Over the last thirty years or so, during which time it has become one of the most important ideas in contemporary social thought, gift theory has often come into conflict with paradigms of Marxist origin. The trajectory of MAUSS1 could almost be described as a project to create a radical critique of the very foundations of commodity society and its historical presuppositions along non-Marxist lines, leading it to choose Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi as its main theoretical reference points.2 Instead of being explicitly anti-Marxist, like many of the fashionable theories of the same historical period, gift theory seems to have sought to avoid Marx, attempting to construct a social critique as rich as that of Marx, but without what were deemed to be the latter’s unfortunate political consequences and without the perceived limitations and one-sidedness of the very concepts that underpinned it. The principal shortcoming of all Marxist theory, in the view of MAUSS, is its economism: it stands accused of reducing the human being to his economic dimension alone or at least of assigning an absolute predominance to this dimension. The Marxist approach is therefore strictly utilitarian: men are motivated solely by their interests alone and indeed by nothing but their material and individual interests. The philosophical and anthropological foundations of Marxism thereby demonstrate a surprising kinship with bourgeois liberalism, according to whose concept of homo œconomicus man is incapable of any act that does not directly or indirectly proceed from a calculation aimed at maximising his own advantage. Far from having any qualms about this, Marxists take malicious pleasure in demonstrating that any expression of sympathy, generosity or disinterestedness in bourgeois society is nothing but a hypocritical veil hiding the eternal clash of antagonistic interests.
This kind of Marxism is no mere “edifice” cobbled together by the theoreticians of the gift the better to distinguish themselves from it. It actually exists and it is not the intention here to explore it further. But does Marx’s theory boil down simply to this “economism”? Are we sure, moreover, that the theoretical tools for emerging from the utilitarian paradigm cannot be found in Marx himself? Or, to put it another way, are gift theory and an approach based on some of Marx’s concepts necessarily incompatible? If not, would it then be a case of sticking bits together from each theory, creating “specific skills” for each approach? Or might not an underlying, doubtless partial, convergence be discerned between them? There are arguments in the works of Polyani, Mauss and other gift theorists that are similar to radical aspects of Marxian critique. These non-Marxian thinkers may well turn out to be closer to Marx’s heritage than the bulk of what is now termed “Marxism”; indeed, a particular reading of Marx could allow conclusions to be drawn that in part corroborate those espoused by gift theory.3
It should not be forgotten that the subtitle of Das Kapital is not “A Treatise on Political Economy” but “A Critique of Political Economy”. Remarks criticising the very existence of an “economy” may be found from one end of Marx’s work to the other. His intuition that an economy separated, or “disembedded” as Polanyi would say, from the rest of social activity already constitutes an alienation was revived by some of his exponents. Thus, in 1919, György Lukács, the most lucid Marxist thinker of his time, wrote with regard to the future “socialist economy”: “But the ‘economy’ no longer has the function that every economy has had hitherto: for it is to be the servant of a consciously directed society; it is to lose its self-contained autonomy (which was what made it an economy, properly speaking); as an economy it is to be annulled”.4 From the 1940s onwards, those who cast doubt on the necessary connection between the Marxian critique of capitalism and a utilitarian and productivist conception of man, bent solely on extending his domination over nature, were the representatives of the Frankfurt School, led by Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, along with, although from a quite different perspective, the Situationists and Guy Debord. For both of them, the experience of modern art embodied the model for establishing a less “self-seeking”, more playful and user-friendly relationship with things. To the extent that these critical currents no longer thought that the greatest defect of post-war society was material poverty but the alienation of everyday life, they envisioned a way out that would no longer take place on an exclusively economic level but was meant to encompass all aspects of life.
It is now the question of labour that is really at stake. From his early writings right through to his later ones such as the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx oscillated between a programme for the liberation of labour (therefore by means of labour) and a programme of liberation from labour (therefore, by means of a complete break with labour). His critique of political economy contains a profound ambiguity with regard to labour. The workers’ movement and official Marxism, which in certain countries became an ideology of accelerated modernisation and in others that of the de facto integration of the working class, preserved merely the centrality of and praise for labour from Marx’s works, conceiving all human activity in terms of labour and calling for the advent of a “workers’ society”. The first people to question the ontology of labour, while at the same time claiming adherence to the essential concepts of Marx, were the aforementioned authors and critics of the economy. The Situationist slogan “Never work”, a legacy of Rimbaud and the Surrealists, was indeed similar to Marcuse’s talk of the “great refusal”.
