that Bailey, in claiming that the Ricardian concept

15 Rubin 1973, p. 108. 16 Draper 1985, p. 99 and 1986, p. 11. 17 A superficially similar argument in his 1857-8 Grundrisse (Marx 1973, p. 141-3) attempts to distinguish a commodity's value from its physical existence, in order to explain the necessity of money, not to identify value itself as a common property of commodities. 18 In Capital, Marx argued that commodities' prices as well as their values are determined before they enter circulation. The quantity theory of money 'had its roots in the absurd hypothesis . . . that commodities enter into the process of circulation without a price, and money enters without a value' (Marx 1977, p. 220). 'The value of a commodity is expressed in its price before it enters into circulation, and is therefore a pre-condition of circulation, not its result' (Marx 1977, p. 260).

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of value was contradictory, had exploited these problems.19

Moreover, Marx believed that Ricardo's distinction was itself imprecise, and that this problem was the basis of Bailey's (incorrect) charge that the Ricardians had absolutised value, hypostatising it into an entity instead of a relation.

Thus, Marx argued that value is not absolute, but relative in two different senses, the latter of which Ricardo had called absolute: 'all commodities, in so far as they are exchange values, are only relative expressions of social labour-time and their relativity consists by no means solely of the ratio in which they exchange for one another, but of the ratio of them all to this social labour which is their substance,.20

This point is not only a 'technical' one. It enables Marx to criticise the fetishisation of things he detects in the concept of value held by Bailey and the author of the Observations. When he makes (apparently for the first time) the famous value-as-'third thing' argument ('To estimate the value of A in B, A must have a value independent of that value in B, and both must be equal to a third thing expressed in both of them'), Marx immediately cautions that

It is quite wrong to say that the value of a commodity is thereby transformed from something relative into something absolute. On the contrary, as a use-value, the commodity appears as something independent. On the other hand, as value it appears as something merely contingent, something merely determined b(' its relation to socially necessary, equal, simple labour-time.2

He thus turns the tables on his opponents, charging them with absolutising value. The author of the Observations 'transforms value into something absolute

, "a prop�rty of things", instead of seeing in

it only something relative,.22 (As I will discuss presently, Marx agrees that value is a property of commodities, but argues that this is not due to their existence as things). Similarly, 'Bailey is a fetishist in that he conceives value . . . as a relation of objects to one another, while it is only a representation in objects, an objective expression, of a relation between men, a social relation, the relationship of men to their reciprocal productive activity'.23

19 Marx 1968b, p. 170-2. 20 Marx 1968b, p. 172; see Marx 1971, pp.132-3. 21 Marx 1971, pp. 128-9. 22 Marx 1971, p. 130. 23 Marx 1971, p. 147.

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Marx is here criticising these authors not only for their failure to recognise that value is determined by labour-time. In claiming that they absolutise and fetishise value, he is criticising the notions that value is a transhistorical, immutable reality and that production aimed at expanding value (the capitalist mode of production) is an 'absolute' form of social production.

These criticisms appear prominendy in the section on the fetishism of the commodity in the first chapter of Capital, Volume 1, which culminates with a critique of Bailey and the author of the Observations. They are prefigured here in the Notebook. Arguing that '[a]s values, commodities are social magnitudes, that is to say, something absolutely different from their "properties" as "things"', Marx states that '[w]here labour is communal, the relations of men in their social production do not manifest themselves as "values" of "things,,,.24 And noting the variable relation between the amount of commodities and the amount of labour needed to produce them (the second sense of relative value), Marx suggests that because Ricardo

argues that social wealth does not depend on the value of the commodities produced ... [i]t should have been all the more clear to him that a mode of production whose exclusive aim is surplus-value, in other words, which is based on the relative poverty of the mass of the producers, cannot possibly be the absolute form of the production of wealth. 25

It is noteworthy that such considerations come in the midst of, and are tightly linked to, what is perhaps Marx's most technical discussion of value. The analytical distinctions Marx makes here are ones that will help enable him to forge a unity among value theory, the process of production, and the theory of fetishism.

His identification of a second meaning of relative value - the relativity or variability of a commodity's value in terms of labourtime - is also closely related to his developing emphasis on the temporal character of value. He stresses this in opposition to Bailey's argument that '[v]alue is a relation between contemporary commodities,.26 Since, in Bailey's view, the concept of an intrinsic value distinct from exchange-value is otiose, he concludes that a commodity's 'own' value cannot be said to rise or fall. One commodity simply exchanges for more or less of another at different times, and it is futile and meaningless to attribute their changed relationship to a change 'within' either.

24 Marx 1971, p. 129. 25 Marx 1971, p. 126. 26 Cited in Marx 1971, p. 154.

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By means of the 'third thing' argument developed in these pages, Marx holds fast to the concept of intrinsic value. Having rejected Bailey's premise, he rejects Bailey's conclusion as well. Values at different times can certainly be compared, and Bailey is a 'fool' to think otherwise: 'Is it not a fact that, in the process of circulation or the process of reproduction of capital, the value of one period is constandy compared with that of another period, an operation upon which production itself is based?'.27 Indeed, Marx now situates the whole process of circulation of capital (M-C-M') within the context of an historically variable intrinsic value, 'value-in-process' or 'dynamic value':

The relation between the value antecedent to production and the value which results from it - capital as antecedent value is capital in contrast to profit - constitutes the allembracing and decisive factor in the whole process of capitalist production. It is not only an independent expression of value, as in money, but dynamic value, value which maintains itself in a process in which use-values pass through the most varied forms. Thus in capital the independent existence of value is raised to a higher power than in money.28

Two important points are made here. First, the very existence of profit demonstrates that values are indeed comparable over time, since the concept of profit is such a comparison. (The same could be said with reference to credit). Second, the dynamics of capitalism as a value-producing system can only be understood once value is conceived as something independent of exchange-value, something that 'maintains itself' or persists through the production' process.

This conception of value as something inter-temporal will figure prominendy in Chapter 4 of Capital Volume 1, where Marx also calls it 'value ... as a self-moving substance,29 and, as endowed with an aim, 'Verwertung' (value self-expansion).30 In Volume 2, moreover, in a passage in which Marx will again criticise Bailey for denying the inter-temporal comparability of values, the same concept reappears as the 'Verselbststandigung' (autonomisation) of value.31 Here, Marx is concerned not only with the self-expansion of value, but especially with its interruption - economic crisis. Technological advance leads to 'revolutions in value', which in turn cause already

27 Marx 1971, p. 154. 28 Marx 1971, p. 13l. 29 Marx 1977, p. 256. 30 Marx 1977, p, 252. 31 Marx 1981a, pp. 185-6.

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existing sums of value advanced as capital to be destroyed. Value thus becomes an autonomous power:

If the social capital value suffers a revolution in value, it can come about that [a capitalist's] individual capital succumbs to this and is destroyed, because it cannot meet the conditions of this movement of value ... These periodic revolutions in value thus confirm what they ostensibly refute: the independence which value acquires as capital, and which is maintained and intensified through its movement.32

Thus, whereas Bailey had pointed to the variability of commodities' values as evidence that the concept of value as something distinct from a momentary exchange-ratio is a mirage, Marx argues that this variability implies the very opposite. The expansion and destruction of capital is the expansion and destruction of value. Because he had conflated value and exchange�value, Bailey was unable to recognise that value exists outside the process of exchange,33 but the independent, abiding existence of value is no 'mere abstraction ... the movement of industrial capital is this abstraction in action,.34

Another moment of development of the value/exchange-value distinction occurs with Marx's revision of Volume 1 of Capital for the French and second German editions.3sI will examine the revised text below, but I wish to note here a few of the ways in which the opening section of the 1867 edition differs from the Capital we know. First, the discussion of the value character of the commodity -from the initial mention of exchange-value to · the statement that commodities are crystallised labour - is about 1/3 shorter in the 1867 edition. One reason is that the distinction between abstract and concrete labour is made only later in the text, not when Marx is deriving abstract labour as the substance of value.

Second, the passage in the revised editions in which Marx elucidates that 'exchange-value cannot be anything other than the mode of expression, the "form of appearance", of a content distinguishable from it', does not appear in the 1867 edition.36 At a later point in the text, when investigating what commodities have in common, he does write that 'commodities are first of all simply to be

32 Marx 1981a, p. 185. 33 Marx 1981a, p. 186. 34 Marx 1981a, p. 185. 35 The French edition was published serially, and revisions to the later parts were made as late as 1875. The first chapter, however, was revised in 1872, at about the same time as the revisions to the German edition were made. 36 Marx 1977, p. 127.

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considered as values, independent of their exchange-relationship or from the form, in which they appear as exchange-values.37 This formulation seems to distinguish less sharply between the content and the form of value. It is, moreover, stated as a premise of an argument, and thus lacks the force of a conclusion that exchangevalue is something different from value.

Third, in the 1867 edition, Marx writes that the wheat's 'exchange-value remains unchanged regardless of whether it is expressed in x bootblacking, y soap, z gold, etc. It must therefore be distinguishable from these, its various manners of expression,.38 Yet these 'manners of expression' are the wheat's exchange-values; what actually 'remains unchanged' is a common element which these commodities all express. The surrounding text clarifies that this was what Marx meant, but later editions, perhaps in the interest of greater precision, do not suggest that exchange-value is the common element. This and other revisions, as well as the expansion of this part of the text, serve as indications that he was not satisfied with the presentation in the first edition.

III. Capital's analysis of the commodity

In this section, I will argue that the primary purpose of Marx's analysis at the beginning of Capital was to establish a clear distinction between value and exchange-value, to break from the conception of value as a ratio in exchange. This interpretation differs sharply from the common view that in the opening pages he was instead advancing a 'labour theory of value' (ie., a theory that exchange ratios are governed by relative quantities of labour), at least as a 'first approximation' to reality.39

In response to Adolph Wagner's critique, Marx emphasised that 'neither "value", nor "exchange-value" are my subjects, but the commodity .. . What I start out from is the simplest social form in which the labour-product is presented in contemporary society, and this is the "commodity",.40 My thesis, that the distinction between value and exchange-value is the focal point of his initial analysis, may seem to contradict this point. Actually, however, it reinforces Marx's

37 Marx 1972, p. 8. 38 Marx 1972, p. 7. 39 Marx surely did hold that value is determined by labour-time, but I question the view that he attempted to explain relative prices on the basis of labour-time. In any case, my argument here is that the opening section makes no such attempt. 40 Marx 1975, p. 183 and p. 198.

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point, since his analysis discloses that value, unlike exchange-value, is an intrinsic property of the commodity itself. Moreover, a major reason commentators have read a labour theory of exchange ratios into the chapter is that they seem to have misconstrued the object of analysis, taking it to be exchange and the determination of exchange ratios. Thus, to establish my contrary thesis, I will frequendy have reason to emphasise that Marx's object of analysis is the commodity itself.

Marx does, of course, examine the 'exchange relation', the expression of one commodity's equality with another.41 But, as we shall see, he does so in order to establish that value is intrinsic to the commodity. It is only in the second chapter, entided 'The Process of Exchange', that Marx begins to investigate the act of exchange; the tide of Chapter 1 is 'The Commodity'.

