Value and Class Analysis
It is clear that the theory of value and class-analysis cannot ultimately be separated. The categories of value and class are mutually implicated. By understanding capital as operating in terms of a “systematic dialectic” one can see that their relation is an internal one, both that “the positing of social labour in the form of the contradiction of capital and wage labour — is the ultimate development of the value-relation”68 and that value relations are a product of the separation of living labour from objectified labour, that is of class. But although it must therefore be ultimately futile to look for the abolition of value anywhere else than in the class that is forced to produce it, and which is increasingly made redundant by it, the doubts about the revolutionary potential of the working class that are harboured by many of the value-critics have to be confronted. It seems to us that Théorie Communiste do this. At the heart of TC’s theory is the recognition of the reciprocal implication or mutual involvement of proletariat and capital. The fundamental question that this poses is that of how the struggle of a class that is a class of capitalist society can abolish that society. Part of the importance of the contribution of TC is to have resisted answering this by attributing a revolutionary human essence to the proletariat, beneath its merely class and capitalist nature, while at the same time not losing the centrality of the class contradiction. Their answer is rather to grasp the class relation as developing historically through cycles of struggle, while always involving a systematic implication. Crucially for TC “communisation” is not what communism and the revolution “always really was or as it always should have been.” Rather, the concept of communisation emerges historically with the end of a cycle of struggle in which communism and revolution appeared as something else. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory
For TC, the classical workers’ movement from Marx through the 2nd and 3rd Internationals was part of a cycle of struggle which they term programmatism.70 In this period workers’ struggles and the vision of the overcoming of capitalism that emerged from them was based on an autonomy and positivity that workers were able to maintain within the capital-labour relation. The revolution of this period could be described as the impossible attempt to abolish a relation by affirming one of its poles. The tragedies of social democracy and Stalinism, and anarchism’s experience in Spain, were the product of the contradictions of the goal and methods set by the movement in its high period, which in turn were a product of the configuration of the class relation at that time — i.e. of the way that capital and class confronted each other. […] The determinate failure of this programmatic revolution bequeathed a post-WW2 capitalism where the workers’ movement had a certain power within capitalist society but no longer carried its earlier aspect of autonomous revolutionary affirmation. It was this situation that the development of a revolutionary theory had to confront. The struggles which then gave rise to new theoretical production in the 60s and 70s were — whatever the hopes of groups like the SI — not beyond programmatism. Rather, they took on a contradictory character: counter-cultural utopianism and “resistance to work,” issues of everyday life, coinciding with — and in many ways depending upon — the strength of a more programmatic movement. It was in this contradiction and these struggles that the theory of communisation and the new critical Marxism could arise. The resolution of these struggles in capital’s favour marked the end of that cycle in a restructuring in which the class’s possibilities of a positive autonomy and affirmation within capitalism would be suppressed. It is for TC exactly this defeat that creates a new configuration of the class relation in which the existence of the class is no longer experienced as a positivity to affirm but as an external constraint in the form of capital. And it is this configuration which necessitates both a new understanding of communism and a new reading of Marx. The critical reading of Marx grasps the radicality of what the revolutionary negation of value involves: we are speaking as much of the overcoming of our own selves as of something “out there.” The contribution of TC is to grasp how and why the configuration of the contradiction between capital and labour in an earlier period did not pose such an overcoming. In Marx’s day, and during the historical workers’ movement, the relation of capital and proletariat posed revolution in terms of the affirmation rather than the negation of labour, value and class. The work of TC suggests that the radical “way out” implied by value-form theory may be determined by the historical evolution of the capital-labour relation itself, rather than being the product of an ahistorically correct consciousness, free-floating scientific point of view or perspective of critique. The historical perspective on the class relation complements value-form theory. And the sophisticated analysis of capitalist social relations in systematic dialectic and value-form theory can inform the perspective of communisation by offering an elaboration of what exactly this class relation is, and how the particular social relations of capitalist society are form-determined as such. Systematic dialectic and value-form theory can help us to understand the character of the capitalist class relation, i.e. what it is exactly that can have a history in which revolution previously presented itself in the form of programmatism, and whose adequate horizon of supersession is now communisation. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory
I disagree with this part of the analysis. I don’t think we needed the workers movement to fail its goals to be able to form a communization thesis. Kropotkin and the anarchist communists had formed it long before (at the end of the 19th century).