However, when they felt the time right to distance themselves from it, the majority of those who had begun their post-war intellectual careers under the banner of Marxism chose to accuse Marxist thought, even in its most unorthodox forms, of grasping only a narrow fragment of human experience. Its economic analyses might be correct, they said, but Marxist thought is completely mistaken when it tries to use the same criteria to work out the consequences for other spheres of man’s existence: linguistics, symbolism, emotions, anthropology, religion, etc. Cornelius Castoriadis and Jürgen Habermas are paradigmatic examples of those who reduced Marx to the role of an economic expert, where he could still be of some use, but would not be very “competent” in many other areas of life, which were supposed to obey very different sets of logic.
The “critique of value” has chosen a different approach. In its view, Marx’s critique of political economy contains a far more radical challenge to the foundations of capitalist society than that proposed by traditional Marxism. Thus, value, money, the commodity and labour are not “neutral”, trans-historical and eternal givens, rather they constitute the heart of what is specifically negative about modern capitalism. These basic categories must therefore be criticised, and not just the existence of social classes, profit, surplus value (or capital gain), market and legal property relations, which are essentially forms by which value is distributed, i.e. its by-products.
Rather than engage in a comprehensive comparison between the perspectives offered by the critique of value and gift theory—which would, nevertheless, be something worth doing—we shall limit ourselves here to drawing attention to some points that clearly differentiate the critique of value from traditional Marxism and where a theoretical comparison with gift theory seems most promising. This first rough outline is essentially limited to the theoretical sphere. It leaves to one side the practical implications, where the distance between the two theories seems to be greatest; especially the hope that gift theory places in associationism, the “third sector”, etc., and even a project to create a “radicalised and universal social democracy” with the goal of returning to the Fordist model, which is considered to be a form of “re-embedding the economy in society”.5 This, according to the critique of value, is neither possible nor desirable.
In contrast to almost the entire Marxist tradition, Marx does not argue from the point of view of labour, conceived as an eternal essence that is “concealed” behind other social forms in capitalism. The person who has best analysed this little-known aspect of Marx’s thought is Moishe Postone, author of Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (1993). He summarises the problem as follows: “In other societies, labouring activities are embedded within an overt social matrix and, hence, are neither ‘essences’ nor ‘forms of appearance’. It is labour’s unique role in capitalism that constitutes labour both as an essence and as a form of appearance. In other words, because the social relations that characterise capitalism are mediated by labour, it is a peculiarity of that social formation that it has an essence.”6
It is only in capitalism that labour, instead of being “embedded” in social relations as a whole, as was the case in pre-capitalist societies, itself becomes a principle of social mediation.7 The process of accumulation of units of dead labour (that is, of labour that has already been performed) in the form of “capital” becomes the “automatic subject”—Marx’s term—of modern society. Obviously, every society must somehow organise its material production, its “metabolism with nature” (Marx), but in pre-capitalist societies this production took place within social frameworks organised according to criteria that were different from the exchange of units of labour between formally independent producers. This is why “labour” and the “economy”, in the modern sense of these terms, did not exist at this time.8 Labour, in the modern sense, has a double nature: it is simultaneously concrete labour and abstract labour (which, in Marx, has nothing to do with “immaterial labour”). These are not two different types of labour, but two sides of the same labour. The social bond in capitalism is not created by the infinite variety of concrete labours, but labour in its quality of being abstract labour, always equal and subject to the fetishistic mechanism of its increase. Under such conditions, socialisation only occurs post festum, as the result of the exchange of units of value, rather than as its presupposition. Wherever production is organised around abstract labour, one may say that the social bond is constituted in an alienated way, removed from human control,9 whereas in other types of societies, labour is subordinated to a social bond that is established in a different way. The “social synthesis” may therefore exist in two principal and opposed forms: either by way of the exchange of gifts—in which the goal is the creation of a bond between persons—or else by way of an exchange of equivalents, in which the creation of a bond is nothing but a practically accidental consequence of the encounter between isolated producers in an anonymous market. The gift can be described as a form of social organisation in which labour and its products do not constitute independent mediations, “behind the backs” of its participants; it is therefore a direct social relationship, one that is not governed by relations between autonomised things. The gift is not a thing, as its theoreticians remind us, but always a relationship; “we would even be tempted to say, it implies, a priori, a synthetic social relationship that it would be futile to try to reduce to the elements it holds together”.10