Although the tide of the first section makes clear that the two 'factors' of the commodity are use-value and value, Marx first states that commodities are use-values and 'material bearers' of exchangevalue.42 Rather than this indicating that value and exchange-value are the same for him, Marx is simply adopting the standpoint of the economists, but only provisionally. As he writes later in the chapter (in a passage that was not part of the first edition):

When 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 'value'. It appears as the twofold thing it really is as soon as its value possesses its own particular form of manifestation ... This 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.43

I

Marx thus begins from the 'form of manifestation' as part of an analytical strategy meant to enable the reader to see 'beyond' the exchange relation of commodities, to focus on the commodity itself, in isolation. Indeed, he moves immediately to distinguish the content, value, from its form of manifestation. Because exchangevalue 'appears' as the ratio in which one thing exchanges for another, and because this ratio is constandy changing, 'exchange-value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and

41 Marx 1977, p. 127. 42 Marx 1977, pp. 125-6. 43 Marx 1977, p. 152 (emphasis added).

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Kilman/Marx's Concept of Intrinsic Value

consequently an intrinsic value, ie. an exchange-value that is inseparably connected with the commodity, inherent in it, seems a contradiction in terms. Let us consider the matter more closely'.44

The 'matter' Marx wishes to consider is not whether the quantitative exchange ratio is accidental or determinate. Instead, it is whether value is an accidental phenomenon - one that arises only contingently, in and through the act of exchange, a phenomenon that is nothing other than this relation between the things, 'something ... purely relative'. Or is the opposite possible - that value is intrinsic, 'inherent in' the commodity itself?

Thus, it is in order to demonstrate that value is indeed inherent in the commodity that Marx turns to the exchange relation; the subject-matter is not exchange, but the commodity. He notes that, because the commodity (a quarter of wheat) is exchanged for a variety of other things 'in the most diverse proportions', it 'has many exchange values instead of one,.45 Its exchange-values are the other things for which it exchanges; if 5 tins of boot polish, 10 yards of silk, or 1/35 ounce of gold, etc. are exchanged for a quarter of wheat, the latter's eXchange-values are the 5 tins of boot polish, the 10 yards of silk, or the 1/35 ounce of gold. Marx is showing that, when value is taken to be exchange-value or relative price, value is not a 'property' of the commodity at all, but is another commodity, the physical body of the other commodity, itsel£

Yet, although the various exchange-values of wheat are physically different, each is equally 'the' exchange-value of the quarter of wheat. As exchange-values, they must be 'of equal magnitude' and, therefore, they 'express something equal,.46 They are all, in other

44 Marx 1977, p. 126. 45 Marx 1977, p. 127. 46 Marx 1977, p. 127. It seems to me that this conclusion follows necessarily once one grants Marx's initial premise. He states not only that the quarter of wheat 'is exchanged for other commodities,' but that the wheat itself 'has' an 'exchange'-value (or is a 'material bearer' of exchange-value). Given this premise, he succeeds in showing that the wheat in fact 'has many exchange values instead of one', that each of these exchange-values is an interchangeable expression of the same thing, the wheat's 'exchange'-value, and that they thus 'express something equal'. Any challenge to this conclusion must therefore challenge the initial premise. One must argue that, although the wheat exchanges for other commodities, it does not (in any other sense) 'have' an exchange-value.

Such a situation is certainly possible. Indeed, I believe it obtains whenever exchanges are merely contingent, ephemeral events. Yet Marx was here considering capitalist society. In this society, it is a fact that - even apart from and prior to any exchange of our wheat - we think and say that it 'has a value (or price) of ', 'is worth', so much money. Moreover, we act on this

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words, 'equally' the expression of something else.47 Marx thus concludes: 'exchange-value cannot be anything other than the mode of expression, the "form of appearance"; of a content distinguishable from it'.48 (It is only on the next page that this content is finally denoted as 'value'). He is not concerned here with causality or magnitude, but is drawing out the relationship between, and the distinction between, the form and the content of this equality.49

The next paragraph seems to derive the same result by looking at just two commodities exchanging with one another. This apparent repetition can be understood in light of the subsequent development of exchange-value in the third section of the chapter. As we have seen, Marx is seeking to dispel the semblance that exchange-value is accidental. This semblance arises when the exchange relation is considered as the exchange of two commodities alone. In Section 3, Marx will call this the 'accidental form' of value.50 To dispel the semblance, Marx takes up this form of value here, in Capitals opening pages, only after first having taken up what he will later call the 'total or expanded form' of value.51 The point is that, once the equal content of each of a series of commodities is established, the

basis. We compute 'the value of ' our assets and our 'net worth', we decide to buy items if they 'are worth' more than the sticker price, etc., and we do so before we exchange and whether or not we exchange.

Yet one may object that, even though Marx's premise that commodities 'have' exchange-values is our own premise as well, it is 'false' nonetheless. In one sense, this is correct (and his theory of the fetishism of the commodity makes precisely the same point). But Marx was analysing our social relations - how we act, speak, and think under capitalism. In this context, the premise is simply a fact, so the challenge fails.

The foregoing has argued that Marx could not successfully have derived the equivalence of commodities to one another from the mere phenomenon of exchange, and that he instead derived it from a particular fact about capitalism - commodities 'have' exchange-value. If this argument is correct, it lends additional support to the view that Chapter 1 of Capital analysed specifically capitalist relations, the 'wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails' (Marx 1977, p. 125), and not (as many authors have traditionally contended) a pre- or non-capitalist exchange society. 47 The equality is thus a qualitative one. The various commodities would still all 'express something equaf were they to exchange for seven or nine bushels of wheat instead of a quarter (eight bushels). 48 Marx 1977, p. 127. 49 See Marx 1975, p. 198: '"commoditY' is, on the one hand, use-value, and on the other hand, "value", not exchange-value, since the mere form of appearance is not its proper content. 50 Marx 1977, p. 139. 51 Marx 1977, p. 154.

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equal content of two commodities can then be recognised more easily.

Beginning with the total form of value also dispels the opposite illusion, an illusion which appears most strikingly in the 'money form,52 of value - namely, that the second commodity, with which the first exchanges, is value itself, is 'endowed with the form of value by nature itself,53 and that the first is therefore valuable by virtue of its exchange with the second. Thus, an examination of the total form helps demonstrate both that there is an identical content to each commodity, and that this content is distinct from any of the commodities themselves.

Having first established this content, common to, but distinguishable from, all commodities, Marx can then turn back to the relation of two commodities and draw the conclusion that 'a common element of identical magnitude exists in two different things ... Both are therefore equal to a third thing, which in itself is neither the one or the other,.54

This 'third thing' argument has frequently been misunderstood. Marx is not asking what allows commodities (much less use-values as such) to exchange, as Bohm-Bawerk believed. Calling Marx's conclusion an 'assumption,' Bohm-Bawerk argued that exchange, 'change of ownership,' involves 'inequality' rather than equality -evidently because each owner wants the other commodity. 55

Ironically, when Marx does finally turn to the process of exchange in Chapter 2, he states the same thing.56

Again, however, Marx's object of investigation in Chapter 1 is not exchange, but the nature of the commodity itsel£ He is not asking why the commodities are exchanged (instead of being hoarded or consumed), or what about them enables them to be exchanged - he argues later in the text that products at first 'bec[a]me exchangeable through the mutual desire of their owners to alienate them,.57 Instead, Marx is asking as 'What do the commodities exchange. 58

52 Marx 1977, p. 162. 53 Marx 1977, p. 149. 54 Marx 1977, p. 127. 55 Bohm-Bawerk 1984, pp. 68-9. 56 'All commodities are non-use-vaiues for their owners, and use-values for their non-owners. Consequendy, they must all change hands' (Marx 1997, p. 179). 57 Marx 1977, p. 182. 58 See Marx 1971, p. 144: 'what is this unity of objects exchanged against each other? ... As what do they become exchangeable?'

1 03


Put differendy, he derives the existence of intrinsic value from a postulated exchange of equivalents, not the converse. In the previous paragraph, he proceeded from the equal magnitudes of the exchange-values to derive a content common to them all. Similarly, he here proceeds from the exchange of two equivalent commodities to derive their equality to a third thing: if'l quarter of corn = x cwt of iron',59 then a common element of 'identical magnitude' exists in each. 'If A, then B' does not imply 'ifB, then .A:.

Moreover, Marx is still dealing with form and content. The causal determination and magnitude of the exchange ratio are not at issue here. Bohm-Bawerk, among many others, apparendy believed the opposite, when he objected that chemical elements do not unite 'because they possess an exacdy equal degree of chemical affinity,.60

Yet had Marx wished to state, either as 'theory' or as 'first approximation', that one qUllrter of corn exchanges for x cwt of iron because in that precise ratio the two are of equal value, he was capable of doing so in clear and unambiguous terms.61 Again, however, the 'third thing' argument answers a very different question - as what do commodities exchange?

To understand Marx's subsequent argument, it is crucial to recognise that he has now indeed established that commodities exchange as bearers of an intrinsic value, a 'third thing', present in each. He now turns to a different question: 'what is this third thing?'. It is also crucial to recognise that, since the common element has b h , · · ,62 h d' h h ' r een s own to eXist m eac commo lty, t e searc is LOr a 'property'63 of the commodity itself. Marx thus discontinues the examination of the exchange relation, which he pursued precisely in order to establish that this third thing exists, and returns to an investigation of the commodity.

It seems that failure to understand these points has led many critics to charge that Marx asserts, rather than proves, what the common element is, or that his proof is faulty, since some possible candidates - eg., utility, scarcity, the commodities' existence as

59 Marx 1977, p. 127. 60 Bohm-Bawerk 1984, p. 69. 61 Contrast the 'third thing' argument with the passage at the end of Chapter 5 (pp. 268-9 and n. 269), in which Marx first does state - but onlr as an assumption - that equal values exchange: 'The money owner ... must buy his commodities at their value, sell them at their value .... If prices actually differ from values, we must first reduce the former to the latter, ie. disregard this situation as an accidental one'. 62 Marx 1977, p. 127. 63 Marx 1977, pp. 127-8.

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appropriated things64 - are not considered. It is quite true that the things could not exchange as commodities unless they were scarce, owned, and useful. But none of these is a property of the things themselves; all are relations between the things and people. (Although the usefulness of things is dependent on their physical properties, usefulness itself is not such a property.) The basis of the criticisms is a misconception of the object under investigation at this point.

This does not mean that Marx proved that the common element is (abstract) labour. First, he does not even state that it is, despite a popular belief to the contrary.65 Marx actually writes: 'only one property remains, that of being products of labour' (emphasis added).66 Here again, the error results from inattention to the fact that the commodity, not exchange or what regulates exchange, is the object of analysis. Second, once one recognises that the object of analysis is the commodity itself, and that what Marx means by 'commodity' is (a) a useful thing that is also (b) the product of labour,67 there is no need for proof. Once all physical properties of the commodity that make it useful are rejected as the common property - they are qualitative properties, but the exchange relation, as a quantitative relation, abstracts from the qualities of commodities68 - it is then self-evident that 'only one property remains, that of being products oflabour,.69

What is not self-evident, what no one before Marx had identified, is the dual character of this labour.70 The commodities are different not only as useful, concrete things, but (for the same reason) also as the products of the different sorts of useful, concrete labouring activities. Onl� as products of 'human labour in the abstract' are they the same. 1

Viewing commodities from the standpoint of what they have in common, then, what remains, according to Marx, is only a

64 Bohm-Bawerk 1984, pp. 74-5. 65 Bohm-Bawerk 1984, p. 77: 'labour is shown to be the sought-for common factor'; Kay 1979, p. 51: 'Marx's argument is ... that in exchange, labour is the common property that regulates the terms of trade'. 66 Marx 1977, p. 128. 67 Bohm-Bawerk 1984, p. 71, was perhaps justified in complaining that Marx had omitted to mention this from the start. Yet Marx was following Ricardo's 1982, p. 12, well known delimitation of the term 'commodity'. 68 Marx 1977, pp. 127-8. 69 Marx 1977, p. 128. 70 '[I]n so far as it finds its expression in value, it [labour] no longer possesses the same charactetistics as when it is the creator of use-values. I was the first to point out and examine critically this twofold nature of the labour contained in commodities' (Marx 1977, p. 132). 71 Marx 1977, p. 128.

