Chapter 2
Critique and Science in Capital
Preliminary
This exposition proposes to show what problems articulate the reorganization of Marx’s conceptual field, the reorganization which constitutes the transition from the ideological discourse of the Young Marx to Marx’s scientific discourse. Actually, there can be no question of a systematic exposition, which would presuppose that Marxism’s concept of scientificity was fully grasped and could be expounded in a unitary discourse. Hence my method will be to start from different points, different sites, in an attempt to circumscribe the specificity of Marx’s discourse in Capital by a series of approximations.
In general, Marx no longer gives this specificity the name ‘critique’, but rather the name ‘science’. A famous letter to Kugelmann (28 December 1862) ranks Capital among the ‘scientific attempts to revolutionize a science’ (MECW 41, p. 436). This project to revolutionize a constituted scientific domain is something quite different from the project to read into a discourse an implicit sub-discourse, the project which characterized the anthropological critique. However, Marx does also use the term ‘critique’ to designate this new specific project – the subtitle of Capital is ample evidence of this. Thus, in a letter to Lassalle on 22 February 1858, he writes:
The work I am presently concerned with is a Critique of Economic Categories or, if you like, a critical exposé of the system of the bourgeois economy. It is at once an exposé and, by the same token, a critique of the system (MECW 40, p. 270).
In approaching the problems raised by this project to revolutionize a science I shall assume familiarity with a number of points. These are, essentially:
– The location of what I have called economic reality in the ‘economic structure of society’ as defined by Marx in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), i.e., I shall presuppose familiarity with the concepts of historical materialism;
– The problematic of the method expounded in the general Introduction of 1857.
The questions I shall attempt to pose are therefore as follows:
If Marx revolutionized a science, founded a new scientific domain, what is the configuration of that domain? How are its objects and the relations between those objects defined? If Marx founded this new science by the critique of economic categories, what is the basis for the essential difference between this new science and classical economics? Further, what in its theory will enable us to understand the economic discourses it refutes, that of classical economics and that of vulgar economics? At the same time, I shall tender another question, as I promised: What becomes of the anthropological problematic of the 1844 Manuscripts in Capital?
This last question can be posed by using a particular interpretation of Marx as a reference, the interpretation developed by Della Volpe’s school. According to this interpretation, to criticize economics in Capital Marx used the critical model he had worked out in the manuscript of 1843 entitled Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (MECW 3, pp. 3–129).
In this text, in order to criticize Hegel’s philosophy of Staatsrecht, Marx used the Feuerbachian critical model, the model of the subject/predicate inversion. This model aimed to show that Hegel everywhere turned the autonomized predicate into the true subject.
As a concrete example, Marx takes the concept of sovereignty. Sovereignty, he says, is nothing but the spirit of the subjects of the state. It is therefore the predicate of a substantial subject (Marx defines this subject as hypokeimenon, as a substance). In alienation, this predicate, this spirit of the subjects of the state, is separated from its subject. It appears as the essence of the state. This separate existence of the subject and the predicate enables Hegel to make the speculative operation: by a new separation he separates sovereignty from the real state, he makes it into an idea, an autonomous being. This autonomous being has to have a support. This support is provided by the Hegelian Idea, what Marx calls the Mystical Idea. Sovereignty becomes a determination of this Mystical Idea.
Once he has completed this movement of abstraction, Hegel has to make the inverse movement and redescend towards the concrete. The link between the abstract idea and the concrete empirical reality can only be made in a mystical way, by an incarnation. This incarnation allows the abstract determination to exist in the concrete. The Mystical Idea is incarnated in a particular individual, the monarch. The latter then appears for Hegel as the immediate existence of sovereignty.
Let me summarize this movement in the figure below. Marx calls this movement hypostatization. It consists of the separation of a predicate from its subject, its hypostatization into an abstract category which is then incarnated in some empirical existence. Marx also says that we are dealing with an inversion of the empirical into speculation (abstraction and autonomization) and of speculation into the empirical (incarnation). This critical model is thus governed by two oppositional couples: subject/object and empirical/speculation.
According to Della Volpe, this is the model Marx used to criticize classical political economy in A Contribution and in Capital. Classical political economy separates the economic categories from their subject which is a determinate society, and hypostasizes them into general conditions, eternal laws of production. It then moves from speculation to the empirical by making the determinate, historical, economic categories of the capitalist mode of production into a mere incarnation of general categories which are those of all production.
A particularly clear example of the use of this schema can be found in Marx’s critique of John Stuart Mill in the 1857 Introduction. Thus, in Mill, private property appears as the empirical existence of the abstract category of appropriation. There is no production, says Mill, without the appropriation of nature by man. Hence property is a general condition of all production. This abstract category is then incarnated in a very special type of property, capitalist private property.
Using passages such as this, and the pages from the general Introduction on ‘determinate abstraction’, Della Volpe sums up the critical work carried out by Marx; he opposed classical economics by everywhere substituting determinate (historical) abstraction for indeterminate general abstractions or hypostases.
Such an interpretation seems to neglect one essential problem, that of the theoretical conditions necessary for the model of the 1843 text to be able to work. For this, the two oppositions, subject/object and empirical/speculation, must be pertinent oppositions within the theoretical field of Capital.
First of all, we must be dealing with a subject. For the model to be able to work, society has to play the part of a subject which humanity played in the anthropological discourse. Two passages in the general Introduction really do speak of society as a subject. But this definition of society as a subject is condemned by Marx elsewhere and, as we shall see, it is incompatible with the concepts he sets to work in Capital. On the other hand, the application of the empirical/speculation model presupposes a certain kind of relation between economic reality and economic discourse. If this relation no longer exists in Capital, this couple ceases to be operational.
It is on the basis of this problematic that I shall seek to define the specificity of the ‘critique of political economy’ constituted by Capital. This will give us an index which enables us to determine whether we really are dealing with a change of theoretical terrain.
(1) The Problem of the Starting-Point and the Critical Question
a) Value and value-form
We know the importance Marx attributed to the problem of the starting-point of a science in the general Introduction of 1857. The fundamental character of this question is confirmed in Capital. Thus when Marx is criticising Smith in Volume Two, for example, he states that the source of his errors and contradictions has to be looked for in his ‘scientific starting-points’. Hence this is the level at which we ought to be able to find the difference between Marx and classical economics.