It follows that “economism”, as the subordination of all human activity to the economy, is not a theoretical error: it is actually quite real in capitalist society, but only in this society. It is not an immutable fact of human existence, much less something that must be defended. On the contrary, this subordination constitutes an aspect of capitalist society that can and must be changed. At the same time, it should be stressed that this centrality of the “economy”, and of the “material” aspect in general, in modernity (at the expense, for example, of “gratitude”) can only be explained by the autonomisation of abstract labour. Postone perhaps goes a little too far in his identification of the Marx he reconstructs with Marx’s actual theoretical structure, which, to a far greater extent than Postone is willing to admit, also contains numerous elements that formed the basis for the later development of the “traditional” Marxism of the workers’ movement. The “critique of value”, formulated in Germany by Robert Kurz, Krisis and Exit!, makes a distinction between the “exoteric” part of Marx’s work—the theory of class struggle and the emancipation of workers, which eventually became a theoretical underpinning for the modernisation of capitalism at a time when the latter still had many pre-modern features—and an “esoteric” part, in which Marx analysed—especially in the first chapters of Capital—the very heart of commodity society: the double nature of labour and the representation of its abstract side in value and money.
The value described by Marx is far from being just a simple “economic” category. The radical break Marx made with the founders of bourgeois economics, Adam Smith and David Ricardo, consisted in the fact that he ceased to consider the representation of labour in a “value” as something neutral, natural and innocent.11 It is not the concrete side of labour that is represented in value and therefore in a quantity of money, but its abstract side: the time alone taken to produce it. It is abstract labour that determines the value of a commodity. It is not the usefulness or the beauty of a table that constitutes its value, but the time employed in its production and that of its components. Abstract labour is by definition indifferent to all content and knows only quantity and its increase. The subordination of the lives of individuals and of all of humanity to the mechanisms of this accumulation without their even being aware of it, this is the “commodity fetishism” discussed by Marx.12 This “fetishism” is by no means a simple mystification or veil, as is often thought. It can only be grasped properly in its anthropological dimension, which is reflected in the origin of the term: the projection of collective powers upon fetishes that man has himself created, but on which he thinks he depends. In a wholly objective and not just psychological sense, the commodity is the totem around which the inhabitants of modern society have organised their lives.
This autonomisation of value, and thus of economic rationality, exists only in capitalist society. This is what Marx described as the reversal of the formula “commodity-money-commodity” into “money-commodity-money”, and it can only exist in the form, “money-commodity-money”. Thus, the production of goods and services is no longer anything but a means, “a necessary evil” (Marx), for the transformation of a sum of money into a larger sum of money. Hence the “productivism” that is so characteristic of capitalism.
“Value” is not therefore limited to a particular sphere of social life. Instead, it is an “a priori form”, in an almost Kantian sense: in a commodity society, everything that exists is only perceived as a quantity of value and, as a result, as an amount of money. The transformation into value is interposed as a universal mediation between man and the world; once again in Kantian terms, value is the “synthesising principle” of the society based upon it.
This leads the critique of value to deny “historical materialism”’s claim to possess trans-historical validity and, at the same time, to reject the opposition between “base” (economy) and “superstructure”.13 On the one hand, commodity fetishism is a modern phenomenon; earlier societies were based on other forms of fetishism. Wherever labour was subordinated to an established social order and served above all to perpetuate existing social hierarchies, as in antiquity or the Middle Ages, it could not exert a self-constituting dynamic, as it later did by transforming itself into a system based on the tautological accumulation of units of dead labour and creating its own workforce. Yet even in a fully developed commodity society, there can be no question of the “primacy of the economy”. Value can instead be defined as a “total social form”, which allows us to bridge the gap between Marx and Mauss. The same logic which in very general terms consists of the subordination of quality to quantity and of the indifference of form with respect to concrete content, is present on all levels of social existence, even in the innermost recesses of the lives of those who live in a commodity society. The commodity-form is also a thought-form, as the German philosopher Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1899-1991) demonstrated.14 Ever since antiquity but particularly since the end of the Middle Ages, abstract and mathematical thought, as well as the abstract concept of time, have been both a consequence and a presupposition of the monetary and commodity economy, and there is no way to distinguish between what arose from the “base” and what arose from the “superstructure”.