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'residue,.72 Nothing physical, concrete, or useful - about them or the labour that produces them - is left. All that is left is a mere abstraction, a 'phantom-like objectivity; they are merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour ... As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values -commodity values' .73

IV. Significance of the concept of intrinsic value

The foregoing discussion has suggested that Capital arrives at the concept of intrinsic value through an analysis of the nature of the commodity itsel£ To appreciate the significance of the intrinsic value concept, moreover, I believe it is helpful to understand why Marx was concerned to analyse the nature of the commodity. I will first consider his investigation's object, the commodity, then its method, analysis, and finally I will relate this discussion to his distinction between value and exchange-value.

Object of Investigation Whether 'value' in Marx's work is labour, or is only determined by labour, has long been the subject of debate.74 I believe that both are correct. Later in Chapter One, Marx clarifies his view: 'Human labour-power in its fluid state, or human labour, creates value, but is not itself value. It becomes value in its coagulated state, in objective form,.75 Hence, living labour creates value, is the '"value-forming substance"',16 while the commodity considered as the container of this labour in objective form, dead labour, i.s value.77 The direct identification of labour and value, and the separation of labour and value, thus arise from the same failure, the failure to recognise that in Marx's thought, the worker's labour undergoes a transformation in the production process: it is alienated from her and takes on an autonomous existence in the product as value?8 The seemingly trivial

72 Marx 1977, p. 128. 73 Marx 1977, p. 128. 74 See, for example, Rubin 1973, p. lllff. 75 Marx 1977, p. 142. 76 Marx 1977, p. 129. 77 Elson 1979, p. 132-3, has also recognised this point. 78 See Marx 1964, p. 122-3: The worker puts his life into the object, and his life then belongs no longer to himself but to the object ... The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, assumes an external existence, but that it exists independendy, outside himse!f, and alien to him, and that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power.

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use-value turns out to be also a value, 'the resume' of the alienation of the workers from their activity.79 It is this alienated relationship that enables the activity, labour, to be separable from the producers -rather than a concrete mode of self-expression - and to become an autonomous, abstract 'property' of the object itsel£80

Hence, when Marx argues that the abstract labour which workers perform is embodied in the commodity as value, he is not merely enveloping the obvious fact that labour is bestowed (to use Ricardo's expression) on commodities in 'a lot of Hegelian stuff and nonsense', as Joan Robinson suggested.81 Marx viewed the embodiment of labour as value not as a transhistorical, technological reality, but as an alienated and fetishistic relation between subject and object: 'it is only a historically specific epoch of development which presents the labour expended in the production of a useful article as an "objective" property of that article, i.e. as its value. It is only then that the product of labour becomes transformed into a commodity'. 82

The significance that Marx ascribed to this transformation of the product of labour into a commodity seems to be little appreciated. This lack of appreciation seems to be one source of the misconceptions concerning the argument in the opening pages of Capital. As the analysis of Marx's text in the last section argued at several points, the reason many commentators interpret it as an attempt to establish a labour theory of exchange ratios, view the object of analysis as exchange, or construe the argument as a quantitative one is that it does not occur to them that his overriding concern was to investigate the nature of the commodity itsel£

Method of Investigation One reason it does not occur to many of them is undoubtedly that the empiricist tradition judges inquiry into the nature of things (what they are, rather than how they behave) to be outside the bounds of responsible science.83 For instance, whereas Aristotelians held that objects fall due to a quality they possess, weight, physical scientists

The life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile fOrce'. 79 Marx 1964, p. 124. 80 See Marx 1964, p. 124: 'How could the worker stand in an alien relationship to the product of his activity if he did not alienate himself in the act of production itself? The product is indeed only the resume of activity, of �roduction'. 1 Robinson 1953, p. 20.

82 Marx 1977, pp. 153-4. 83 I thank Patrick Murray for bringing this to my attention.

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since Galileo have repudiated this kind of explanation, and instead seek only to describe the manner in which the objects fall.84

Yet, a more specific reason may also be at work in this case, namely that the commodity is accepted as it 'appears at fIrst sight[,] an extremely obvious, trivial thing,.85 Interpreters 'make the mistake of treating it as [an] eternal natural form [and therefore] necessarily overlook [its] specificity,.86 The commodity itself, in other words, is not recognised as being a value in addition to a use-value, an artefact which exists only in a specifIc kind of society. The historical specifIcity of value is thus displaced to the sphere of market exchange.

To accept the data of immediate experience is to accept the givenness of reality. Of course, one can fInd out what the facts are, how they interrelate, determine the conditions that enable them to exist (ie., 'explain' them by other facts), etc. Yet if we 'take what is given just as it is, . . , we have no right to ask whether and to what extent it is rational in its own nature,.87 The object is primary and thought must conform to it; its self-conformity, undivided simplicity, is unquestioned.88 It is the fIrm ground upon which all else must stand. Thus, for Bohm-Bawerk

, 'the great radical fault of the

Marxian system [from which] all the rest necessarily springs' is that 'Marx has not deduced from facts the fundamental principles of his system, either by means of a sound empiricism or a solid economicopsychological analysis; he founds it on no fIrmer ground than a formal dialectic,.89

Although Marx's analysis of the nature of the commodity certainly does not meet Bohm-Bawerk's requirements, neither is it the empty formalism, the 'a priori construction', that Bohm-Bawerk thought it was.90 Marx distinguished his approach from that of Adolph Wagner, who would have had

use-value and exchange-value ... derived at once from the concept of value, not as with me, from a concretum, the commodity . . . What I start out from is the simplest social form in which the labour-product is presented in

84 See, for example, Kline 1967, pp. 287-8. 85 Marx 1977, p. 163. 86 Marx, 1977, p. 174. 87 Hegel, 1975, p. 64. 88 Hegel, 1975, pp. 40-1. 89 Bohm-Bawerk 1984, p. 101. 90 Marx 1977, p. 102.

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Kilman/Marx's Concept of Intrinsic Value

contemporary society, and this is the 'commodity'. I analyse it . . . 91 [emphasis omitted] .

Thus, rather than constructing a self-contained system of concepts in a priori fashion, he instead analysed the concrete internal make-up of capitalist society by analysing its 'elementary form,.92 That is, Marx described immediate reality, although without accepting the simple way it 'appears at first sight' as the whole truth of it.93 That which is concrete is a unity of diverse elements.94 Analysis, ie. separation, is the means by which this diversity is grasped. By analysing the commodity as a unity of opposites instead of accepting its givenness, Marx was thus laying the foundation for his subsequent analysis of capitalism's contradictions; in his view, the ground of fact to which Bohm-Bawerk would later refer was anything but firm. As Dunayevskaya has argued, '[t]here is nothing simple about a commodity . . . [T]he commodity, from the start of capitalism, is a reflection of the dual character of labour. It is, from the start, a unity of opposites - use-value and value - which, in embryo, contains all the contradictions of capitalism,.9s

Value vs. Exchange-Value The classical economists had distinguished between use-value and exchange-value, the natural and the social aspects of capitalist wealth. Yet, given this distinction, Marx asked, why do the natural constituents of this wealth nevertheless appear to be social by their

' h . 'al ch d thi , 96 very nature, at t e same ttme SOCl aracters an mere ngs .

In the form in which it appears in exchange, value is clearly a social relationship. Exchange is a social activity, and one of the things exchanged, money, is the socially recognised form of value. Nonetheless, it is equally an object-object relationship, a relation between commodities as things. The exchange-value of 20 yards of linen is a specific quantity of another thing (eg., 1 coat, 1/35 ounce

91 Marx 1975, p. 189 and p. 198. 92 Marx 1977, p. 125. 93 Marx 1977, p. 163. 94 Marx appropriated this conception of the concrete from Hegel. Referring to the 'concrete totality', for instance, Hegel 1989, p. 830, wrote that '[a]s concrete, it is differentiated within itself '. In his Introduction to the Grundrisse, Marx 1973, p. 101, argued that '[t]he concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse'. 9S Dunayevskaya 1988, p. 99 (emphasis added). 96 Marx 1981b, p. 969.

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of gold, etc.). Thus we have, in Marx's famous phrase, 'social I · b thi , 97 re atlOns etween ngs .

At first, these relations seem accidental, not really relations between the things themselves, but something dependent on the whims of the exchangers and established ephemerally by them.98 Yet, the exchange relation is actually a stable one. The one thing is related to the totality of all others even apart from the act of exchange99 - it expresses itself as the same as all the rest even though it cannot be exchanged for all of them at once. It is now seen that the objectobject relation is independent of the exchangers; the things are 'autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations with each other,.100

Yet from what, Marx asked, does this 'fetishism of the world of commodities' arise?lOl In large part, his answer is already given in the opening pages of the work. He 'gets behind' the closed world of object-object relations by abstracting the individual object from its relation to other objects, and a 'third thing' emerges to the fore: every commodity is a product of labour. Thus, he contends, analysis of the commodity shows that the things enter into social relations with one another, not because they have a natural ability to do so, but because they relate as 'containers' of a third thing.

Hence, as values, the commodities relate to one another as products of labour, not as mere things. This simple fact involves a radical change in perspective. 'Behind' the relationship of the products to one another is the relationship of the individual product to its producer. The inquiry into value has thus shifted from one that refers to an object-object relation to one that refers to a subjectobject relation.

In Marx's view, this subject-object relation is an alienated one. It is because the worker is alienated from the labour she expends in producing the commodity that this labour can take on an autonomous existence 'as an "objective" property of that article, i.e. as its value,.102 Thus, the concept of value as 'intrinsic' to the commodity expresses an historically specific production relationship. It is for this reason that Marx repudiated Ricardo's notion of 'absolute value' and insisted, instead, that value itself is relative, a relation.

97 Marx 1977, p. 166. 98 Marx 1977, p. 126. 99 Marx 1977, p. 127. 100 Marx 1977, p. 165. 101 Marx 1977, p. 126. 102 Marx 1977, pp. 153-4.

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Of course, Ricardo and others also had a 'labour theory of value'. Yet they conceived of the relationship between labour and value as merely a causal one, and therefore an external one. The ratio in which two things exchange was reduced to the relative quantities of labour needed to produce them. To the extent that Ricardo employed a concept of , real' or 'absolute' value, not only did he fail to distinguish it clearly from exchange-value, but he employed it only to trace the cause of the change in the exchange ratio. His question was, which commodity's value has changed and therefore caused the exchange ratio to change? The subject matter remained, always, the relations among the commodities themselves. Conversely, by clearly distinguishing between value and exchange-value, Marx in effect created a category that expressed an internal relation between labour and value, worker to product.

If one regards the labour process as transhistorical, a technical reality left more or less unaltered when it takes on a capitalistic form, this may not seem to be much of an achievement. If, however, one regards capitalist production as Marx did, as 'the rule of things over man, of dead labour over the living, of the product over the froducer ... the inversion of subject into object and vice versa',l0 then a concept that expresses the specificity of this relationship -'value, i.e., the past labour that dominates living labour,104 - takes on much greater meaning.

References

Bohm-Bawerk, Eugen von 1984, Karl Marx and the Close oj His System, Philadelphia: Orion Editions.

Bortkiewicz, Ludwig von 1952, 'Value and Price in the Marxian System', International Economic Papers, 2: 5-60.

Draper, Hal 1985, The Marx-Engels Chronicle; Volume I oj The MarxEngels Cyclopedia, New York: Schocken Books.

Draper, Hal 1986, The Marx-Engels Glossary; Volume III oj The Marx-Engels Cyclopedia, New York: Schocken Books.

Dunayevskaya, Raya 1988, Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 until today, 5th ed., New York: Columbia University Press.

Elson, Diane 1979, 'The Value Theory of Labour', in Value: The Representation oj Labour in Capitalism, edited by Diane Elson, London: CSE Books.