What defines the scientificity of classical economics for Marx?
Classical economics seeks to reduce the various fixed and mutually alien forms of wealth to their inner unity by means of analysis and to strip away the form (Gestalt) in which they exist independently alongside one another. It seeks to grasp (begreifen) the inner connection (inhere Zusammenhang) in contrast to the mulitiplicity of outward forms (Erscheinungsformen) (Theories of Surplus-Value, MECW 32, p. 499).
In Capital (Vol. 3, p. 969), Marx uses the word auflösen (dissolve) to designate the work of classical economics. Classical economics dissolves the fixed forms of wealth, an operation which, in the same text, Marx describes as a critical operation. This dissolution is a return to an inner unity, the determination of value by labour time.
Classical political economy is thus constituted as a science by its installation of a difference between the diversity of phenomenal forms and the inner unity of the essence. But it does not reflect the concept of this difference. Look at its application in Ricardo:
Ricardo starts out from the determination of the relative values (or exchangeable values) of commodities by ‘the quantity of labour’ … Their substance is labour. That is why they are ‘values’. Their magnitude varies, according to whether they contain more or less of this substance (Theories of Surplus-Value, MECW 31, p. 389).
Ricardo determines two things: the substance of value which is labour; and the magnitude of value which is measured by labour time. But he neglects a third term: ‘Ricardo does not examine the form – the peculiar characteristic of labour that creates exchange-value or manifests itself in exchange-values – the nature of this labour’ (ibid.).
In the analysis of value which is Ricardo’s scientific starting-point, there is thus an absent term in the first chapter of Capital: ‘The substance of value and the magnitude of value have now been determined. The form of value remains to be analysed’ (Le Capital, t. 1, p. 62; not in the English edition).
This is the work Ricardo never did. He was satisfied with the restored unity. The dissolution (Auflösung) of the fixed forms of wealth he regarded as the solution (Lösung) of the problem of value. Marx’s procedure, on the contrary, as Engels points out in the Preface to Volume Two, is to see in this solution a problem. Marx poses the question we can call the critical question: Why does the content of value take the form of value?
Political economy has indeed analysed value and its magnitude, however incompletely, and has uncovered the content concealed within these forms. But it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed (sich darstellt) in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product (Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 173–4).
The critical question is the problematization of the content-form relationship. For Ricardo, value is labour. It does not matter in what form this substance appears. For Marx, labour is represented in value, it takes on the form of the value of commodities.
Given the equation: x commodities A = y commodities B, Ricardo resolves it simply by saying that the substance of the value of A is equal to the substance of the value of B. Marx shows that this equation is posed in very special terms. One of the terms only features as use-value, the other only as exchange-value or form of value.
Hence we must pose:
Form of value of A = Natural form of B.
B lends its body, its natural form, for the expression of the value of A. The value must therefore have its form of existence in the natural form of B.
Hence we cannot be satisfied with an affirmation of the identity of the content of A and B. We can see this from the critique Marx made of Bailey in the Theories of Surplus-Value. For Bailey, value is merely a relation between two objects, just as distance is a relation between two objects in space. ‘A thing cannot be valuable in itself without reference to another thing … any more than a thing can be distant in itself without reference to another thing’ (cit. Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, MECW 32, p. 329).
Look how Marx refutes this argument:
If a thing is distant from another, the distance is in fact a relation between the one thing and the other; but at the same time, the distance is something different from this relation between the two things. It is a dimension of space, it is some length which may as well express the distance of two other things besides those compared. But this is not all. If we speak of the distance as a relation between two things, we suppose something ‘intrinsic’, some ‘property’ of the things themselves, which enables them to be distant from each other. What is the distance between the syllable A and a table? The question would be nonsensical. In speaking of the distance of two things, we speak of their difference in space. Thus we suppose both of them to be contained in the space, to be points of space. Thus we equalize them as being both existences of space, and only after having them equalized sub specie spatii we distinguish them as different points of space. To belong to space is their unity (ibid., p. 330).
This text seems to me to be open to two readings. At one level, Marx is defending Ricardo against Bailey’s criticism by disengaging the existence of a substance of value. The existence of this substance common to the two terms of the relation means that we are not dealing with a relation of the type A = table. This last relation is an absurd, irrational relation. By disengaging the substance of value, Ricardo avoids irrationality at this level. But since he does not disengage the form of value, he condemns himself to fall in his turn into contradiction and irrationality where more complex and developed forms than the commodity form are concerned.
What Ricardo omits is the critical question, the question of the ‘=’ sign. As we have seen, this sign is problematic in that it relates together two terms which are presented in absolutely heterogeneous forms. On the one hand we have a pure thing, on the other a pure incarnation of value:
A close scrutiny of the expression of the value of commodity A contained in the value-relation of A to B has shown us that within that relation the natural form of commodity A figures only as the aspect of use-value, while the natural form of B figures only as the form of value (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 153).
The identity posed by the ‘=’ sign thus conceals a most radical difference. It is an identity of opposites. ‘The relative form of value and the equivalent form are two inseparable moments, which belong to and mutually condition each other; but, at the same time, they are mutually exclusive or opposed extremes’ (Vol. 1, p. 139–40). This identity of opposites is only possible because one form (the natural form of B) itself becomes the form of manifestation of its opposite value.
Thus, we see, and could have read implicitly at a second level in the passages on Bailey, that commodities are only equal in the very special mechanism of representation (Darstellung). They are neither equal as mere things, nor even as items of the same substance; they are equal in determinate formal conditions imposed by the structure in which this relation is achieved.
We can make this reference to space say a little more than Marx says about it explicitly. The forms in which the things are related with one another by the dimension of value are forms determined by the structure of a certain space. The properties they take on in the equation must be determined by the properties of the space in which the representation, the Darstellung, is achieved. The installation of this space which makes an impossible equation possible is expressed by a certain number of formal operations: representation, expression, adoption of a form, appearance in such and such a form, etc.