It may be objected, however, that the critique of value, even if it does not conceive of value in a purely economic sense, always sees in it a “monist” principle according to which contemporary society is completely determined by value and, as a result, by the exchange of equivalents. There would be no place for the gift or for actions that are not tied to a calculation. Homo œconomicus is still well and truly there, only a more refined version. Actually, during its development the critique of value swiftly outstripped any such conception (which, furthermore, rendered unthinkable any positive escape from capitalism). Value does not exist, and cannot exist, except in a dialectical relationship with non-value, and this relation is necessarily antagonistic. Historically, commodity production long took place only in particular locations; it was limited to circumscribed sectors (the wool industry, for example). All the rest of production obeyed other laws because it was based on domestic production and direct appropriation (slavery, serfdom). The historical spread of capitalism has paralleled a gradual extension of commodity production to more and more sectors of life. After imposing itself on all industry and agriculture over the course of the nineteenth century, in the twentieth century it invaded everyday reproduction, above all in the form of “services”. Whether the food-processing industry or the marketing of child or elderly care, the development of the culture industry or the rise of therapeutic treatments: capital’s constant and insatiable need for new spheres of valorisation of value pushes it to “incorporate into the sphere of value” that which had previously been “of no value”. This “internal colonisation” of society has played at least as important a role as “external colonisation” in counteracting the endemic tendency of value production to grind to a halt due to the decreasing quantity of value “contained” in each particular commodity. This constant diminution is the result of technology that replaces living labour, which is the only source of commodity value.
The process of “incorporating into the sphere of value” what had not yet been subordinated to the logic of value has not come to an end, nor can it ever come to an end. Indeed, all these victories of commodification are so many Pyrrhic victories. By occupying and ruining spheres that had not yet been subjected to commodification, capital achieves a short-term resolution of its problems on the economic level. But it undermines its own foundations on the social level. Commodity logic, based on indifference to contents and consequences, is not viable as such. No society can be exclusively based on the logic of the commodity because the result would be the most complete anomie. A vast number of activities necessary for life, starting with children’s education, a love life or a modicum of mutual trust, cannot take place within the commodity logic of the exchange of equivalents and on the model of a contract. In order to function and enjoy a society in which it can develop, commodity logic needs a part of social life to develop according to non-mercantile criteria. At the same time, however, its blind fetishistic logic (and not the strategy of a mega-subject called the “capitalist class”) drives it to consume these spaces too. Value is not a “substance” that opens out, but a kind of “nothing” that feeds on the concrete world and consumes it. Whereas not just bourgeois thought, but even the quasi-totality of Marxism has accepted value as a fact of nature and argued in its name (the glory of the working class which “creates all values”!), the critique of value perceives it as a historically destructive and negative form. If capital ever succeeds in transforming everything into value, this success will also be its demise. Value is not the “totality”, a reality that embraces everything, something that needs to be appropriated, but is itself “totalitarian” in the sense that it tends to reduce everything to itself, but without managing entirely to do so. The totality only exists as a “broken totality”.
Thus, the critique of value claims to go much farther than other approaches that criticise economism, because it clearly delineates its causes. Even the critique of growth makes no sense if it is not connected to an analysis of the dynamism that is inherent to value, and of the crisis towards which that dynamism inevitably leads.15 Indeed, the prediction made throughout the last twenty years of a major crisis due to the fact that the internal limit of the system of valorisation has been reached, has constituted one of the fundamental aspects of the critique of value, and today this prediction has been largely confirmed.
The critique of value chimes therefore with the gift paradigm in the following sense: even within contemporary society, there are many aspects of life, and aspects without which life would be impossible, which do not take place in the form of an exchange of equivalents, which are not measurable as quantities of abstract labour, and which do not immediately serve the material interests of their creators. Value can only “function” because of the existence of non-value. As a result, reference may be made to a “dark side of value”, to its “hidden face”, like the dark side of the moon that is never seen but which, nonetheless, is there, and is just as large as the visible side.