103 Marx 1977, p. 990. 104 Marx, 1981b, p. 136.

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Foley, Duncan K. 1986, Understanding 'Capital': Marx's Economic Theory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Freeman, Alan and Guglielmo Carchedi (eds.) 1996, Marx and Nonequilibrium Economics, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Hegel, Georg W.F. 1975, Hegel's 'Logic', Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kay, Geoff 1979, 'Why Labour Is the Starting Point of Capital', in Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism, edited by Diane Elson, London: CSE Books.

Kliman, Andrew J. and Ted McGlone 1999, 'A Temporal SingleSystem Interpretation of Marx's Value Theory', Review of Political Economy, 11, 1: 33-59.

Kline, Morris 1967, Mathematics for the Nonmathematician, New York: Dover Publications.

Mandel, Ernest 1968, Marxist Economic Theory, London: Merlin Press.

Marx, Karl 1964, 'Alienated Labour', in Karl Marx: Early Writings, edited by Tom Bottomore, New York: McGraw-Hill.

Marx, Karl 1968a, 'The Civil War in France', in Karl Marx and V I Lenin, The Civil War in France: The Paris Commune, New York: International Publishers.

Marx, Karl 1968b, Theories of Surplus-Value Part II, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Marx, Karl 1971, Theories of Surplus-Value Part III, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Marx, Karl 1972, Capital: First Edition, New York: Labor Publications.

Marx, Karl 1973, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political economy, New York: Vintage Books.

Marx, Karl 1975, 'Notes on Adolph Wagner', in Karl Marx, Texts on Method, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Marx, Karl 1977, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, New York: Vintage Books.

Marx, Karl 1981a, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume II, New York: Vintage Books.

Marx, Karl 1981b, Capital· A Critique of Political Economy, Volume III, New York: Vintage Books.

Meek, Ronald L. 1956, Studies in the Labor Theory of Value, New York: Monthly Review Press.

Okishio, Nobuo 1961, 'Technical Changes and the Rate of Profit', Kobe University Economic Review, 7: 86-99.

Ricardo, David 1982, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Robinson, Joan 1953, On Re-Reading Marx, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rubin, Isaak 1. 1973, Essays on Marx's Theory of Value, Montreal: Black Rose Books.

Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1950, Capitalism. Socialism and Democracy third edition, New York: Harper & Row.

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Reply to Lebowitz

Felton Shortal l

As Michael Lebowitz, i n his extended review points out/ The Incomplete Marx is part of 'a growing body of work which challenges the exclusive preoccupation with Capital of so many academic Marxists? Like Lebowitz's own work in this area, The Incomplete Marx is part of the project which seeks to go beyond the 'logic of capital' that we find in Capital, 'which yields a one-sided understanding of capitalism', in order to grasp the other essential aspect of capitalism - class struggle and proletarian subjectivity.

However, unlike Lebowitz's Beyond Capital, The Incomplete Marx is mainly concerned with developing a comprehensive understanding of both how and why Marx was led to provisionally close off class struggle and class subjectivity in order to develop an understanding of what capital is. To the extent that it does not follow Lebowitz and attempt to go 'beyond Capital ' to develop the 'political economy of the working class', we may admit that The Incomplete Marx is perhaps deficient, although this was never seen as its task.

Yet Lebowitz's criticisms go much further. In the first instance, he claims that the attempt to place Marx in his social and political context, in order to explain the closure we find in Capital, is both misguided and, in important respects, does not 'stand up'. ' Secondly, he argues that the central argument in The Incomplete Marx ultimately falls back into the objectivism from which it seeks to escape.

While we do not propose to explore in any great detail what differentiates our approach from that of Lebowitz in this reply, it seems necessary that we respond to the serious criticisms he levels.

Contingency and context

In his review, Lebowitz seems remarkably sensitive to any attempt at placing Marx in his political and social context, let alone to any attempt to criticise Marx even with the benefit of hindsight. While acknowledging Marx's own emphasis on the 'unity of theory and

1 I would like to acknowledge the comments and suggestions made by Niels Turnbull, John Drury and Giuseppina Salamone during the writing of this article. 2 Lebowitz 1998.

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practice', Lebowitz concludes: 'Much, indeed, of Shortall's discussion of Marx's limits is gratuitous and a digression from the main thrust of his argument'.3

Lebowitz attempts to substantiate this claim by considering the question of the possibility of rising wages, which appears absent in Capital. In Capital, Marx assumes that the value of labour-power, which regulates the level of wages, is determined by the value of commodities necessary for the subsistence of the working class, which, for any given period, is more or less fIXed. As such, Marx at least provisionally closes off the possibility that, through class struggle, workers can raise the value of their labour-power and thus bring about a secular rise in real wages. In The Incomplete Marx, it is pointed out that, given the conditions of the working class in the mid-nineteenth century, when Marx was writing Capital, this was an assumption that could easily be made without too much explanation. Yet Lebowitz retorts: 'Shortall's musings on this matter ignore not only the rising wages of this period but also Marx's own explanation as to why he was assuming them fIXed until the book on WageLabour, as well as other places in Capital and other writings where he addressed these very questions'.4

Of course, from the perspective of the economic historian, it is undoubtedly true that real wages did rise during what has become known as the Mid-Victorian boom, that is the period between the defeat of the Chartists in 1848 and the onset of the great depression in 1875 - although much of this increase was concentrated in the last few years of this period. However, for contemporaries it was far less obvious.s The more organised and militant workers were often able to extract wage increases in the upswing of the trade cycle only to see their combinations smashed and wages forced down with the onset of the downswing.

The perception that there was no secular increase in real wages is clearly evident in Marx's own writings of the 1860s. For example, in 'The Inaugural Address to the International Workingmen's Association' Marx begins: 'It is a great fact that the misery of the working masses has not diminished from 1848 to 1864, and yet this period is unrivalled for the development of its industry and the growth of its commerce'. 6

3 Lebowitz 1998, p. 179. 4 Ibid. 5 See Kirk 1985 for more detailed discussion of the question of growth in working-class living standards in mid-Victorian England. 6 MECW 1985, p. 5.

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Shortall/Reply to Lebowitz

In the booklet Wages, Prices and Profits, which is a polemic against both those, such as the followers of Proudhon, who opposed strikes and trade unions, and against trade unionists who opposed political action. Marx states that:

The capitalist [tends] to reduce wages to their physical minimum, and extend the working day to its physical maximum, while the workingman constandy presses in the opposite direction. The matter resolves itself into a question of the respective powers of the combatants.7

This is a quote that Lebowitz uses in Beyond Capital. However, what Lebowitz does not quote is that which follows a few pages later: '[But] in 99 cases out of 100 [the workers'] efforts at raising wages are only efforts at maintaining the given value of labour [power] . . . [the] general tendency of capitalist production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard ofwages .. .'.8

Clearly, then, for both Marx and his contemporary audience, rising wages were far from a recognised empirical fact. Furthermore, Lebowitz's assertion that the attempt to place Marx's assumptions regarding the value of labour-power in historical context ignores the explanations put forward by Marx is not true. In fact, in Chapter 7 of The Incomplete Marx these logical explanations are considered in great detail. In considering the question of the 'missing book on wage-labour',9 it is argued in this chapter that only those aspects on this 'missing book' were incorporated into Capital that were necessary for the· logical exposition of Marx's theory of surplus-value - an exposition which required the provisional simplifying assumption of a constant value oflabour-power.

The significance of context

The continuing relevance of Marx rests on his ability to go beyond the immediate empirical reality of nineteenth-century capitalism to grasp the essential features of capital. Yet, to determine the extent he was able to do this requires that we consider the contemporary social and political factors that served to condition his work; to see how they were both conducive and restrictive in the development of a critique of capitalism that is still relevant today.

7 MESW 1968, p. 223. 8 MESW 1968, p. 225. 9 Lebowitz 1992.

1 1 7


In the mid-nineteenth century, Marx could easily presuppose the working class as a 'class in-itself. At this time, no one, not even the most superficial bourgeois observer would have questioned the existence of the working class, as the likes of Andre Gorz do today. In fact, most bourgeois commentators would have recognised the increasing . social and political potential of the emerging industrial proletariat. At the same time, the working class had only begun to place restrictions on the operation of capital through the state, in the form of the Factory Acts, and with the emergence of trade unions organising a small number of the more skilled workers. The mediation between capital and wage labour through trade unions and the state was at an early and precarious stage and was far from being established on any kind of firm basis.10

Furthermore, the subsidence of the intense class conflicts of the 1830s and 1840s allowed Marx time to hole himself up in the British Library and study the capitalist system 'objectively and scientifically. To this extent, the conditions of his time were conducive to the development of Marx's critique of political economy, which still stands as his most important contribution to revolutionary theory.

However, in hindsight, such conditions must also be recognised as being limitations on Marx. After seventy years of Stalinism, in which generations of workers in the Eastern bloc were sacrificed to the brutal accumulation of capital in the name of Marx, socialism and the working class, it must be recognised that the fate of traditional:Marxi&m is not merely a result of distortions introduced by Marx's followers, but is due in part to the limitations of Marx himself.

.

While we can agree there is no sharp 'epistemological break' between the young humanist Marx and the old scientific Marx, there is clearly a shift in emphasis. A shift in emphasis that introduced ambiguities around which significant tenets of traditional Marxists could develop. For example, the rather uncritical acceptance of the progressive nature of the development of the means of production and democracy, the notion of socialism as state capitalism plus workers' control, are all ideas that can be traced back to aspects of Marx's thought but which, while understandable in the nineteenth century, must be taken far more critically given the experience of the last hundred years.

It is not enough just to find a 'good quote' from Marx to counter the ones the traditional one-sided Marxists rely on to back up their

10 It must be remembered that, in Britain, trade unions only gained a secure legal basis with the reforms of the 1870s and independent political representation only 30 years later.

1 18


interpretation: we must make sense of Marx's ambiguous legacy to the workers' movement, which means, for us, acknowledging the limitations of Marx that partially lead to this ambiguity.

Our project must be not simply to 'go beyond Capital ' to see what Marx left out, but to go beyond the Marx of Capital in order to re-appropriate his theory as a weapon for today. To do this, it is vital that we situate Marx in his political and social context. Lebowitz, however, is reluctant to do this. While he recognises the inadequacies of Marx's Capital for the current era, he is unwilling to break from the leftist orthodoxy that has grown out of such inadequacies. We suspect it is this that underlies his aversion to countenance criticisms of Marx that arise in placing him in his political and social context.

The politics of context

This attachment to a certain political orthodoxy is attested to in political positions that Lebowitz takes up in Beyond Capital. Specifically, we see him expressing views that the 'traditional trade union movement' remains the 'critical organising centre of the working class'l1 and that workers should struggle to transfer 'activities from the control of capital to that of the state as their own agency'.12 It is true that Lebowitz does qualify his positive assessment of these 'agencies'. He observes that trade unions tend to change from 'new movements in which people are in motion' to become 'old structures in which generals conduct a war of position' and that a 'social-democratic government (elected as an agency of workers)' may act 'to foster demobilization of workers'.13 The lesson, it seems, is that workers should continuously struggle to make these institutions work in their interests.

This notion of giving 'critical support' to trade unions and socialdemocratic governments is very familiar on the Left - it is typified by slogans such as 'Vote for the Labour/Socialist/Communist Party but keep on struggling'. We would argue that such politics, no matter that it can find some support in Marx's own writings, is inadequate to the way the relations between workers and those who seek to represent them have developed in the last hundred years.

In the twentieth century, we have seen social-democratic parties and trade unions mobilise the working class to be slaughtered for the

11 Lebowitz 1992, p.149. 12 Lebowitz 1992, p.151. 13 Lebowitz 1992 p. 148-9.

1 19


nation. In the 1918-23 period, it was the social-democratic party and trade unions which, by a mixture of repression and manipulation, managed to save German capitalism. We have also seen the Russian Social Democratic Party become the agency of one of the most savage programmes of capital accumulation ever witnessed, developing forms of political organisation copied by fascism and national socialist parties.