Let us consider one of these operations: ‘Value takes on the form of a thing.’ This examination will enable us to make the meaning of the content/form relation clear; it is a matter of the relation between the inner determination and the mode of existence, the phenomenal form (Erscheinungsform) of this determination.
In fact, the expression means that value has its mode of existence, its phenomenal form (or form of manifestation), in the natural form of the equivalent commodity. The paradox is that value is unable either to appear or to exist. In so far as it appears in the natural form of a commodity, it disappears in it as value, and takes the form of a thing.
Value thus has its form of manifestation in the exchange relation only in so far as it is not manifested there. We are dealing with a type of causality quite new in relation to the 1844 Manuscripts. In the Manuscripts the equations which expressed the contradictions (e.g., the erection of the world of things into values = the depreciation of the world of men; or value of labour = value of means of subsistence) all referred to the equation: essence of man = essence foreign to man, i.e., they referred as their cause to the split between the human subject and its essence. The solution of the equation lay in one of its parts. The essence of man separated from the human subject provided the cause of the contradiction and the solution to the equation. The cause was referred to the act of subjectivity separating from itself.
Here, in the equation, or, what amounts to the same thing, the contradiction: x commodities A = y commodities B, the cause is not in the equation. The latter presents a relation between things, a connection between effects determined by the absence of the cause. This cause lies in the identity of useful labour, creative of use-values, and labour creative of exchange-values, of concrete labour and abstract labour. It is well-known that, in a letter to Engels dated 8 January 1868, Marx declared that the discovery of the double nature of labour (concrete labour and abstract labour) is ‘the whole secret of the critical conception’ (MECW 42, p. 514). This distinction is indeed what enables us to problematize the unity of the two determinations. Classical economics took the concept of labour without making the distinction. Hence it could not understand the specific character of the unity: abstract labour/concrete labour, and fell into inextricable difficulties. Having thought the distinction, Marx can think the unity. The latter is the result of a social process. The absent cause to which we are referred is the social relations of production.
Thus the formal operations which characterize the space in which economic objects are related together manifest social processes while concealing them. We are no longer dealing with an anthropological causality referred to the act of a subjectivity, but with a quite new causality which we can call metonymic causality, borrowing this concept from Jacques-Alain Miller, who formulated it in the exposition he devoted to the critique of Georges Politzer. Here we can state it as follows: what determines the connection between the effects (the relations between the commodities) is the cause (the social relations of production) in so far as it is absent. This absent cause is not labour as a subject, it is the identity of abstract labour and concrete labour inasmuch as its generalization expresses the structure of a certain mode of production, the capitalist mode of production.1
In other words, the equation: x commodities A = y commodities B is, as we have seen, an impossible equation. What Marx does, and what distinguishes him radically from classical economics, is to theorize the possibility of this impossible equation. Without this theory, classical economics could not conceive the system in which capitalist production is articulated. By not recognizing this absent cause, it failed to recognize the commodity form as ‘the simplest and the most general form’ of a determinate mode of production – the capitalist mode of production. Even if it did recognize the substance labour in the analysis of the commodity, it condemned itself to incomprehension of the more developed forms of the capitalist production process.
In his critique of the starting-point of classical economics, Marx disengages a problem which is that of the mode of manifestation of a certain structure within a space which is not homogeneous with it. We must now make clear the terms of this last problem.
b) The problem of economic objects
Take the commodity-object. Three statements of Marx enable us to define its object character:
1) ‘The products of labour take on the commodity form.’ Here we see that strictly speaking there is not a commodity-object but a commodity-form.
2) The products of labour, when they become values, change into ‘things which transcends sensuousness’ or social things (sinnlich-übersinnlich oder gesellschaftliche Dinge)’ (Vol. 1, pp. 163–4).
3) ‘Commodities possess an objective character as values (Wertgegen-ständlichkeit) only in so far as they are all expressions of an identical social substance, human labour’ (Vol. 1, p. 138).
The question is to define the Gegenständlichkeit of commodities, i.e., their reality as objects.2 The latter is a very special reality. The thingness of commodities is a social thingness, their objectivity an objectivity of value. Elsewhere Marx says that they have a phantasmagoric objectivity. This objectivity only exists as the expression of a social unity, human labour.
We can therefore no longer have a subject-object couple like that of the 1844 Manuscripts. In the Manuscripts, the term Gegenstand was given a sensualist meaning, whereas here it is no more than a phantom, the manifestation of a characteristic of the structure. What takes the form of a thing is not labour as the activity of a subject but the social character of labour. And the human labour in question here is not the labour of any constitutive subjectivity. It bears the mark of a determinate social structure:
It is only a historically specific epoch of development which presents (darstellt) the labour expended in the production of a useful thing as an ‘objective’ (gegenständlich) property of that article, i.e., as its value. It is only then that the product of labour becomes transformed into a commodity (Vol. 1, pp. 153–4).3
It is therefore a ‘historically determined epoch’, i.e., a determinate mode of production, which achieves the Darstellung of labour in the phantasmagoric objectivity of the commodity.
The status of this Gegenständlichkeit is made even clearer when Marx speaks of an illusion of objectivity (gegenständliche Schein):
The belated scientific discovery that the products of labour, in so far as they are values, are merely the material expressions of the human labour expended to produce them, marks an epoch in the history of mankind’s development, but by no means banishes the semblance of objectivity possessed by the social characteristics of labour (den gegenständlichen Schein der gesellschaftlichen Charaktere der Arbeit) (Vol. 1, p. 167).
The character of this Gegenständlichkeit is such that it is only recognized for what it is, i.e., as a metonymic manifestation of the structure, in science. In ordinary perception it is taken for a property of the thing as such. The social character of the products of labour appears as a natural property of these products as mere things.
This theory of the sensuous-supersensuous object enables us to mark the difference between the problematic of Capital and that of the 1844 Manuscripts. In the Manuscripts, economic objects were treated in an amphibological fashion because the theory of wealth was overlaid by a Feuerbachian theory of the sensuous. The sensuous character of the objects of labour referred to their human character, to their status as objects of a constitutive subjectivity. Here objects are no longer taken for anything sensuous-human. They are sensuous-supersensuous. This contradiction in the mode of their appearance refers to the type of objectivity to which they belong. Their sensuous-supersensuous character is the form in which they appear as manifestations of social characteristics.