However, the critique of value draws less optimistic conclusions from this insight than gift theorists. From the former’s point of view, the non-commodified sphere is not an alternative logic that flows beneath the victorious logic of the commodity and which, as such, can be mobilised to form the point of departure for a non-commodity society, or to set up an alternative on the fringes of the commodity sector. In commodity society, the non-commodified sphere only exists as a subordinated and mutilated sphere. It is not a sphere of freedom, but the despised yet nonetheless necessary servant of commodity splendour. It is not the opposite of value, but its presupposition. The sphere of value and the sphere of non-value together form the society of value. Even though non-commodified activities, like family life or cooperation between neighbours, are not the historical products of the logic of value, they have been successively absorbed by its sphere and now subsist as its auxiliary forces. They do not as such therefore constitute a “different” reality; they do not represent, in their current form, the basis for resistance to commodification. They are not the “non-alienated residue” (Theodor Adorno), nor what has escaped commodification. They also bear the marks of a fetishistic society. The woman who does unpaid housework, who neither creates nor receives value (in the economic sense, of course) is not, however, any less a part of socialisation through value. She ensures that “dark side” without which the production of value would not function, but which is not itself yet subject to the value form. The traditional housewife can only indirectly gain access to the sphere of value: by organising the everyday reproduction of the labour power of her husband and raising the labour power of the future. This sphere that is “dissociated” from value effectively obeys different rules: housework cannot be described in terms of “economic exploitation”, in the sense of the extraction of surplus value. Her labour is, however, functional, and even indispensable, for valorisation. Each of the two spheres is the precondition for the existence of the other.
The example of the housewife is not given here by chance: the distinction between the sphere of value and that of non-value coincides to a great degree with the traditional division of gender roles. The gradual expansion of commodity society that started at the end of the Middle Ages entailed the separation between labour that “creates” value, value that can be realised in the market, and other equally necessary, vital activities which cannot be translated, however, into a quantity of “value” and which therefore are not “labour”. On the one hand, the progressive accumulation of value, subject to a linear and historical logic and taking place in the public sphere; and on the other, the sphere of the reproduction of that labour power in private life, subject to an eternal cyclical logic: the non-commodified part of commodity society. Only participation in the sphere of labour allows access to a public existence and a role as a subject, while the domestic sphere retains a kind of quasi-natural quality, outside of history and all discussion. The sphere of value is the male’s, and the domestic sphere is the woman’s, who is thus excluded from all official decision-making power and from enjoying the status of “subject”. This is, of course, a matter of structural logic, and is not always associated with the biological gender of its agents. Throughout history, there have been women who have occasionally—and, in the last few decades, on a massive scale—taken part in the sphere of value as workers or presidents. On the other hand, males who take part in everyday reproduction, such as servants, and who were thus, like women, in a relation of personal dependence with their employers and not in a relation of anonymous dependence on a market that is ruled by contracts, were, like women, excluded from the public sphere (consequently when the right to vote was conceded to workers, it was not always given to domestic servants).
Masculine “values”16 are associated with the production of value: hard-heartedness towards oneself and others, determination, reason, calculation, agreement; while non-commodity activities are associated with feminine “values”: gentleness, understanding, emotion, gift, gratuitousness. This is not meant to imply that women “are” this way by nature, but that everything that does not find a place in the logic of value is projected into “femininity”. Men and women are both allowed, especially these days, to cross over to the other side, but always by assimilating the dominant values of that sphere. And it is obvious that these spheres are not just complementary, but hierarchical. A certain number of women can enter the masculine sphere, that of production and the management of value, but those activities considered to be “feminine” are still seen as inferior to “serious” matters. This is why Roswitha Scholz entitled the article published in issue no. 12 of Krisis in 1992, in which she formulated the theory of the relationship between value and what is separated from it, “Value Maketh Man”. Scholz summarises the problem as follows:
Because whatever value cannot appropriate, whatever is therefore separated from value, completely refutes the value-form’s claim to totality, this represents the ‘unsaid’ of the theory itself and is thus removed from the purview of the critique of value. Feminine activities of reproduction represent the reverse side of abstract labour. It is impossible to subsume them under the notion of ‘abstract labour’, as feminism has often done, which has largely reclaimed for its own use the positive category of labour that had previously been the domain of the Marxism of the workers’ movement. Among the separated activities that equally, but not exclusively, embrace the emotions, welfare, care for the sick and the handicapped, and also eroticism, sexuality, as well as ‘love’, there are also feelings, emotions and attitudes that are opposed to the rationality of ‘private enterprise’ which rules in the domain of abstract labour, and which oppose the category of labour, even if they are not completely exempt from a certain utilitarian rationality and Protestant norms.17