In response to these developments, workers and others have produced theoretical and practical critiques of the trade-union movement and social-democratic politics. Trade unions through their role of integration of the working class have been identified as 'critical organising centres' for capital. The statist practice of social democracy has been instrumental to the incorporation of the working class into bourgeois society.14

Now, of course, those in the Marxist tradition generally acknowledge such 'betrayals' and failings of the workers movement. Lebowitz himself quotes Rosa Luxemburg's criticisms of the ossification of the trade unions and, in a footnote, suggests he prefers her take on the party to that of Lenin.1s However, we would suggest that the understanding of the division of the workers movement at this time as between Luxemburg and Lenin is to remain within a traditional and safe set of oppositions and omits the most coherent and far reached critiques of social-democratic and trade-union practice corning from those to their left.

The point in relation to the theoretical tension between Lebowitz and our approach is that we would suggest that a reference to what Marx wrote (or even to what he might have written but did not get round to) is not sufficient for clarity on these questions. This is perhaps illustrated in an essay he cites in his review article 'Situating the Capitalist State'. In this article, Lebowitz makes a fundamental point with which we can agree, that the state cannot be seen purely from the point of view of the logic of capital. However, Lebowitz, bowing to the authority of Marx, tries to combine a conception of how the state can be used derived from Marx's position in The Communist Maniftsto,16 with the rejoinder for the Civil War in France

14 Examples of such critiques can be found in the writings of Gorter, Pannekoek and Mattick. See Smart 1978, Mattick 1978. 15 Lebowitz 1992, pp. 148, 177. 16 For example, Lebowitz takes the Communist Manifesto as grounds for the following position: 'Thus for example, the struggle to make the state expand its provision of use values "needed for common satisfaction of needs such as schools, health services, etc. n not only is an effort to substitute the state for capital as a mediator for workers but also unifies workers (skilled and unskilled, waged and non-waged). In this respect the struggle for the state is

1 20


that: 'The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-ma'de state the machinery, and wield it for its own purposes,.17 The point for us is that we are not dealing here with some subtle dialectical tension in Marx's thought, but rather with a real change or advance in his thinking on the question of the workers' relation to the state inspired by the experience of the working class.

Likewise, we should not limit our ability to learn to the experience of the class that Marx witnessed. In their development of soviets or workers' councils, linked across countries and territories, workers made an advance on the historical experience of the Paris Commune. When the social-democratic party and trade unions set themselves against the development of revolutionary workers' councils in Germany, this also marked an historical experience of the proletariat, as did the Bolshevik suppression of the independent political life in the Russian soviets.

One might add that the limitations of the workers' council form of organisation have also been exposed in subsequent revolutionary experiences. The wave of struggles in the 1960s and 1970s - where aspects of the 'refusal to work', rather than � desire to take it over, came to the fore - is also part of the real movement that we must taken into account. For us, the way to grasp this process is in terms of the counter-dialectic of class struggle. A counter-dialectic that is provided by just that: the class struggle. Thus Marx's social and political context, and the immaturity of the proletarian movement of his time, is of great relevance.

Having answered Lebowitz's claims that the attempt in The Incomplete Marx to situate Marx in his social and political context was gratuitous, and in important respects wrong, we can now address his criticism concerning the very nature of the closure iri Marx.

an essential moment of the process of producing the working class as a class for itself, an essential moment of going beyond capital' (Lebowitz 1995, pp. 204-5). Now, without denying that workers' struggle for their needs is part of revolutionary practice, and that this struggle needs to be expressed at a political level, we might add that the provision of these needs through the state form has also served as an intervention against the working class's own process of self-formation. Furthermore, we can see the generation of the 'social state' as central to the fractioning of the working class into a series of national working classes. In this respect, the statist forms of mediation of needs is an essential way through which capital has managed to prevent the working class going beyond capital. 17 MESW 1968, p. 285.

121


Necessity of closure

Lebowitz's criticism of the explanation of closure within Capital, put forward in The Incomplete Marx, suggests that, by adopting the concept of the 'dialectic of capital' from the Uno school ofJapanese Marxism, my attempt to go beyond Capital becomes trapped in a closed Hegelian logic. The only way out is to adopt the 'objectivist' category of 'crisis'. Thus Lebowitz proclaims 'Shortall, through his embrace of the dialectic of capital, has himself imposed a closure upon capital'.18

Of course, it is important to acknowledge the work of the Uno school, which has been introduced into the English-speaking world by Thomas Sekine.19 However, this does not mean that its notion of the 'dialectic of capital' is accepted uncritically. The Uno school has attempted to demonstrate a strict one-to-one correspondence between the dialectical exposition of Hegel's logic with that found in Marx's Capital, such that capital emerges as an organic selfreproducing closed system. Yet the crucial differences between Marx's open dialectic and the closed dialectic of Hegel are repeatedly pointed out throughout The Incomplete Marx.

Contrary to the Uno school, the dialectic of capital is seen as

merely a tendency that can never be fully realised - a mere moment of capitalism opposed to the counter-dialectic of class struggle. As such, the dialectic of capital must continually presuppose the subsumption of human praxis to its own movement - that is the repeated imposition of the commodity and wage-labour, which is no forgone conclusion.

Thus, while it may appear that, by pressing, his exposition of the dialectic of capital to a conclusion, Marx's Capital sets out a mere materialist inversion of Hegel's logic, in which capital emerges as Hegel's Absolute, this is precisely only an appearance. This is evident in the fact, repeatedly pointed to in The Incomplete Marx, as Lebowitz is obliged to acknowledge, that the question of class struggle, rupture and crisis are always implicit in Marx's exposition in Capital. While Marx must provisionally close off such questions in order to develop his exposition of the dialectic of capital, he never severs them completely; they are always presupposed. As a result, they repeatedly erupt into his line of reasoning, indicating the points at which a reversal of perspective would allow us to go beyond the exposition of the dialectic of capital that is found in Marx's Capital.

18 Lebowitz 1998, p. 185. 19 Sekine 1985.

1 22


Contrary to Lebowitz's assertion, there is no imposition of a final closure onto Marx; rather, there is an exposition of the provisional closure that we find in Capital. The way beyond this provisional closure is through the question of rupture and crisis, which always threatens to break up the dialectic of capital, and which necessarily entails working-class subjectivity.

The question of rupture and crisis

As with the question of placing Marx in his political and social context, Lebowitz would seem to have an aversion to the notion that crisis and subjectivity could have a relationship. Indeed, Lebowitz sees the examination of how the question of rupture and crisis is closed off within the three volumes of Capital as an unnecessary diversion, and denies that there is any connection between crisis and class struggle.

Of course, it is important to avoid the mechanical conception prevalent among the more vulgar variants of traditional Marxism, which sees crisis as emerging automatically from the movement of capital and automatically leading to class struggle as the working class is forced to react - a conception that implies the otherwise inherent passivity of the working class. Although this may have a kernel of truth, it is a one-sided view of crisis. On the one hand, the movement of capital that incessantly breaks up and reconstitutes social relations of production and reproduction creates rupture and crisis. On the other hand, the working class, in developing needs that can no longer be contained within existing social relations, also generates rupture and crisis.

As Toni Negri has pointed out, although crisis is marginal to Capital, it was central in the development of Marx's critique of political economy, as becomes clear in the Grundrisse.'}J) To the extent that rupture and crisis develops, capital and the working class confront each other as antagonistic subjects. If capital is to persist, it must contain and decompose the working class as a subject. Yet, at the same time, the working class can only constitute itself as a class for-itself in-and-against capital. To the extent that it does constitute itself as a subject, it must necessarily threaten rupture and crisis within capital.

By dismissing the connection between rupture, crisis and class subjectivity, Lebowitz is obliged to posit the working class as existing partly outside capital. Capital seems to stand on the one side of

'}J) Negri 1991.

1 23


capitalism and wage-labour on the other. As a result, Lebowitz is unable to examine the mediations between the working class and capital, since he is unable to see how the working class has to be repeatedly incorporated into the dialectic of capital This explains Lebowitz's uncritical position regarding the state and trade unions.

The task of going 'beyond Capital ' is not merely a theoretical, but a practical question. At the end of the twentieth century, after the collapse of Stalinism and the triumph of western capitalism, it is an increasingly pressing problem, but one without easy solutions.

References

Kirk, Neville 1984, The Growth of Working Class Reformism in MidVictorian England, London: Croom Helm.

Lebowitz, Michael A. 1992, Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class, London: Macmillan.

Lebowitz, Micha�l A. 1995, 'Situating the Capitalist State' in Marxism in the Postmodern Age: Confronting the New World Order, edited by Antonio Callari et al., New York: Guilford Press.

Lebowitz, Michael A. 1998, 'Explaining the Closure of Marx', Historical Materialism, 3: 171-188.

Mattick, Paul 1978, Anti-Bolshevik Communism, London: Merlin Press.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1968, Marx and Engels Selected Writings (MESW), London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1985, Marx and Engels Collected Works (MECW), Vol. 20, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Negri, Antonio 1991, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the 'Grund risse', New York: Autonomedia.

Sekine, Thomas 1985, The Dialectic of Capital: A Study of the Inner Logic of Capitalism, Vol. I, York, Canada: Yushindo Press.

Shortall, Felton 1994, The Incomplete Marx, Aldershot: Avebury. Smart, D.A. 1978, Parmekoek and Gorter's Marxism, London: Pluto

Press.

124

Answering Shortall

Michael A. Lebowitz

Karl Marx, philosopher of praxis - the theorist who rejected both the utopian socialists and the utopian putschists because of his core concept of the self-development of the working class through its own struggles. Was Marx necessarily limited because he lived and wrote in the nineteenth century - limited, not because capitalism was as yet 'immature' (as many would have it), but because the proletariat was? Felton Shortall proposes that, able to observe neither the struggles for (and fate of) workers' councils and soviets nor 'the limitations of the workers' council form of organisation' as revealed by revolutionary experiences such as the 'refusal to work', Marx could not proceed beyond the dialectic of capital.

Why? Because Marx 'could not see the development of the counter-dialectic oj class struggle'. 1 Due to his historical context, Shortall argues, Marx was incapable of presenting the side of workers - of making the 'great reversal within his thematic from the positive to the negative side of bourgeois society, from a theory of the dialectic of capital to its counter-dialectic of class struggle; from the critical standpoint of the bourgeoisie to the critical standpoint of the proletariat'.2

Alas, the adherence to 'political orthodoxy' revealed in my reviewl of Shortall's book apparently makes me 'remarkably sensitive' to any such criticism of Marx. But you don't need to be an orthodox leftist to recognise that Shortall's The Incomplete Marx explains neither why the same historical context which purportedly limited Marx did not limit Proudhon and Bakunin, nor why Marx was unable 'to make the great reversal,4 from the perspective of capitalists to the perspective of workers on the basis of the class struggle and proletarian subjectivity he had already observed. Shortalls simply asserts his point (really, Debord's point) about how Marx's theory was delimited by 'the limitations of his own epoch'.

Unfortunately, the example Shortall6 offered for the negative effects on Marx's theory of writing 'at such an early stage in the development of the workers' movement' - the 'remote' possibility of

1 Shortall 1994, pp. 136, 140, 146. 2 Shortall 1994, pp. 132-3. 3 Lebowitz 1998. 4 Shorthall 1994, p. 140. S Shortall 1994, p. 2. 6 Shortall 1994, p. 139.

