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.