Communism necessitates the abolition of a multifaceted relation [value] that has evolved over time, but to abolish it simply means that we cease to constitute value, and it ceases to constitute us. The radicality of our own period is that this is now the only way we can conceive it. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory
The ideological conception of labour and value in “traditional” Marxism
Against the neo-classical revolution in bourgeois economics, which repudiated the labour theory of value, Marxists tended to assert the classical position that labour is the substance of value and that value is the labour embodied in the product. Like the classical political economists, Marxists failed to address the peculiarity of the social process of reduction that is necessary for such quantitative magnitudes to be compared. That is to say, they too did not ask the question of why labour appears in the value-form of its product, and what kind of labour can so appear. Yet as Marx indicates, it is only by understanding the intricacy of the value-form that one can understand the subsequent forms of money and capital, or how human activity takes the form of the accumulation of capital. […] Understanding value as merely a form […] went together with a vision of socialism as a state-directed version of essentially the same industrial division of labour that is organised by the market in capitalism. On this view labour, which was restricted by market forms under capitalism, would become the conscious organising principle of society in socialism. […] labour is something that exists quasi-naturalistically in the product, and exploitation is seen as an issue of the distribution of that product — thus the “solution” to capitalism is seen as workers, via the state or other means, shifting that distribution in their favour. If exploitation is a matter of the deduction of a portion of the social product by a parasitic ruling class then socialism does not have to substantially alter the form of commodity production; but may simply take it over, eliminate the parasitic class, and distribute the product equitably. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory
In the traditional view, the overcoming of the capitalist mode of production need not involve the abolition of abstract labour: abstract labour, according to this view, is a generic abstraction, a general transhistorical truth underlying the appearance of market forms within the capitalist mode of production. This truth would shine forth in socialism, with the parasitic role of the capitalist eliminated, and the anarchic market organisation of social labour replaced by (state) planning. From a critical perspective, traditional Marxism had turned capitalist forms and laws into general laws of history: in the relatively backward areas such as Russia, where Marxism became the ideology of state-led industrial development, Capital became a “how-to manual.” By contrast, for the value-form theorists Marx’s theory of value, as a monetary theory of value, is “not a theory about the distribution of social wealth, but rather a theory of the constitution of the social totality under the conditions of capitalist commodity production.” The issue was thus shifted from one of distribution to an overcoming of the form of labour, of wealth and the mode of production itself. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory
The Endnotes stand critically against an ideological conception of labour and value met in “traditional” Marxism, which in the end of the day do not call for immediate abolition of Value and call for a period of transition where this gradually happens. They are supporting the communisation project, which they conceive as a movement characterized by immediate communist measures which would aim at stopping constituting capitalist forms. They view the project of communization theoretically related and following the new readings of Marx of the 60s and 70s which constituted the value-form theory. There, a new, critical reading of Marx is attempted, which emphasizes the autonomization of value (and capital as value), which forms the totalizing social structure that encompasses social life in capitalist societies.