1 25


rising real wages - was rather poorly chosen, given the course of real wages in the 1850s and 1860s. Not only does Shortall's subsequent retreat to the question of whether Marx knew that real wages were rising reveal definite problems in grasping the concept of relative surplus-value, but he seems to have missed that Marx7 explicidy called 'attention to the real rise of wages that took place in Great Britain from 1849 to 1859'.8

More significant than this gaffe, however, is that Shortall's assertion about Marx's inability to proceed to the side of workers is inconsistent with the main theoretical thrust of his book, which stresses that Marx provisionally closed off proletarian subjectivity and the counter-dialectic of class struggle in Capital because of a logical imperative. Marx, Shortall tells us over and over again, 'had to begin with an up.derstanding of the dialectic of capital as such'9 taking classical political economy as his point of departure, his project was 'to establish the objective laws of capitalist production independendy and in abstraction from its subjective determinations,.lo It was 'to take up the critical perspective of the bourgeoisie, so as to understand what capitalism essentially il.11 Nor was this an abstract logical imperative:

If Marx was to theoretically arm the emergent communist movement so that it could consciously transform reality, if he was to develop an understanding of how capitalism could be overthrown, he had to first of all understand what capitalism is and how it perpetuates itse]£ 12

7 Marx 1985, p. 109. 8 Marx's comments on how trade unions and workers' struggles can allow workers to participate in the growth of wealth (Lebowitz 1992, pp. 73-82, 92-6) make it quite clear that, by the 1850s and 1860s, he had moved significantly away from his absolute immiseration argument of the 1840s. This shift is reflected in his discussion in Capital of the possibility that, with increasing productivity, a constantly falling price of labour-power could be 'accompanied by a constant growth in the mass of the worker's means of subsistenc/(Marx 1977, p. 659) and his observation (p. 702) that, while real wages were higher in countries with a more developed capitalist mode of production, so also was the rate of surplus value. Shortall's quotations supra, which are meant to suggest the contrary, unfortunately neither define 'misery' nor take into account the rising productivity that can permit rising real wages while the value oflabour-power falls. 9 Shortall 1994, pp. 129-30. 10 Shortall 1994, p. 263. 11 Shortall 1994, p. 165. 12 Shortall 1994, pp. 120-1. Shortall's point here parallels my argument (Lebowitz 1992, pp. 139-41) that, rather than explore the side of workers,

1 26

Lebowitzl Answering Shortall

How capitalism perpetuates itself - this, of course, is the absolutely critical question. Well over a century after Marx, and capitalist relations do not yet seem to have turned into fetters. All that development of productive forces, as well as those crises, depressions, recessions and the like - how is it that objective conditions have not brought an end to capitalism? How does capitalism perpetuate itself?

Marx's answer in Capital was both simple and clear (although missed by Shortall in his elaboration of the dialectic of capital): capitalism stands on its own foundations as an organic system so long as capital is able to produce the working class it needs. 'In the completed bourgeois system every economic relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois economic form, and everything posited is thus also a presupposition, this is the case with every organic system'. 13

The development of the capitalist mode of production, Marx explained, produces a working class which - 'by education, tradition and habit', by the constant reproduction of the reserve army ('the silent compulsion of economic relations'), by the fetishism of commodities and mystification of capital, by the reproduction of dependence (and the feeling of dependence) upon capital - 'looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws'.14 As common sense. Although 'direct extra-economic force is still of course used', Marx noted that normally 'it is possible to rely upon his [the worker's] dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them'. 15

Did Marx really believe that the worker's dependence and feeling of dependence on capital were guaranteed 'in perpetuity by the development of the specifically capitalist mode of production? Certainly not. But Marx understood both how essential this barrier was for the continuation of capitalism, as well as the only way beyond it. Through their struggles, he consistendy stressed, workers transform both circumstances and themselves; they rid themselves of 'all the muck of ages', producing themselves as subjects no longer dependent upon capital, as subjects capable of going beyond capital.16

the priority in Marx's revolutionary project was to demonstrate that capital is the result of exploitation - ie., is the workers' own product turned against them. 13 Marx 1973, p. 278. 14 C£ Lebowitz 1992, pp. l20-4, Lebowitz 1997. 15 Marx 1977, p. 899. 16 Lebowitz 1992, pp. 142-5.

1 27


With this self-development of the working class, capital no longer produces its most necessary premise.

If the counter-dialectic to the dialectic of capital means anything, this is what it is all about - the self-development of workers through their struggles. So, how can Shortall assert that Marx was incapable of going beyond the dialectic of capital to the counter-dialectic of class struggle? In stark contrast to his (not completely unsympathetic) theme of Marx's provisional closure, this contradictory claim about the limitations of Marx appears to be grounded primarily in Shortall's desire to distance himself from Marx and those 'bowing to the authority of Marx'. 17 His emphasis upon Marx's limitations flows directly from his political position: rather than embracing Marx as the most formidable theoretical critic of social democracy and Stalinism, Shortall declares Marx's responsibility for these.18

Both Shortall's political criticisms of Marx and his apparent political stances (describing trade unions as organising centres for capital rather than workers and rejecting the concept of a workers' state), echo many anarchist critics of Marxism. Prudently, however, he does not construct his immanent critique of Marx's limitations upon their theoretical scaffolding but looks specifically for theoretical support to Antonio Negri's Marx Beyond Marx - 'a fiercely argued polemic that seeks to reclaim Marx for the side of the revolutionaries'.19 Negri, whose 'theoretical efforts', according to Shortall, 'are invaluable to us', poses 'Marx the revolutionary rather than Marx the dialectical scientist'.20

In Negri's imaginative reading of the Grundrisse, which portrays Capital as a backward leap into determinism and objectivism,

17 Shortall, supra. Was Marx incapable of setting out the side of workers or did he correcdy attach priority to analysing the side of capital? Shortall's sustained argument that Marx's provisional closure was central to his revolutionary project is one of several examples of a theoretical work that appears at odds with the political baggage it is designed to carry. Consider, for example, The Incomplete Marx's captivation by the mysteries of 'the Dialectic of Capital'; Shortall's (initially under-acknowledged) debt to Tom Sekine's account of the 'dialectic of capital' and the impasse into which it leads him is discussed in Lebowitz 1998. 18 Note, for example, Shortall's comment supra that 'After seventy years of Stalinism, in which generations of workers in the Eastern bloc were sacrificed to the brutal accumulation of capital in the name of Marx, socialism and the working class, it must be recognised that the fate of traditional Marxism is not merely a result of distortions introduced by Marx's followers, but is due in part to the limitations of Marx himself. 19 Shortall, 1994, p. 150. 20 Shortall 1994, pp. 151, 149.

1 28

Lebowitz! Answering Shortall

Shortall finds the basis for his critique of Capital.2l Echoing Negri's argument, he proposes that, by starting in the Grundrisse with the category of money, Marx immediately introduced (and privileged) class antagonism. Like Proudhon and Bakunin, who 'clearly recognized money and state authority as the hostile will of the bourgeoisie', the Grundrisse discussion presents money as the social power of capital over the worker right at the outset.22 'Money,' he approvingly quotes Negri, 'has only one face, that of the boss'.23

Everything is, indeed, so clear: money-power, money-command. But, not when it comes to Capital. There, Shortall argues, Marx

proceeded to close off subjectivity and the counter-dialectic of class struggle by beginning with the (double-faced) commodity.24 And, the implication, he proposes, was momentous: 'this unreclaimed deferral of money and the state as the hostile will of the bourgeoisie, and consequendy of the workers' organizational response to it - in contrast to its immediate recognition by the anarchists - opened the way to Marx's authoritarian statism, and subsequendy to Marxism's commitment to state socialism.' 2S

In starting with the commodity, this result of capitalist production, the 'will of the proletariat' is 'extinguished' (or, at least, provisionally subordinated), and this path of objectification is followed throughout Capital. Shortall concludes that, by thus taking up the 'critical perspective of the bourgeoisie,' Marx turned away from the alternative of 'the critical perspective oj a revolutionary proletarial, the perspective he identifies with Negri's 'insistence on the superiority of money as the point of departure for a Marxian analysis'.26 One result is that we end up with the 'bourgeois' Marx: Shortall argues that 'it is through this very closure of Capital that Marx has been both assimilated in academia as a harmiess alternative to orthodox bourgeois theories, and appropriated as the ideology of the surrogate bourgeois rulers of state capitalism'.r7

21 Negri, who views the Grundrisse as 'the summit of Marx's revolutionary thought', describes Capital, in contrast, as a text which served 'to annihilate subjectivity in objectivity, to subject the subversive capacity of the proletariat to the reorganizing and repressive intelligence of capitalist power' (1991, pp. 18-9). Unfortunately for this prosaic reader, the revolutionary exuberance of Marx Beyond Marx is exceeded only by its revolutionary defiance of logic and evidence (which, of course, does not preclude the occasional insight). 22 Shortall 1994, pp. 164-5. 23 Negri 1991, p. 23. 24 Shortall 1994, pp. 154-5, 199. 2S Shortall 1994, p. 164. 26 Shortall 1994, pp. 165-6. 27 Shortall 1994, p. 5.

1 29


In addition to finding inspiration in Negri's premise that 'the objectification of categories in Capital blocks action by revolutionary subjectivity',28 Shortall also draws from Negri the equation of money-crisis--working-class subjectivity, which then runs throughout his discussion of Capital. As seen in my earlier review, Shortall stresses that the very existence of money as mediator in C-M-C already contains the possibility of a rupture in circulation; and, given that capital therefore also 'contains the inherent possibility of its rupture and crisis', Marx is 'logically obliged' to defer this question of rupture in order to proceed with the dialectic of capital. 29 This logical suppression of crisis and rupture mirrors capital's success -circulation by its very nature is 'a capitalist victory over the crisiS'.3O A contingent victory, though. With the focus on money, we see that 'the movement of value is pure precariousness'. Indeed, 'crisis shows what money is'.31

The immanence of crisis (always threatening to erupt) thus demonstrates, for Shortall, the fragility of the dialectic of capital. Crisis also, however, unleashes working-class subjectivity. Indeed, for Shortall, crisis is its necessary condition. In The Incomplete Marx, he declared that the emergence of the working class for-itself 'requires the mediation of crisis'.32 Where he did entertain the thought that working-class action itself also may generate rupture and crisis, this event occurs only after the onset of crisis (inherent in the dialectic of capital) which his broken up class compromises and led to 'the intensification and opening up of class struggle'.33

Shortall's latest discussion demonstrates a definite consistency on this particular point: 'To the extent that rupture and crisis develops, capital and the working class confront each �ther as antagonistic subjects,.34 Nothing, though, is more explicit than the statement cited in my earlier discussion, for which Shortall offers no defence:

28 Negri 1991, p. 8. 29 Shortall 1994, pp. 199-200. 30 Negri 1991, p. 105. 31 Negri 1991, pp. 27, 40. 32 Shortall 1994, p. 430. 33 Shortall 1994, p. 129. 34 Shortall supra, emphasis added. Don't capital and the working class confront each other as antagonistic subjects in the sphere of production -even in the absence of rupture and crisis? In contrast to Shortall, Negri proceeds well beyond his initial presentation of crisis as emerging out of the vagaries of money and exchange to stress class antagonism and struggle; nevertheless, rupture and crisis in the sphere of circulation still appear as necessary condition: 'let's imagine that circulation stabilizes its course, even if in the irreversible form of the crisis; let's imagine that this immanence of

130

Lebowitzl Answerin g Shortall '

The dialectic of capital, through its inherent ruptures and crises, produces the objective conditions for the emergence of the counter-dialectic of class struggle which holds within it the possibility of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and thus of a future communist society.3s

From an avowed champion of worker subjectivity, this display of unadulterated objectivism reveals yet another example of discordance between his theory and his political argument. Objective crisis -workers' insurrection. Why assume, though, that workers automatically turn against capital as the result of crisis? Could it be because it is forgotten that money has another face for the worker -the face of the commodity?