The substitution of the relationship sensuous/supersensuous → social, for the relationship human/sensuous, is fundamental for an understanding of what Marx calls the fetishism of commodities.
To show this let us examine the beginning of section 4 from the first chapter entitled ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret’: ‘A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ (Vol. 1, p. 163).
I think it may be instructive to take this last phrase absolutely to the letter. It means that the commodity is theological in the sense the concept of theology has in the anthropology of Feuerbach and the young Marx. Let us follow this guiding thread in the analysis of the commodity:
In the production of the coat, human labour-power, in the shape of tailoring, has in actual fact been expended. Human labour is therefore been accumulated in the coat. From this point of view the coat is a ‘bearer of value’ (Wertträger), although this property never shows through, even when the coat is most threadbare (Vol. 1, p. 143).
The object is no longer transparent. The whole theory relating the sensuous and the object to the human subject collapses. The coat has a quality which it does not get from the act of a subject, a supernatural quality. It is the bearer (Träger) of something which has nothing to do with it.
Here we have come once again upon the concept of the bearer which we located in the diagram of the anthropological critique of speculation, and with it we return to a function which corresponds to the function of incarnation in this same diagram. The empirical thing (the coat) becomes the bearer of the supernatural abstraction value just as the empirical existence of the monarch became the incarnation of the abstract category ‘sovereignty’ in Hegel.
Nevertheless, the coat cannot represent value towards the linen unless value, for the latter, simultaneously assumes the form of a coat. An individual, A, for instance, cannot be ‘your majesty’ to another individual, B, unless majesty in B’s eyes assumes the physical shape of A (Vol. 1, p. 143).
It is not just because it is a question of majesty here and of sovereignty in the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law of 1843 that we can affirm the homology between the structure of the manifestation of value and the structure of incarnation which constituted an element of the general structure of speculation in the 1843 text. Value is incarnated in the empirical existence of the coat, just as majesty is incarnated in the empirical existence of A, and sovereignty is incarnated in the empirical existence of the Hegelian monarch.
Thus we see emerging an identical form to that of 1843. But it has neither the critical function that it had in the anthropological critique of speculation, nor the function which the Della Volpe school want it to play as a critique of the speculative operation performed by classical political economy. The union of the sensuous and the supersensuous here expresses the phenomenal form of value itself, and not its speculative translation. In the 1843 Critique this union was presented as a speculative operation. Hegel transformed the sensuous (the empirical) he found at the starting-point so as to make a supersensuous abstraction from it which he then incarnated in a sensuous existence which served as a body for this abstraction.
This means that the pattern which designated the speculative procedure in the anthropological critique, here designates the process which takes place in the field of reality itself. This concept of reality (Wirklichkeit) must be understood to mean precisely the space in which the determinations of the structure manifest themselves (the space of phantasmagoric objectivity). We must carefully distinguish between this Wirklichkeit, real with respect to perception, and the wirkliche Bewegung (real movement) which constitutes the real with respect to science.
We see that the properties which define the Wirklichkeit, the space of appearance of the determinations of the economic structure, are the properties which defined the operations of speculative philosophy for the young Marx. The commodity is theological, i.e., reality is of itself speculative, it itself presents itself in the form of a mystery.
There is another example of this change in function of the structure of incarnation in the text entitled Die Wertform (the first draft of Chapter 1 of Capital):
This inversion (Verkehrung) by which the sensibly-concrete counts only as the form of appearance of the abstractly general and not, on the contrary, the abstractly general as property of the concrete, characterizes the expression of value. At the same time, it makes understanding it difficult. If I say: Roman law and German law are both laws, that is obvious. But if I say: Law (das Recht), this abstraction (Abstraktum) realizes itself in Roman law and in German law, in these concrete laws, the interconnection becomes mystical (‘The Value-Form’, Capital and Class, no. 4, spring 1978, p. 140).
The process which characterizes the mode of existence of value here is the one which characterized the speculative Hegelian operation for the young Marx, and which he illustrated in The Holy Family by the dialectic of the abstract fruit realizing itself in concrete pears and almonds.
If reality is speculative, an extremely important consequence follows: every critical reading which claims, along the lines of the letter to Ruge, to speak or read things as they are, is invalidated. The ambitions of the letter to Ruge are refuted in one short sentence which tells us that ‘Value does not carry what it is written on its forehead’ (Es steht daher dem Werte nicht auf der Stirn geschrieben was er ist).
We are no longer concerned with a text calling for a reading which will give its underlying meaning, but with a hieroglyph which has to be deciphered. This deciphering is the work of science. The structure which excludes the possibility of critical reading is the structure which opens the dimension of science. This science, unlike Ricardo, will not be content to pose labour as the substance of value while deriding the commodity fetishism of the Mercantilists who conceived value to be attached to the body of a particular commodity. It will explain fetishism by theorizing the structure which founds the thing-form adopted by the social characteristics of labour.
Comment 1
A glance at the concepts in action in this problematic of economic objects show us that what is at stake here is the critical question of the Kantian transcendental dialectic. Here too we find the problematic of the object (Gegenstand) and the two couples phenomenon/appearance (Erscheinung/Schein) and sensuous/supersensuous (sinnlich/übersinnlich). In Kant a dividing line relating to the faculties of a subjectivity separates two domains:
| Gegenstand | |
| sinnlich | übersinnlich |
| Erscheinung | Schein |
In Marx we have a quite different structure:
| Gegenstand = Erscheinungsform (form of appearance) | |
| sinnlich-übersinnlich | gesellschaftlich |
| Schein (appearance or illusion) |
The commodity is a Gegenstand in so far as it is the phenomenal form (Erscheinungsform) of value. This object is a sensuous-supersensuous object in so far as its properties are only the form of manifestation of social relations. It is the misrecognition of its supersensuous character, i.e., the misrecognition of its character as a manifestation of labour in a determinate social structure, which founds the appearance (Schein).