New texts and readings of Marx leading to developing the value-form theory
Value is a relation or process that unfolds itself and maintains itself through different forms — in one moment money, the next the commodities that compose the labour process (including the commodity labour-power), the next the commodity product, and then again money — whilst always maintaining a relation in its money form to its commodity form and vice versa. For Marx then, value is not the embodiment of labour in the commodity, nor an unmoving substance. It is rather a relation or process which dominates those who bear it: a substance that is at the same time subject. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory
Germany: The Neue Marx Lekture & Value Form Theory: Value as a process defining and dominating social life
The Neue Marx-Lektüre argued that neither Engels’ interpretation, nor any of the proposed modifications of it, did justice to the motion behind the order and development of the categories in Capital. Rather than an advance from a non-capitalist earlier stage, or hypothetical simplified model, of simple commodity production to a later stage, or more complex model, of capitalist commodity production, the movement in Capital was to be grasped as a presentation of the capitalist totality from the outset, moving from the abstract to the concrete. In The Logical Structure of Marx’s Concept of Capital, Helmut Reichelt developed a conception which, in one form or other, is now basic to theorists of systematic dialectic: that the “logic of the concept of capital” as a self-determining process corresponds to the going-beyond-itself of the Concept in Hegel’s Logic. According to this view the world of capital can be seen as objectively idealist: e.g. the commodity is a “sensous-supersensous thing”. The dialectic of the value-form shows how, starting with the simplest commodity form, the material and concrete aspects of the social life process are dominated by the abstract and ideal social-forms of value. For Marx, as Reichelt puts it: “Capital is thus conceived as a constant change of forms, into which use-value is constantly both integrated and expelled. In this process, use-value too, assumes the form of an eternally vanishing object. But this constantly renewed disappearance of the object is the condition for the perpetuation of the value itself — it is through the always reproduced change of forms that the immediate unity between value and use-value is retained. What is thus constituted is an inverted world in which sensuousness in the widest sense — as use-value, labour, exchange with nature — is demoted to a means of the self perpetuation of an abstract process that underlies the whole objective world of constant change. […] The whole sensuous world of human beings who reproduce themselves through the satisfaction of needs and labour is step-by-step sucked into this process, in which all activities are “in themselves inverted”. They are all, in their vanishing appearance, immediately their own opposite; the persistence of the general.” This is the ontological inversion, the possession of material life by the spirit of capital. It is what Camatte grasped in his recognition of the importance of the understanding of capital as value in process and as subsumption. If there is no use-value other than in the form of value in capitalist society, if value and capital constitute a forceful, totalising form of socialisation that shapes every aspect of life, their overcoming is not a matter of the mere replacement of market mechanisms through a state manipulation or workers’ self-management of these forms, but demands a radical transformation of every sphere of life. By contrast, the traditional Marxist conception derived from Engels — according to which the law of value pre-existed capitalism — separated the theory of the market and value from that of surplus value and exploitation and thus opened up the possibility of ideas of a socialist law of value, a socialist form of money, “market socialism” and so forth. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory
The critical import of value-form theory is that it calls into question any political conception based on the affirmation of the proletariat as producer of value. It recognises Marx’s work as an essentially negative critique of capitalist society. In reconstructing the Marxian dialectic of the value-form, it demonstrates how the social life process is subsumed under — or “form-determined” by — the value-form. What characterises such “form-determination” is a perverse priority of the form over its content. Labour does not simply pre-exist its objectification in the capitalist commodity as a positive ground to be liberated in socialism or communism through the alteration of its formal expression. Rather, in a fundamental sense value — as the primary social mediation — pre-exists and thus has a priority over labour. As Chris Arthur argues: "At the deepest level, the failure of the tradition that uses the model of “simple commodity production”, is that it focuses on the human individual as the originator of value relationships, rather than viewing human activities as objectively inscribed within the value form… In truth, however, the law of value is imposed on people through the effectivity of a system with capital at its heart, capital that subordinates commodity production is the aim of valorisation and it is the real subject (identified as such by Marx) confronting us.” [Chris Arthur, ‘Engels, Logic and History’ in Riccardo Bellofiori, ed., Marxian Economics a Reappraisal: Essays on Volume III of Capital, vol. 1 (Macmillan 1998), p. 14.] While it seems true and politically effective to say that we produce capital by our labour, it is actually more accurate to say (in a world that really is topsy turvy) that we, as subjects of labour, are produced by capital. Socially necessary labour time is the measure of value only because the value-form posits labour as its content." Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory
Whereas in bourgeois social science, and in the dominant forms of Marxism, abstraction is a mental act, Marx argued that a different form of abstraction was present in capitalism: “real” or “practical abstraction” that people carry out in exchange without even knowing it. […] For Marx the most striking example of “real abstraction” is the money form of value, and perhaps the most far-reaching contribution of the German debates lies in their development of a “monetary theory of value” along the lines already laid out by Rubin. In an important passage from the 1st edition of Capital Marx describes money as an abstraction that perversely takes on a real-world existence independently of its particulars — “It is as if alongside and external to lions, tigers, rabbits, and all other actual animals ... there existed also in addition the animal, the independent incarnation of the entire animal Kingdom.” [Marx, ‘The Commodity, Chapter One, Volume One of the first edition of Capital’ in Value: Studies by Karl Marx, trans. A. Dragstedt (New Park 1976), p. 27.] The products of private labour must be exchanged with this concrete representation of abstract labour for their social validity to be realised in actuality. Thus an abstraction — rather than a product of thought — exists in the world as an object with a social objectivity to which all must bow. Traditional Marxism overlooked this discussion, and generally followed Ricardo and bourgeois economics in viewing money as simply a useful technical tool for facilitating the exchange of pre-existing commodity values. By contrast the German debates picked up on the strange kind of objectivity of value — that it does not inhere in any particular commodity, but only exists in the relation of equivalence between a commodity and the totality of other commodities — something that can only be brought about through money. This role of money in a generalised commodity society feeds back onto the experience of living labour itself. To the extent that labour is simply an activity carried out for money, the kind of labour performed is a matter of indifference and chance. The organic link that existed in previous societies between particular individuals and specific forms of labour is broken. A subject able to move indifferently between different forms of labour is developed: Here, then, for the first time, the point of departure of modern economics, namely the abstraction of the category “labour”, “labour as such”, labour pure and simple, becomes true in practice. The simplest abstraction, then, which modern economics places at the head of its discussions, and which expresses an immeasurably ancient relation valid in all forms of society, nevertheless achieves practical truth as an abstraction only as a category of the most modern society. Abstract labour then as a practical abstraction is a fundamentally capitalist form of labour — a product of the reduction of all activities to abstract money-generating activity. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory
Though detached from any working class milieu, the Frankfurt School had attempted to keep alive a critical and emancipatory Marxism against its development as an apologetic ideology for state-centred accumulation in Russia. The affinity with council communism is most clearly on display in earlier texts such as Horkheimer’s Authoritarian State, which the anti-authoritarian students published to the disapproval of the rather conservative later Horkheimer. Nonetheless a radical critique of capitalist society remains at the centre of Adorno’s less obviously political texts of the fifties and sixties — indeed perhaps even precisely due to their avoidance of the logic of immediate political effectiveness. While the “ultra-left” had attempted to keep alive the emancipatory promise of Marxist theory against the actual developments of labour movements by emphasising working class autonomy against working class representation and institutions, the Frankfurt School had paradoxically attempted the same task by turning away from the immediate class struggle and “economic questions.” This meant that the radical re-appropriation of Marx in 1960s Germany necessarily took the form of both a continuation and a break from the legacy of the Frankfurt School. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory
The German language gave the Neue Marx-Lektüre a clear advantage over investigations into Marx in other countries. The new texts of the “unknown Marx” generally became available and known in German before any other language, and there were of course no issues of translation. Furthermore, the great cultural resource that Marx had used in the critique of political economy — classical German idealism — was not subject to the same problems of the reception of Hegelian thought as in other countries. Thus, while in Italy and France the new readings of Marx tended to have a strong anti-Hegel bias as a reaction against earlier fashions for Hegelianism and “Hegelian Marxism”, the German discussions were able to develop a more nuanced and informed picture of the Hegel-Marx connection. Crucially they saw that in describing the logical structure of the real totality of capitalist social relations, Marx in Capital was indebted not so much to Hegel’s conception of a historical dialectic, but to the systematic dialectic of the Logic. The new critical Marxism, sometimes disparagingly referred to as Kapitallogik, thus had less in common with the earlier critical Marxism of Lukács and Korsch than with that of Rubin and Pashukanis. The Neue Marx-Lektüre was not a homogeneous school but a critical approach involving serious arguments and disagreements that nonetheless shared a certain direction. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory
I like Marx’s sociological approach in the first chapter of Capital when he discusses the commodity, value and the fetishism of commodities. There, he observes that value is a concept belonging to the social plane. On the other hand, and unlike Zizek, to the extent that Marx considers the autonomization of value and capital as a kind of (especially non-metaphorical) subjectification, I am really skeptical of this part (and probably don’t like the Hegelian ontology pervading it). I see it more as the autonomization of an institution (the market and the social logic of value and capital) rather than a metaphysical Hegelian process. I think the latter mystifies the fact that it is really our social action (its constitution and orientation) that defines and constitutes value and capital.
France: Jacques Camatte’s new reading of Marx ending up developing a communisation thesis
Camatte recognised that the different ways Marx introduced and developed the category of value in the various versions of the critique of political economy have a significance beyond a progressive improvement of the presentation. Some of the earlier treatments bring out aspects such as the historical autonomisation of value, the definition of capital as value in process, and the importance of the category of subsumption, in ways that are not as clear in the published versions. One finds in Camatte’s reading of the newly available texts a recognition that the implications of Marx’s critique of political economy were far more radical than the positivistic Marxist interpretation of Capital had taken them to be. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory
The earlier [Marx’s politico-economic] drafts also pointed towards a more radical concept of revolution at a more fundamental ontological level. The drafts reveal that for Marx the critique of political economy calls into question the division of subjectivity and objectivity, the givenness of what it is to be an individual, and what is, and is not, our very being. For Marx these ontological questions are essentially social. He considered that the political economists had more or less succeeded in clarifying the categories which grasped the social forms of life under capitalism. While the bourgeoisie, however, tended to present these as ahistorical necessities, Marx recognised them as historically specific forms of the relationship between humans, and between humans and nature. The fact that human activity is mediated by social relations between things generates an atomised, object-less character to human subjectivity. The individual experience in capitalism is one of pure subjectivity, with all objectivity existing against it in the form of capital: “Separation of property from labour appears as the necessary law of this exchange between capital and labour. Labour posited as not-capital as such is: (1) not-objectified labour, conceived negatively [...] separated from all means and objects of labour, from its entire objectivity. This living labour, existing as an abstraction from these moments of its actual reality (also, not-value); this complete denudation, purely subjective existence of labour, stripped of all objectivity. Labour as absolute poverty: poverty not as shortage, but as total exclusion of objective wealth. [...] (2) Not-objectified labour, not-value, conceived positively, or as a negativity in relation to itself [...]. Labour not as an object, but as activity; not as itself value, but as the living source of value. [T]he in-every-way mutually contradictory statements that labour is absolute poverty as object, on one side, and is, on the other side, the general possibility of wealth as subject and as activity, are reciprocally determined and follow from the essence of labour, such as it is presupposed by capital as its contradiction and as its contradictory being, and such as it, in turn, presupposes capital.” [Marx, Grundrisse (MECW 28), pp. 221-2] Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory
Drawing on the pioneering work of Pashukanis, participants in the state-derivation debate grasped the separation of “the economic” and “the political” as something specific to capitalist domination. The implication was that — far from establishing a socialist economy and a workers’ state, as in traditional Marxism — the revolution should be grasped as the destruction of both “the economy” and “the state”. Despite the abstract — and at times scholastic — appearance of these debates, we thus begin to see how the critical return to Marx on the basis of the struggles of the late sixties in Germany had specific — and particularly radical — implications for how we conceive of the overcoming of the capitalist mode of production. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory
Aris Goudouras
Struggling to understand what is meant here at the ontological level.