For all the talk about worker subjectivity, what seems missing here is any consideration of the worker as concrete subject with real needs and desires. The idea that capital may produce workers who look to it as the necessary mediator for satisfying their needs or that rupture and crisis may lead workers to accept the necessity of 'sacrifices' has no place in this conception of things where once the objective conditions are ripe, subjectivity is unleashed.36 For Shortall (and Negri), capital objectively transforms the situation, alters class composition by its economic development; and the response is working-class subjectivity - working-class rage, insurgency, insurrection - the working class says no!37

Unfortunately, workers regularly say yes. If it is indeed true that capital's tendency is to produce workers who look upon its requirements as 'self-evident natural laws', reliance upon spontaneity cannot possibly be sufficient. Those who do not grasp the development of the working class as a class-for-itself as a process may be inclined to dismiss trade unions as organising centres for the working class and the struggle for a workers' state. They may celebrate only the initiatives of the immediate moment. Yet, while the creativity of the working class (from which Marx, Lenin and Luxemburg learned much) produces new forms in the course of struggle, the central issue remains that identified by Marx: how

the class struggle is stabilized and can only tendentially present itself as explosive; . . : (Negri 1991, p. 104). 3S Shortall 1994, p. 454. 36 Lebowitz 1992, Chapter 7, argues that objective conditions (including crises) cannot be sufficient for a challenge to capital. 37 The pinnacle of this thought is Negri's (1991) theorisation of the 'refusal of work', which becomes for him the concept of communism.

131


workers can produce themselves as other than dependent upon capital, as other than capital's premise.

Marx understood that people produce themselves differendy through their struggles and that, like trade-union struggles, attempts to make the state serve the needs of working people are part of a living school which has many classrooms. He grasped, too, that the workers' state - a state which, unlike previous states, can no longer stand above society - is a critical part of the process of the development of the working class as a class-for-itse1£38 (Those who, in attempting to distance themselves from Marx, declare this to be just another form of statism are just playing at words.) Unfortunately, while some days can be like decades, the process by which workers come to recognise themselves as a class against capital, develop their capacities and make themselves fit to rule is often slow and prosaic - characteristics that may not satisfy the passionate indignation of intellectuals.

Shortall's readiness to propose that Marx's limitations and, thus, his 'ambiguous legacy to the workers' movement' are responsible for Stalinism and other ills of the last century is just another morbid symptom in the interregnum when the new cannot yet be born.

References

Lebowitz, Michael A. 1992, Beyond 'Capital': Marx's Political Economy oj the Working Class, London: Macmillan.

Lebowitz, Michael A. 1995, 'Situating the Capitalist State', in Marxism in the Postmodern Age: Confronting the New World Order, edited by Antonio Callari et al., New York: Guilford Press.

Lebowitz, Michael A. 1997, 'The Silences of Capital, Historical Materialism, 1: 134-45.

Lebowitz, Michael A. 1998, 'Review Essay on Felton Shortall, The Incomplete Marx', Historical Materialism, 3: 173-88.

Marx, Karl 1973, Grundrisse, New York: Vintage Books. Marx, Karl 1977, Capital, VoL I, New York: Vintage Books. Marx, Karl 1985, Value, Price and Profit in Marx and Engels Collected

Works, VoL 20, New York: International Publishers. Negri, Antonio 1991, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse,

New York: Autonomedia. Shortall, Felton 1994, The Incomplete Marx, Aldershot: Avebury.

38 See Lebowitz (1992, pp. 146-9) for comments about new movements as new organising centres of the working class and the 'still critical' role of trade unions. For a brief discussion of Marx's conception of the workers' state, see the essay Shortall cites, Lebowitz 1995.

132

Dialectics and Crisis Theory: A Response to Tony Smith

Ben Fine, Costas Lapavitsas, Dimitris Mi lonakis

Brenner's 'The Economics of Global Turbulence' has induced a flood of responses, the vast majority of them critical, especially on grounds of (divergence from Marx's) method and theory. Tony Smithl is an exception in seeking to defend Brenner, mostly by pushing his arguments further and by attacking his critics, including ourselves. In part, Smith interprets Brenner and credits him with positions that he can either defend for himself or, as we suspect, reject. Our concern in this reply is not to address issues through the prism of Brenner but to assess Smith's own contribution critically on its own terms and merits.

Central to Smith's argument is the distinction between 'capitalin-general' (by which he means capital as a whole) and 'many capitals' (by which he means capitals in competition with one another), as found in Marx's Capital. He appropriately ties this distinction to the progression from abstract to more concrete levels of analysis. However, his understanding of the distinction and its association with abstraction is unduly simple, as if based on an upstairs and downstairs metaphor, possibly with a single step on the way. This leads to simple errors, as in the assertion that 'many capitals' only first appear in Capital in Volume III. Yet, Volume II explicitly deals with many capitals in the schemata of reproduction, since the economy is, at least initially, divided into sectors for means of production and for means of consumption. Further, whilst Volume II is, as Smith suggests, concerned with the total social capital and with the (economic) reproduction of the capitaVwagelabour relation, it is not - and cannot be - confined to such matters. For the circulation and reproduction of capital as a whole necessarily involves the circulation, and reproduction, of commodities as total output, including exchanges that do not involve capital (wage revenue exchanged for wage goods for example).2 Moreover, Volume II is also concerned with the fmancial requirements of reproduction, that is, outlay of money capital, receipt of sales revenue and hoarding/dishoarding of money occurring in the course of the

1 Smith 1999. 2 See Fine 1975 for an elementary but full exposition, with Marx shown to be concerned to distinguish between money and commodities as such and as capitals.

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circular flow of capital. These processes necessary involve exchanges among the constituent parts of the total social capital. In short, Volume II does deal in many capitals but not with competition, indicating that the introduction of many capitals and of competition are not synonymous with one another.

Further, it is remarkable for Smith to suggest that Volume I does not contain 'many capitals' - and 'many capitals' in competition with one another. Admittedly, Marx's primary concern is to examine how surplus-value is expanded through, for example, the production of absolute and relative surplus-value. But, in doing so, Marx regales the reader with theoretical and empirical arguments about how capitals compete with one another. Further, in the production of relative surplus-value, the reader is forced to acknowledge the distinction between means of production and means of consumption, since productivity increase in the former can lead indirectly to a lowering of the value of labour-power. Marx also makes reference to the credit system as a lever of competition, through its serving as a mechanism of centralisation of capital (mergers and acquisitions).

In short, competition is present in Volume I, if not Volume II other than in passing, though it primarily refers to relations between 'many capitals' as producers. Volume II, in contrast, is concerned with relations between many capitals in exchange. Volume III brings the two processes together to examine how prices of production are formed through the tendency of the rate of profit to be equalised. As already argued above, the inescapable conclusion is that competition and 'many capitals' do not appear for the first time in Volume III. Nor, by the way, is Volume III primarily cOIicerned, as Smith asserts, with the distribution of surplus-value as profits, rents and interest, although this is an important corollary. Rather, it deals much more generally and fully with specific types of capital (merchant and interest-bearing) and with specifically capitalist forms of landed property.

In short, the upstairs-downstairs metaphor does not apply to abstraction (in Capital). The relationship between 'capital-in-general' and 'many capitals' is multi-faceted and non-linear. Whilst, at the broadest level, it comprises production, exchange and distribution (the three volumes of Capital, respectively), the connections between these also comprise production of absolute and relative surplus-value, the concentration and centralisation of capital and other laws of production, and the intervention of the fmancial system, quite apart from the competition for markets which needs to be situated at the most complex and concrete level.

Smith's problematic understanding of abstraction is the probable source of other inadequacies in his approach. His account of crises is,

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Fine, Lapavitsas, M ilonakis/Response to Smith

for example, impenetrable. First, much like Brenner, he fails to distinguish between different forms of 'crisis' in the history of capitalism (such as cyclical, financial, long downturns). Second, and related to the first, though contrary to Brenner, he presents the overcapacity problem that arises on the level of 'many capitals' as the general form of appearance of crisis. Third, he refers to crisis tendencies, a contradiction in terms since a tendency is an underlying force and a crisis is a short and sharp break in the accumulation process. Fourth, his use of Grossmann is mechanical and unpersuasive. Smith assumes that constant capital grows at 10 per cent and working population by 5 per cent. As this means that the ratio of the first to the last grows at 5 per cent, it is hardly surprising that the economy must break down. This is Malthus-type reasoning, putting capital in the place of people and people in the place of agriculture. Lasdy, he interprets Marx's law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in terms of an increasing value, instead of an organic, composition of capital. This is despite reference to Fine,3

where the rationale for and the distinction between the two, and between the tendency and counteracting tendencies, are made clear. Fine's account allows Okishio to be dismissed for the same reason advanced by Smith (failure to deal with dynamics as opposed to comparative statics).4 But, Smith accepts the law as prior to the counteracting tendencies because, presumably, capitalism generates its own crises, as compared to the natural catastrophes and military invasions of earlier epochs. In other words, Smith embarks upon this particular argument in order to demonstrate the necessity of crises under capitalism, only to assume the existence of such crises in order to make his case for the priority of the law over the counteracting tendencies. Marxists might also be wary of reducing crises in precapitalist societies to primarily exogenous matters.

Even less convincing is Smith's sharp distinction between systematic dialectics and historical explanation, which aims at providing theoretical support for Brenner's overcapacity explanation of the present long downturn. Incidentally, despite Smith's protestations to the contrary, Brenner clearly thinks that he has offered a theoretical explanation of the downturn. Be that as it may, Smith claims that there is an 'unbridgeable gap' between theoretical

3 Fine 1982. 4 Specifically, Fine argues that the law and the counteracting tendencies appear as their opposites through competition (productivity increase appears to raise the rate of profit, competition to lower it) and, whilst the law is at a higher level of abstraction (of capital as a whole), it has equal causal status with the counteracting tendencies (which operate at the level of many capitals).

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dialectics and historical explanation. This is, however, a very weak argument as it grants unlimited degrees of freedom to the theorist when it comes to explaining particular historical phenomena. If it were so, any explanation could be made compatible with any general (systematic) theory referring to the same phenomenon.

The problematic distinction between logic and history also has a bearing on the simple dichotomy Smith posits between 'capital-ingeneral' and 'many capitals'. Whilst, all must agree, the two levels of capital are inextricably linked logically, for Smith, in practice or historically they might be separated at the level of reason. Hence, his notion that Brenner's account of 'many capitals' complements that of Marx/Grossmann for 'capital-in-general'. Presumably, for Smith, Brenner shows how individual capitals conform with overproduction, taking for granted the Marx/Grossman account of 'capital-ingeneral'. We do not dispute that this is logically possible in some ideal sense. Indeed, such arguments are compatible with mainstream neoclassical economics, and their new information-theoretic microfoundations, without need to fall back upon Marx/Grossmann. But, as we have been at pains to point out, such arguments depend upon setting aside each and every form of competition that might stimulate the economy - for instance, falling input prices, mergers and acquisitions, financial operations and all those elements that both logically and historically mediate the relations between production and exchange. Once again, it is significant that Smith -unlike Brenner, who starts with 'many capitals' - moves from 'capital-in-general' to 'many capitals' by a single step. 'Many capitals' appear to stand for the (capital-in-general-constrained) behaviour of individual entrepreneurs or even state officials.

We believe that an attempt to drive a wedge between logic and history is deeply misguided. Rather, logic ought to draw upon, and to allow for, the historically specific forms in which the accumulation of capital is realised. In this connection, Brenner's account, and Smith's attempt to retrieve it, are deficient in three respects. First, as argued above, the relation between 'capital-in-general' and 'many capitals' needs to be traced both logically and historically across a number of complex and contradictory mediating elements. As we have shown in our earlier piece,S Brenner's approach in this respect is to posit a simple dichotomy between inter- and intra-class struggle. This stance straddles the present debate and the earlier one initiated by Brenner on the historical transition to capitalism. For Brenner, in the earlier debate, inter-class struggle over the surplus comes to the fore. In the current debate, as labour is perceived to have been

S See Fine, Lapavitsas and Milonakis 1999.