In Marx, and particularly here in Chapter 1 of Capital, we do find the relationship between an analytic and a dialectic, but this relationship presupposes a totally new distribution of the elements, a reorganization of the theoretical space of these concepts. We might call this reorganization Marx’s anti-Copernican revolution (anti-Copernican in the Kantian sense, i.e., Copernican in the true sense). Phenomena are no longer centred around a constitutive subject. In the problem of the constitution of the phenomena, the concept of the subject does not intervene. Inversely, what Marx does take seriously is the connection between the phenomenon and the transcendental object = X. The phenomena, the objects, are phenomenal forms of this object, which is also the unknown that resolves the equations. But this X is not an object, it is what Marx calls a social relation. The fact that this social relation has to be represented in something which is radically foreign to it, in a thing, gives that thing its sensuous-supersensuous character. What characterizes appearance (Schein) is the fact that this thing appears in it simply as a sensuous thing and that its properties appear as natural properties.
Thus the constitution of objects does not appertain to a subjectivity. What does appertain to a subjectivity is perception. Appearance (Schein) is determined by the gap between the conditions of constitution of the objects and the conditions of their perception.
Comment 2
What radically differentiates Marx from classical economics is his analysis of the value-form of the commodity (or the commodity-form of the product of labour). The difference between the classical conception of abstraction and analysis and the Marxist conception is inscribed here. The theory of the form provides a solution at the level of the specific theoretical practice of Capital to the problems raised in the 1857 Introduction by the concept of determinate abstraction.4
The historicist interpretation of this theory of determinate abstraction as it is found particularly in the Della Volpe school depends upon a non-pertinent relation; the relation between the abstract in thought and the real concrete. The determinate abstraction then appears to be the one which solidly preserves the richness of the real concrete.
Marx, on the other hand, is concerned here with the value-form of the commodity (the commodity-form of the product of labour) as a scientific starting-point within the thought process. From this viewpoint, the value-form is characterized as the most general, the simplest, the most abstract, and the least developed form. Here I shall not speak of the first of these determinations, which incidentally poses difficult interpretation problems. Simple and abstract are situated in the oppositions abstract/concrete and simple/complex which define the field of what is thought in the 1857 Introduction. But the meaning of these two oppositions is made clearer here by the concept of development. This form is the least developed and the task of science, a task which was never undertaken before Marx, is to develop this simple form:
Now, however, we have to perform a task never even attempted by bourgeois economics. That is, we have to show the origin of this money-form, we have to trace the development of the expression of value contained in the value-relation of commodities from its simplest, almost imperceptible outline to the dazzling money-form (Vol. 1, p. 139).
Ricardo was incapable of making this development. He was incapable of deducing the money-form from his theory of value. This was because he did not grasp the concept of the expression of value, the concept of form. What he missed in this way was the motor of the development of the economic categories, a development which permits the constitution of the system of political economy. This motor is contradiction.
This poses the problem of the location of the concept of contradiction, the problem of the determination of its theoretical validity.
What is it that Marx, in the first chapter of Capital, calls sometimes contradiction (Widerspruch) and sometimes merely opposition (Gegensatz)? There can be no question of providing a definitive solution to this problem here, but only of presenting certain givens and indicating a possible direction for enquiry.
Take the relationship: x commodities A = y commodities B. It can be said to be contradictory in so far as one of the terms appears only as use-value and the other only as exchange-value. This contradiction refers to the internal contradiction of the commodity, to its duplication into use-value and exchange-value, and from here we are referred to the identity of opposites which characterizes the labour represented in the value-form of the commodity – the identity of concrete labour and abstract labour.
Three comments can be made here.
1) The contradiction posed here cannot be reduced to the order of appearance and ideology, as was the case with the pseudo-contradiction in adjecto implied, according to Bailey, by the concept of an exchange-value intrinsic to a commodity. On the contrary, this contradiction only occurs in the scientific discourse. It is not perceived by the subjects of the exchange, for whom the relation xA = yB is quite natural.
2) It does not consist of a split. In the equations in the 1844 Manuscripts which expressed the contradiction, the latter amounted to the separation of an original unity. The contradiction lay in the separate existence of complementary terms. Here, on the contrary, it lies in the union of two mutually exclusive terms. This identity of two opposites exposes the hidden existence of a third term which supports their union, i.e., of the term social, which supports the sensuous-supersensuous contradiction.
3) Nor does the contradiction consist of the fact that concrete labour is inverted into abstract labour, in the way that, with Hegel, Being is inverted into Nothingness, or the concrete here-now into the abstract universal. The contradictory union of concrete labour and abstract labour is not determined by a dialectic supposed to be inherent in one of these two terms. It expresses the special form that the general characteristics of labour take in a determinate mode of production.
Marx shows in fact that all production is necessarily determined by the society’s available labour time and by the distribution of social labour according to the different needs.5 This rule must be observed in one way or another in all forms of production. But it adopts different characteristics in each of these forms. Thus, in the text on the fetishism in Chapter 1, Marx shows in the case of several different forms of production (Robinson Crusoe, the Middle Ages, patriarchal peasant industry, and finally communist society) how this natural law operates according to specific forms determined by each of these structures. Within the capitalist mode of production, where commodity production is the dominant form of production, the regulatory law of labour time and its distribution follows a very special pattern, that of the contradictory identity of concrete labour and abstract labour, represented in the inherent contradictions of commodity exchange.
‘Contradiction’ could thus well designate precisely the structure’s peculiar mode of effectivity. We have already seen that the space of representation (Darstellung) of the structure was a space of contradiction, in which the objects were not objects, in which the relations linked together things which did not have any relationship between them, etc. The existence of the contradiction thus appeared as the very existence of the structure. In this way we should perhaps give the concept of contradiction, as Marx uses it in Part One of Capital, a purely indexical value; i.e., in these Hegelian concepts ‘contradiction’ and ‘development of the contradiction’, Marx is thinking something radically new, the concept of which he has not succeeded in formulating – the mode of action of the structure as a mode of action of the relations of production which govern it.