What conclusions does the critique of value draw from these considerations? There can be no question of demanding wages for “housewives”, because this would mean that only what is represented in a commodity value and therefore in money continues to be accorded social importance. Nor should the mere positive valorisation of this dissociated “dark side” be undertaken in the name of “difference”. Likewise, it would appear difficult to organise a sphere of the gift alongside the commodity sphere:18 what drives capital to conquer ever more spheres of valorisation is its internal dynamic and not the evil intentions of its managers, who could be tamed by political means. Capital will never be able to peacefully “live with” a sphere of the gift and of gratuity. The critique of value is well aware that there are social relations distinct from the exchange of equivalents and contractual relations that operate even within capitalist society. Nevertheless, it asserts that the emancipatory potential of these forms of relations can only be realised at the cost of an overall break with abstract labour as a form of autonomised and fetishistic social mediation. It is not therefore a question of complaining about some kind of “ungratefulness” on the part of the commodity system, which does not, for example, sufficiently acknowledge “business cooperation”. Perhaps, as Polanyi claims, reciprocity, redistribution and local markets could have coexisted in pre-capitalist societies; but the fully developed unregulated market—in which the transformation of labour into money and, as a result, the proliferation of abstract labour, becomes the sole purpose of social life—must destroy all other means of exchange, which in turn cannot be restored except at the price of a generalised transcendence of the concrete world’s subjection to its commodity form.
In conclusion, the critique of value and gift theory are among the forms of thought that pay most attention to one of the most dangerous aspects of the contemporary world: an increasing number of individuals and groups are becoming “superfluous” because they are “useless”. “Useless” from the point of view of utilitarianism and “useless” from the point of view of the valorisation of value. “In a society based on the duty to be useful, there is nothing worse than the sense of being superfluous”, says Alain Caillé,19 speaking of totalitarian regimes. But is it not the totalitarianism of commodity logic, based on labour, which is currently making increasingly large strata of humanity superfluous, and ultimately humanity itself? Is it even possible, without referring to the lethal rule of abstract value and abstract labour, to explain the fact that individuals have become perfectly interchangeable: an interchangeability that would form the link between utilitarianism and totalitarianism? In the absence of such a reference, is it possible to grasp the reductio ad unum that for utilitarians means all pleasures are comparable and therefore the same, being distinguishable only quantitatively, to the point that “the pleasure of listening to J. S. Bach” is no different from “the pleasure of eating a camembert”?20
1.Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales [Movement for Anti-Utilitarianism in the Social Sciences]. Hence La Revue du MAUSS [The MAUSS Journal], the movement’s bi-annual journal.
2.“Easier to handle than Marx”, according to the lead article of the Revue du MAUSS semestrielle, no. 29, and more “based on consensus” (Alain Caillé, “Présentation”, in Revue du MAUSS semestrielle, no. 29, 2007, p. 28). Although Alain Caillé also says that “Marcel Mauss was, nonetheless, a great admirer of Marx and, as strange as it may seem, could reasonably be considered to be his principal heir” (Alain Caillé, Anthropologie du don: Le tiers paradigme [2000] [Anthropology of the Gift: The Third Paradigm] (Paris, La Découverte, 2007), p. 59.
3.The fact that Polanyi arrived at his conclusions on the basis of a theory that was quite different from that of Marx adds even more weight therefore to the negation of the trans-historical status of the economy: different lines of inquiry lead to the same result. It should however be pointed out that Polanyi attributes the labour theory of value to Marx, when it was in actual fact formulated by Ricardo. This theory is dismissed wholesale, moreover, by the Marxian critique of the twofold nature of labour, but Polanyi, like virtually all his contemporaries, read Marx exclusively through the lens of “orthodox” Marxism, according to which Marx had established the labour theory of value as the positive basis for the emancipation of the workers, and not as the object of a critique that aimed at its abolition.
4.György Lukács, tr. Rodney Livingstone, “The Changing Function of Historical Materialism” [1919], in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1983), p. 251. It should also be noted that three of the most innovative critical analyses of modern society appeared at the same time, in 1923-1924: Essay on the Gift by Mauss; History and Class Consciousness by Lukács; and Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value by Isaac Rubin, published in Moscow in 1924. The latter book was the most important rediscovery during its time of Marxian concepts that had been almost entirely forgotten, such as “abstract labour” and “fetishism”.