Communisation: immediate communist measures & the abolition of value
For TC [Theorie Communiste] the communist revolution understood as communisation does not establish a “republic of labour” or any new form of management of the means of production. Rather, it is the overcoming of the alienated social relation of production which constitutes the separation of subjectivity and objectivity experienced in capitalism. In the overcoming of the separation of individuals from each other and from the means of production, communisation overcomes the separation of human subjectivity from “objectified labour,” i.e. the subject/object split that forms the basis of social reality under capitalism. TC envisage this as an overcoming of each dimension which Marx describes in the Grundrisse: labour ceases to exist as a separate activity; production no longer distinguishes itself from and dominates reproduction; needs are no longer separate from capacities; and individuals no longer confront their sociality through the mediation of the exchange of their products or in the form of the state — they become directly social. The revolution as communisation dissolves both the social form of things, i.e. their existence as carriers of ‘objectified labour’, of value (they become things again), and the atomised, empty and separated out subject-form of the individual. Thus for TC, as for Marx in the Grundrisse, the formerly “objective” moment of production no longer dominates the subjective, but rather becomes “the organic social body in which the individuals reproduce themselves as individuals, but as social individuals.” Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory
Those who developed the theory of communisation rejected this posing of revolution in terms of forms of organisation, and instead aimed to grasp the revolution in terms of its content. Communisation implied a rejection of the view of revolution as an event where workers take power followed by a period of transition: instead it was to be seen as a movement characterised by immediate communist measures (such as the free distribution of goods) both for their own merit, and as a way of destroying the material basis of the counter-revolution. If, after a revolution, the bourgeoisie is expropriated but workers remain workers, producing in separate enterprises, dependent on their relation to that workplace for their subsistence, and exchanging with other enterprises, then whether that exchange is self-organised by the workers or given central direction by a “workers’ state” means very little: the capitalist content remains, and sooner or later the distinct role or function of the capitalist will reassert itself. By contrast, the revolution as a communising movement would destroy — by ceasing to constitute and reproduce them — all capitalist categories: exchange, money, commodities, the existence of separate enterprises, the state and — most fundamentally — wage labour and the working class itself. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory
Alignment in the consequences of value-form theory and the theory of communisation
Both value-form theory and communisation express dissatisfaction with received interpretations of Marx, and thus a rejection of “orthodox” or “traditional” Marxism. For us, there is an implicit commonality between value-form theory and the theory of communisation such that each may productively inform the other. We will here examine the historical parallels, and points of convergence, between these two tendencies. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory
This is why value-form theory points, in terms of the notion of revolution that follows from it, in the same direction as communisation. The overcoming of capitalist social relations cannot involve a simple “liberation of labour”; rather, the only “way out” is the suppression of value itself — of the value-form which posits abstract labour as the measure of wealth. Communisation is the destruction of the commodity-form and the simultaneous establishment of immediate social relations between individuals. Value, understood as a total form of social mediation, cannot be got rid of by halves. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory
I disagree with this part of the argument. I don’t think we need the value-form theory to arrive at the communization thesis. Marx’s sociological analysis of the commodity (and his observation that value is a social relation) can lead us to the understanding that we must abolish it and its logic of relating to each other by strictly quantifying our contributions to the social product. I believe that Kropotkin and the anarchist communists arrive at the communization thesis already at the end of the 19th century. The fact that Marx himself believed that we need an intermediate stage or that the socialist/pro-state strategy was the dominant one until recently doesn’t mean that the argument wasn’t there long before. It was just seen as utopian.