Recognition of the contradiction is thus recognition of the structure within which the economic objects and their relations function, the structure of a determinate mode of production. By analysing the commodity form Marx discovered the contradiction, i.e., he discovered that economic objects were determined as manifestations of a particular structure. The development of the forms is thus a development of the contradiction. The resolution (Lösung) of the contradiction is achieved in what Marx calls its forms of movement. The more complex, more developed forms are forms in which the contradictions of the simpler forms can develop and resolve themselves. This is the case for forms of exchange with respect to the contradictions inherent in the commodity form, and for the forms of capitalist production with respect to the forms of simple commodity production:
We saw in a former chapter that the exchange of commodities implies contradictory and mutually exclusive conditions. The further development of the commodity [as something with a double aspect, use-value and exchange-value] does not abolish these contradictions, but rather provides the form within which they have room to move. This is, in general, the way in which real contradictions are resolved. For instance, it is a contradiction to depict one body as constantly falling towards another and at the same time constantly flying away from it. The ellipse is a form of motion within which this contradiction is both realized and resolved (Vol. 1, p. 198).
There is an antithesis, immanent in the commodity, between use-value and [exchange-]value, between private labour which must simultaneously manifest itself as directly social labour, and a particular concrete kind of labour which simultaneously counts as merely abstract universal labour … these contradictions immanent in the commodity acquire their forms of motion in circulation (Vol. 1, p. 209; translation modified according to the French edition, t. 1, p. 122).
The development of the forms of bourgeois production, which constitutes the object of Capital proper, is thus thought as the development of forms of motion for the primitive contradiction, the opposition between abstract labour and concrete labour. Here, too, we can ask whether the concepts used by Marx (contradiction, development, resolution of contradiction) adequately express what is thought in them.
Let us leave this problem in abeyance and note the two essential elements that we have been able to extract from the analysis of the value-form:
1) This analysis and the theory of the form which it implies enable us to bring to light the constitutive structure of the relations of production and its mode of action at the level of Wirklichkeit.
2) It enables us to attain a systematic knowledge of the connection and articulation of the forms of the capitalist mode of production. Classical economics was unable to handle this development of forms. (For example, Ricardo did not succeed in deducing money from the analysis of the commodity or in showing the connection between surplus-value and the average rate of profit.)
We shall find that these two elements become clearer when we turn to the study of a special commodity – wage-labour.
c) Wage-labour and the theory of the irrational
It is well-known that the category of wage-labour poses an insoluble problem for classical economics. What really happens in the exchange between the capitalist and the worker?
The capitalist buys a certain quantity of labour, the worker’s working day, with a wage which represents a smaller quantity of social labour. We therefore see two commodities which represent unequal social labour times exchanged as equals, which clashes with the labour theory of value.
At the same time, we discover a circle. The wage appears to be the value of the labour. But labour has been posited as the creator of value. How can one determine the value of what creates value?
The solution to this clash and to this circle lies in the introduction of a new category, absent from classical economics, the category of labour-power.
The wage represents the value of labour-power. This value as we know, in accordance with the law of value, represents the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the reproduction of labour-power. Classical political economy had indeed formulated this determination of the value of labour-power, but as the value of labour. It therefore remained in a quid pro quo.
In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx, too, remained in this quid pro quo, tied to the non-critique of the concept of the value of labour and of the concept of labour itself. Here, on the contrary, Marx attacks the concept itself and with the help of the concepts of form and relation works it over so that a new concept appears, that of labour-power, so that the concept of the value of labour can be understood in its inadequacy.
Marx grasped the difference between the exchange-value of labour-power (the quantity of social labour necessary for its reproduction, represented in wages) and its specific use-value – to create value.
We can pose the problem in the following two statements:
1) Labour-power has an exchange-value measured by the labour time necessary for its reproduction, and a use-value which is creative of value, which produces an exchange-value greater than its own value (which is not true of any other commodity).
2) Labour is creative of value. It does not have value.
In these two statements we can read the possibility of surplus-value. We can do so thanks to the analysis of the double character of labour, of the distinction between useful labour and labour creative of value, which enables us to penetrate the appearance of the capitalist mode of production:
From all appearances, what the capitalist pays for is the value of the usefulness which the worker gives him, the value of the labour and not that of the labour-power which the worker does not seem to alienate. The experience of practical life alone does not bring out the double usefulness of labour, the property of satisfying a need which it has in common with all commodities, and the property of creating value which distinguishes it from all the other commodities and, as a formative element of value, prevents it from having any value itself (Le Capital, Livre 1, t. II, p. 211; the English edition, Vol. 1, p. 681 reads differently).
We are confronted with the following contradiction: labour appears as a commodity whereas it cannot ever be a commodity. That is, we are dealing with a structure which is impossible. This possibility of an impossibility refers us to the absent cause, to the relations of production. The immediate producers, separated from their means of production as a result of primitive accumulation, are constrained to sell their labour-power as a commodity. Their labour becomes wage-labour and the appearance is produced that what is paid for by the capitalist is their labour itself, and not their labour-power.
The revelation of the category ‘value of labour-power’ concealed behind the category ‘value of labour’ is the revelation of the determinant character of capitalist relations of production.
Unable to problematize the category ‘value of labour’ as a phenomenal form of the value of labour-power, Ricardo could not reveal what sustains the whole mechanism, i.e., the relations of production: capital and wage-labour:
Instead of labour, Ricardo should have discussed labour capacity. But had he done so, capital would also have been revealed as the material conditions of labour, confronting the labourer as power that has acquired an independent existence? And capital would at once have been revealed as a definite social relationship. Ricardo thus only distinguishes capital as ‘accumulated labour’ from ‘immediate labour’. And it is something purely physical, only an element in the labour process, from which the relation between labour and capital, wages and profits, could never be developed (Theories of Surplus-Value, MECW 32, p. 36).
Marx, on the other hand, problematizes the category ‘value of labour’. This expression is an imaginary expression. In Marx this category of the imaginary designates the posing of an impossible relation which conceals the truly determinant relation.