5.Alain Caillé, op. cit., p. 14. Caillé and Laville say that “market society and democracy are still incompatible” (Alain Caillé and Jean-Louis Laville, “Actualité de Karl Polanyi” [Karl Polyani’s Topicality], Revue du MAUSS semestrielle, no. 29, 2007, p. 100), but when they discuss the market or capitalism, they seem to have only neoliberalism in mind.
6.Postone, p. 166. See also the review of this fundamental work in Anselm Jappe, “Avec Marx, contre le travail” [With Marx, Against Labour], Revue Internationale des livres et des idées [International Journal of Books and Ideas], no. 13, September-October 2009.
7.After mentioning the fact that Polanyi “also emphasizes the historical uniqueness of modern capitalist society”, Moishe Postone criticises him for his “exclusive focus on the market” and for the fact that his approach is based on an “implicit social ontology”. According to Postone, for Polanyi it is only the transformation of human labour, land and money into commodities that characterises capitalism, while “the existence of labour products as commodities is, somehow, socially ‘natural’. This very common understanding differs from that of Marx, for whom nothing is a commodity ‘by nature’, and for whom the category of commodity refers to a historically specific form of social relations rather than to things, people, land or money” (Postone, p. 149).
8.Historians such as Moses Finley (The Ancient Economy [1973] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)) and Jean-Pierre Vernant (Myth and Thought Among the Greeks [1965] (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983)) have demonstrated this with respect to the ancient world.
9.In a fetishistic society, a methodological holism like that of Durkheim is therefore closer to the truth than any “methodological individualism”, even though it ontologises what pertains to a particular historical formation.
10.Jacques Godbout and Alain Caillé, tr. Donald Winkler, The World of the Gift [1992] (Ithaca: McGill-Queens University Press, 1998), pp. 17-18.
11.The Marxian critique of the exchange of equivalents, furthermore, would make no sense if this exchange was not implicitly contrasted with other possible forms of circulation.
12.Robert Kurz summarises this concept as follows: “Fetishism has become self-reflexive and constitutes, for this reason alone, abstract labour as a machine that is its own end for itself. Henceforth, fetishism no longer ‘extinguishes’ itself in use value, but presents itself in the form of the autonomous movement of money, as the transformation of a quantity of abstract, dead labour into another—larger—quantity of abstract, dead labour (surplus value), and thus as a tautological movement of the reproduction and self-reflection of money, which becomes capital—and thus modern—only in this form” (Robert Kurz, Der Kollaps der Modernisierung: Vom Zusammenbruch des Kasernensozialismus zur Krise der Weltökonomie [The Collapse of Modernisation: From the Downfall of Barracks Socialism to the Crisis of the World Economy] (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 1991), p. 18.
13.As already noted above, the critique of value is not concerned with an attempt to determine “what Marx really said” or meant to say, and thus admits that passages can be found in Marx that contradict our interpretations; for example, with respect to the universality of economic rationality. Instead, what the critique of value is attempting to do is to set about the elaboration of the conceptual core of the most innovative and important Marxian intuitions.
14.See Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1977).
15.See infra “Degrowthers, One More Effort…!”
16.On this one occasion we are using the word “value” in the ordinary sense of “behavioural norm”, while in other cases our use of the term denotes only “the value of a commodity”. But it is obvious that there is a connection between their different meanings.
17.Roswitha Scholz, “Remarques sur les notions de ‘valeur’ et de ‘dissociation-valeur’” [Remarks on the Ideas of ‘Value’ and ‘Value-Dissociation’], Illusio, no. 4-5 (2007), p. 561. This article is a translation of the first chapter of Das Geschlecht des Kapitalismus: Feministische Theorien und die postmoderne Metamorphose des Patriarchats [The Sex of Capitalism: Feminist Theories and the Postmodern Transformation of the Patriarchate] (Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 2000). See also, in the same issue of Illusio, Johannes Vogele, “Le côté obscur du capital: ‘Masculinité’ et ‘féminité’ comme piliers de modernité” [The Dark Side of Capital: ‘Masculinity’ and ‘Femininity’ as Pillars of Modernity].
18.On this subject see the long-running correspondence between André Gorz and some proponents of the critique of value published in the Austrian journal, Streifzüge.
19.Caillé, p. 246.
20.Ibid., p. 239.