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Fine, Lapavitsas, Milonakis/Response to Smith

acquiescent in contemporary capitalism, intra-capitalist class struggle (or competition) prevails. Such a collapsed dialectic is flawed - and remarkably ahistorical as it seems to apply across pre-capitalist and capitalist societies - for it renders rough justice to the complexity of the determination of concrete phenomena, irrespective of the rhythm and balance of class struggle itself. Second, by the same token, the simplistic logic - whether Brenner's single level of 'many capitals' for analysis of the long downturn or Smith's attempt to make this compatible with a further level of 'capital-in-general' - precludes the incorporation of many of the factors that comprise the relationship between 'capital-in-general' and 'many capitals'. Third, again as shown in our earlier piece, this is not simply a logical omission but a historical one as well, with undue neglect of internationalisation, especially of finance and production. The historical omission is also due to Brenner's focus upon competition between the three foremost national economies.

It is, perhaps, appropriate to conclude by observing that the debate sparked by Brenner has unduly . dug itself back into entrenched theoretical positions on the economics of capital, with little by way of challenge to Brenner's empirical analysis and even less enlightenment on the current phase of capitalism. The new Brenner debate, unlike the earlier one, runs the risk of producing a lot more heat than light. This is only partly the result of the weaknesses of Brenner's original contribution. To his credit, Brenner took the initiative in addressing anew the historical specificities of contemporary capitalism. Nevertheless, by doing so, he seems to have exposed the collective deficiencies of contemporary political economy in this regard.

References

Brenner, Robert 1998, 'The Economics of Global Turbulence', New Left Review, 229: 1-264.

Fine, Ben 1975, 'The Circulation of Capital, Ideology and Crisis', BuUetin of the C01iference of Socialist Economists, 12: 82-96.

Fine, Ben 1982, Theories of the Capitalist Economy, London: Edward Arnold.

Fine, Ben, Costas Lapavitsas and Dimitris Milonakis 1999, 'Addressing the World Economy: Two Steps Back', Capital and Class, 67: 47-90.

Smith, Tony 1999, 'Brenner and Crisis Theory: Issues in Systematic and Historical Dialectics', Historical Materialism, 5: 145-178.

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A Reply to Fine, Lapavitsas and Mil onakis

Tony Smith

I should like to thank Ben Fine, Costas Lapavitsas and Dimitris Milonakis1 for their stimulating and detailed comments. In the limited space available, I cannot respond to every criticism. A number of criticisms appear to be a matter of mere semantics. In the Marxian literature, the term 'crisis' is often used to refer to extended downturns as well as to short and sharp declines. And Marx himself defines the organic composition of capital as the value composition considered 'in so far as this is determined by its technical composition and reflects it'/ which is how the value composition is considered in my paper. Nor will I respond to the charge that my 'use of Grossmann is mechanical and unpersuasive', since I am not sure what exacdy the objection is.3 Firsdy, I will take up the criticisms regarding the logical structure of Capital. Then I move on to consider one substantive issue raised regarding the tendency for the falling rate of profit. I will next respond to criticism of my treatment of the relation between systematic and historical dialectics. Finally, I respond to criticism of my main thesis overall.

The logical structure of Capital

FLM claim that my interpretation of the logical structure of Marx's Capital is 'unduly simple' presenting a 'collapsed dialectic'. Furthermore they claim that my distinction between 'many capitals' and 'capital-in-general' is not only a manifestation of this supposed collapse but a 'simple error' in that 'many capitals' appear prior to Capital Volume III, contrary to my interpretation.

My response to the first point can be brie£ My article began with a disclaimer: 'Capital is an exceedingly complex and controversial work. For present purposes I shall simply assert .. .'. This qualification was meant to convey that the reading of Capital that followed was not comprehensive. My goal was simply to sketch the minimal

1 Henceforth, FLM. 2 Marx 1981, p. 245. 3 I recognise that Grossmann is generally out of favour. In retrospect, it might have been wise to drop references to his work. It still seems to me, however, that the part of his account that I discuss captures an essential dimension of Marx's theory.

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framework necessary in order to introduce the debate about the relationship between 'capital-in-general' and 'many capitals' in Marx and Brenner. In The Logic oj Marx's 'Capitar and other writings, I too stress that there are many other steps in Marx's dialectic, including those mentioned by FLM (relative and absolute surplusvalue, concentration and centralisation, the financial system).

Regarding the second point, in the beginning of Capital, individual units are treated merely as representative instances of total social capital. From a systematic standpoint, Marx explicidy abstracts from the complications for value theory arising from the fact that capitals in different sectors generally have different compositions of capital and turnover times, and from the fact that capitals are internally stratified within sectors. These complications are considered only later. In this sense, it is perfecdy legitimate to assert that 'many capitals' appears as a category in its own right later in the dialectic, after the treatment of capital-in-general.

Tendencies and counter-tendencies for the falling rate of profit

FLM write:

Smith accepts · the law as prior to the counteracting tendencies because, presumably, capitalism generates its own crises, as compared to the natural catastrophes and military invasions of earlier epochs. In other words, Smith embarks upon this particular argument in order to demonstrate the necessity of crises under capitalism, only to assume the existence of such crises in order to make his case for the priority of the law over the counteracting tendencies.

FLM appear to be accUsing me of begging the argument. Here are the relevant propositions: (i) there are systematic tendencies in the 'logic of capital' for extended downturns in the accumulation process. (ii) There are also systematic tendencies for innovations allowing the accumulation process to proceed smoothly. (iii) From a worldhistorical perspective, there is reason to give special emphasis to the former set of tendencies, since the endogenous tendency to major interruptions in economic reproduction helps distinguish capitalism from other modes of production. Where is the argument begged?

4 Smith 1990.

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Smith/Reply to Critics

Contrary to what FLM appear to suggest, the argument for proposition (i) given in the paper does not in the least rest upon an appeal to proposition (iii).s

System and history

FLM write:

Smith claims that there is an 'unbridgeable gap' between theoretical dialectics and historical explanation. This, however, is a very weak argument as it grants unlimited degrees of freedom to the theorist when it comes to explaining particular historical phenomena. If it were so, any explanation could be made compatible with any general (systematic) theory referring to the same phenomenon.

My view is that, on each level of theoretical abstraction in a Marxian systematic theory of capital, a set of tendencies can be derived that are necessarily given with the capital form. What systematic theory cannot do is allow us to deduce a priori how these different tendencies all sort themselves out in any given region or historical period. For a myriad of contingent reasons, certain tendencies dominate in certain places and at certain times, modifying others or even putting others out of play entirely. In other places and other times, a different set of tendencies takes centre stage. This implies that Marxian historians cannot simply go around deriving historical narratives from the necessary 'logic of capital'. The history of capitalism is far too contingent for that.

I would be absolutely amazed if FLM disagreed with this. Nonetheless, they object that, '[w]e believe that an attempt to drive a wedge between logic and history is deeply misguided. Rather, logic ought to draw upon, and to allow for, the historically specific forms in which the accumulation of capital is realised'. But there is not a single a word in my paper that suggests in the least that I disagree with the second sentence! Whatever this somewhat vague statement might mean, it certainly does not imply that one can derive the course of capitalist history a priori from the essential determinations of the value-form. It follows from this that there is indeed a gulf between the theory of the logic of capital (with its claims of

S This, of course, does not imply that proposition (iii) is correct. FLM write, 'Marxism might also be wary of reducing crises in pre-capitalist societies to primarily exogenous matters'. This is good advice.

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systematic necessity) and historical explanations (with their ineluctable contingency).

At any rate, it is quite a jump for FLM to assert that my position 'grants unlimited degrees of freedom to the theorist when it comes to explaining particular historical phenomena'. It certainly grants a very high degree of freedom to historians in the M:uxian tradition, which in my view is entirely appropriate. But it still rules out certain types of accounts, for instance, historical narratives based on the assumption that the goal of capitalism is the production of usevalues, or that the history of capitalism is a process in which God reveals the elect .

. Similarly, it does not at all follow from my position that 'any explanation could be made compatible with any general (systematic) theory referring to the same phenomenon'. I do, in fact, think, for example, that many specific historical explanations developed by social theorists committed to Weberian pluralism can be incorporated within a M:uxian framework, and vice-versa. But not all; historical explanations granting an absolute causal priority to cultural ideas or the activities of state agents are surely ruled out by historical materialism.

In the case at hand, I clearly do not argue that Brenner's position is compatible with a Marxian point of view because any sort of historical explanation whatsoever is compatible with any point of view. I argue, instead, that the core of Brenner's recent work helps flesh out the M:uxian dialectic of the value-form (even if Brenner himself does not note this). And I argue that Brenner's emphasis on intra-capital relations does not automatically justify his expulsion from the community of M:uxists, since there is a gap between system and history in the following specific sense: we cannot assume a priori that the factors that have systematic priority always and everywhere must be granted priority in historical explanations as well. Do FLM agree or disagree with that last point, the substantive claim of this part of the paper? They never say.

The main thesis

We finally get to the heart of my paper towards the very end of FLM's response: 'presumably, for Smith, Brenner shows how individual capitals conform with overproduction, taking for granted the Marx/Grossmann account of "capital-in-general". We do not dispute that this is logically possible in some ideal sense'.

'Ideal' is obviously is meant as a general pejorative term here. But my claim is that the heart of Brenner's account, the drive to

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Smith/Reply to Critics

appropriate surplus profits from innovation and the drive to continue employing fixed capital already in place, refers to a real social process. I also hold that this objective and material process must be incorporated in any comprehensive account of the value-form, since it captures the dynamic of value on a relatively more complex and concrete theoretical level than the level of capital-in-general. Dismissing this claim about the relationship between capital-ingeneral and competition among many capitals as merely 'logically possible in some ideal sense' hardly counts as responding to the claim in a serious fashion.

Nor does the statement that follows do the trick, as far as I can see: 'Indeed, such arguments are compatible with mainstream neoclassical economics, and their new information-theoretic microfoundations, without need to fall back upon Marx/Grossmann'. First, of all, the 'need to fall back upon Marx' is simply the need to connect a relatively concrete and complex theoretical level in value theory with its more abstract and simple levels. FLM can hardly be critical of me for insisting on this connection, since they argue compellingly for the same need in their own work. Second, if it turns out that there are aspects of contemporary neoclassical theory that can be incorporated in the systematic dialectic of the value-form the way I believe Brenner's contribution can be incorporated, then I have to bite the bullet and accept this. After all, the fact that Capital is a critique of political economy did not prevent Marx from appropriating specific arguments from political economists when they were compelling.

This brief section of FLM's remarks concludes, '[b]ut, as we have been at pains to point out, such arguments depend upon setting aside each and every form of competition that might stimulate the economy - for instance, falling input prices, mergers and acquisitions, financial operations and all those elements that both logically and historically mediate the relations between production and exchange'. Once again, my paper explicitly acknowledges both tendencies towards serious and extended downturns in the accumulation process, and tendencies that allow the accumulation process to proceed at a relatively rapid rate. The topic of the paper is Brenner's contribution to a Marxian account of the former. Of course

this sti1l leaves the latter to consider. I myself believe that Brenner incorporates this latter set of concerns more extensively and adequately than FLM imply here, although I am open to the possibility that I could be mistaken. But these concerns are outside the scope of the paper. Investigating them would have required another paper at least as long as the one I wrote. In my view, attempting to establish that Brenner's approach contributes to the

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development of a relatively concrete and complex level in the dialectic of the value-form, that his emphasis on intra-capital relations is not necessarily incompatible with a Marxian research programme, and that the practical implications of his theory are not inherently reformist, was quite enough for a single paper.

References

Marx, Karl 1981 [1894], Capital, Volume 3, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Smith, Tony 1990, The Logic of Marx's Capital· Replies to Hegelian Criticisms, Albany: State University of New York Press.

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