There is a naive way of thinking the imaginariness of this expression. This is to consider it as a mere abuse of language. Thus Proudhon states that, ‘Labour is said to have value not as a commodity itself, but in view of the values which it is supposed potentially to contain. The value of labour is a figurative expression’ (cit. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 677 n6). Thus, according to Proudhon, the whole world of capitalist production is founded on a ‘figurative expression’, mere poetic licence. Here we have a very characteristic type of explanation; confronted by expressions which designate the mystery of capitalist production, its fundamental structural determination, it is said that these constitute only figurative expressions or subjective distinctions. In Capital, Marx repeatedly calls attention to this type of explanation by the arbitrary and subjective. (Ricardo, for example, states that the distinction between fixed and circulating capital is a wholly subjective one.)
For Marx, on the contrary, the imaginary expressions are not at all arbitrary. They express a rigorous necessity; that of the mode of action of the relations of production:
In the expression ‘value of labour’, the concept of value is not only completely extinguished, but inverted, so that it becomes its contrary. It is an expression as imaginary as the value of the earth. These imaginary expressions arise, nevertheless, from the relations of production themselves. They are categories for the forms of appearance of essential relations (Sie sind Kategorien für Erscheinungsformen wesentlicher Verhältnisse) (Vol. 1, p. 677).
Here the theory of the form and of the development of forms acquire precision. The expression ‘value of labour’ presupposes a change of form; the value of labour-power appears, manifests itself in a form of manifestation (Erscheinungsform) which is the value of labour. As a form of manifestation of labour-power, the value of labour is a form of manifestation of that relation of production essential to the capitalist mode of production – wage-labour. The mechanism of transformation of the forms is thus determined by the relations of production, which manifest themselves in the Erscheinungsformen by concealing themselves. The imaginariness is the index of this peculiar effectivity, this manifestation/concealment of the relations of production:
We may therefore understand the decisive importance of the transformation of the value and price of labour-power into the form of wages, or into the value and price of labour itself. All the notions of justice held by both the worker and the capitalist, all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production, all capitalism’s illusions about freedom, all the apologetic tricks of vulgar economics, have as their basis the form of appearance discussed above, which makes the actual relation invisible, and indeed presents to the eye the precise opposite of that relation (Vol. 1, p. 680).
d) The concept of process
In the study of the phantasmagoric objectivity of commodities and in that of the imaginary expression ‘value of labour’, a certain structure can be apprehended. We see that the forms of Wirklichkeit are forms of manifestation for the social relations of production which do not appear as such in this field of Wirklichkeit but which structure the relations given there. At the same time, we see that all these forms of manifestation are equally forms of concealment. It is this structure which is misrecognized by classical economics. In the absence of a theory of form it misrecognizes its own object. It does not recognize the specific objectivity with which science is concerned, that of a determinate process of production.
For an understanding of this concept ‘process’, let us first recall Marx’s definition: ‘The word process … expresses a development considered in the totality of its real conditions’ (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 685, modified according to the French edition).
Let us complete this definition by mentioning the two essential characteristics of a process, i.e.:
1) its development leads to a constant reproduction of its starting-point;
2) the elements in it are defined not by their nature but by the place they occupy, the function they fulfil.
These characteristics are valid even for the simplest process studied by Marx, the labour process in general. Marx shows that the same material elements can play the part of product, raw material or means of labour in the labour process:
Hence we see that whether a use-value is to be regarded raw material, as instrument of labour of as product is determined entirely by its specific function in the labour process, by the position it occupies there: as its position changes, so do its determining characteristics (Vol. 1, p. 289).
A confusion is already possible at this level, a confusion between a material property of the elements of production and their functional determination. But we know in fact that the production process always takes place in determinate social forms, that it is always a determinate production process. This means that the places, forms and functions which it determines must themselves serve as bearers for those which are determined by the relations of production characterizing some mode of production. These relations of production in fact determine new places and functions which give specific forms to the elements of the labour process. In Wirklichkeit, these forms appear as properties of the material elements which support them, whereas they are phenomenal forms, modes of existence of the hidden motor of the development. The same is true of the commodity form which, in the fetishistic illusion, is severed from the social relations which found it, and of the form ‘value of labour’ behind which is hidden the value of labour-power, i.e., the capitalist relations of production.
This structure of the process of science implies the specific character of the concepts of the science which explains it. This is expressed by Marx in an opposition which determines the true form of scientificity on the one hand, and the principle of the errors of classical economics, on the other. ‘What is at issue here is not a set of definitions under which things are to be subsumed. It is rather definite functions that are expressed in specific categories’ (Capital, Vol. 2, p. 303).
| Things (Dinge) | Functions |
| subsume | express |
| definitions | categories |
Believing that it deals with natural relations between stable things, classical economics misrecognizes the specific structure of the capitalist process of production. In fact the latter is constituted by the concealment of the process of production in general, of the form of commodity production, and of the forms peculiar to the capitalist process which itself develops at several levels (production, reproduction, overall process). Classical economics, which flattens this structure down to a single plane, is trapped in a whole series of confusions: a confusion of the material determinations of the elements of production with the capitalist forms of these determinations; a confusion between forms of simple commodity production and capitalist forms; confusions between the forms of capital in the production process and in the circulation process, etc. Smith’s conception of fixed and circulating capital, criticized by Marx in Volume Two, is a concentrate of all these confusions. Smith succeeds in reducing the determinations of fixed and circulating capital, determinations of the form of the capital involved in the circulation process, to the mobility or immobility of the material elements of capital.
Thus we see how the study of the starting-point of Capital leads us to recognize the peculiar objectivity with which science is concerned, and to understand the basis of the errors of classical economics.
Appendix – Commodity relations and capitalist relations
Our analysis of the value-form raised the following objection. In order to explain the identity abstract labour/concrete labour which determines the value-form of commodities, we introduced the capitalist relations of production. Now it is evident that the commodity form existed long before the capitalist mode of production, and it seems that the analysis made of the commodity in the first part of Capital only introduces the characteristics of commodity production in general, independently of the part this form of production may play in different modes of production.
First let me restrict the range of the objection. It does not contradict at all what seems to me to be the fundamental point, namely the fact that the phenomena of economic reality (Wirklichkeit) are only comprehensible in so far as they manifest, in a specific distortion, the effectivity of the relations of production. However, what is at issue is the exact meaning of the function that the analysis of the commodity plays in the theory of the capitalist process of production, the function of the starting-point.
In fact, it seems at first that in Capital Volume One, Part One it is only a question of commodity production in general, in so far as it is a necessary presupposition of the capitalist mode of production. Thus we are concerned with the commodity in general and not with the commodity as an element of a capital commodity. The identity of useful labour and labour creative of value simply defines commodity production, capitalist production being defined by the identity of useful labour and labour creative of surplus-value.
In this first part we should thus be at a stage (theoretically and historically) prior to the peculiar determinations of the capitalist mode of production. Given this, a historicist reading is possible, one which sees in the first part a genetic exposition moving from primitive forms of exchange to bourgeois forms via those commodity islands which develop, as Marx puts it, in the interstices of societies prior to the capitalist mode of production.
But at the same time, Marx tells us that ‘the value-form of the product of labour is the most abstract, and but also the most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production; by that fact it stamps the bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of social production of a historical and transitory character’ (Vol. 1, p. 174 n35), and he affirms in a letter to Engels dated 22 June 1867 that the simplest form of the commodity ‘embodies the whole secret of the money form and thereby, in nuce, of all bourgeois forms of the product of labour’ (MECW 42, p. 384). The metaphor of the embryo, like that of the cell in the Preface to the first German edition, indicates that the peculiar determinations of the capitalist mode of production are not simply added on over and above the simple determinations of the commodity and the exchange of commodities, but must in some way be already present in them. If so, we should have in the first chapter of Capital not at all an analysis of the general characteristics of all commodities but an analysis of the commodity form in so far as it is the simplest form of a determinate mode of production, the capitalist mode of production.
The accuracy of such an interpretation is clearly confirmed by Marx’s praise of Steuart in the first chapter of A Contribution:
Steuart knew very well that in pre-bourgeois eras also products assumed the form of commodities and commodities that of money; but he shows in great detail that the commodity as the elementary and primary unit of wealth and alienation as the predominant form of appropriation are characteristic only of the bourgeois period of production, and that accordingly labour which creates exchange-value is a specifically bourgeois feature (MECW 29, p. 298).
However, we must avoid the trap of a Hegelian reading of Capital, according to which the commodity form contains in embryo, in its interiority, all the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, of which capital is only the development – with the corollary, inevitable in a discourse of the Hegelian type, that this starting-point is itself mediated by the destination point, that the commodity presupposes the whole development of the capitalist production process.
Note that Marx provides at least as many arguments for this Hegelian interpretation as he does for the historicist interpretation, and let me show the way I believe the problem can be posed correctly. To do so I can draw on the indications that Marx gives us in the chapter in Volume Three entitled ‘Relations of Distribution and Relations of Production’:
[Capitalist production] produces its products as commodities. The fact that it produces commodities does not in itself distinguish it from other modes of production; but that the dominant and determining character of its product is that it is a commodity certainly does so. This means, first of all, that the worker himself appears only as a seller of commodities, and hence as a free wage-labourer, i.e., labour generally appears as wage-labour (Vol. 3, p. 1019).
What is also implied already in the commodity, and still more so in the commodity as the product of capital, is the reification of the social determinations of production and the subjectification (Versubjektifierung) of the material bases of production which characterize the entire capitalist mode of production (p. 1020).
[T]he particular form in which social labour-time plays its determinant role in the value of commodities coincides with the form of labour as wage-labour, and the corresponding form of the means of production as capital, in so far as it is on this basis alone that does commodity production become the general form of production (p. 1022).
Only on the basis of the capitalist relations of production does the form of commodity production become the dominant form of production and the commodity form appear in a general way and with all the determinations to which it is susceptible as a form of the product of labour. Or, to put it another way, the identity of useful labour with labour creative of value only determines social production overall on the basis of the identity of useful labour and labour creative of surplus-value.
This confirms the determinant character of the capitalist relations of production.
Given the separation of immediate producers and means of production, the conversion of the means of production into capital, achieved in the process of the constitution of the capitalist mode of production (‘primitive accumulation’), the useful labour of the worker, of the immediate producer, can be manifested only as labour creative of value. This creates the condition which allows the identity of useful labour and labour creative of value to become the general law of production. It is in this way that the characteristics of the capitalist mode of production can be found already implied (eingeschlossen) in the simple commodity form of the product of labour.
(2) Structure of the Process and Perception of the Process
a) The development of forms and the inversion
We have established a first concept expressing the relation between the internal determination of the process and its forms of appearance (or forms of manifestation) – the concept of concealment. In doing so, we have provisionally left in the shade a second concept which defines this relation – the concept of inversion (Verkehrung).
Studying the change in form which converts the value of labour-power into value of labour, Marx declares: ‘[this] form of appearance … makes the actual relation invisible, and indeed presents to the eye the precise opposite of that relation’ (Vol. 1, p. 680). ‘In the expression “value of labour”, the concept of value is not only completely extinguished, but inverted, so that it becomes its contrary’ (Vol. 1, p. 677).
What does this inversion consist of? What appears in the form of wages is the fact that the worker is paid for the whole of his working day without distinction, whereas in reality the wages correspond to the value of the labour-power, and therefore to the part of the working day during which the worker reproduces the value of his own labour-power. In the form of wages, the basis for the understanding of surplus-value (the division of the working day) is thus reversed.
One of the essential points of the revolution brought about by Marx in political economy consists of his bringing to light in its domain this connection of inversion between scientific determination and phenomenal form, which is for him a general law of scientificity. ‘That in their appearance things are often presented (sich darstellt) in an inverted way is something fairly familiar in every science, apart from political economy’ (Vol. 1, p. 677).
The inversion of the inner structural determinations, which bear witness to the constitutive character of the relations of production, in their forms of manifestation, thus appears as a fundamental characteristic of the process. It is this law which determines the development of its forms.
We already have an illustration of this even at the level of mere monetary circulation. Money is in fact a form of existence of the value of commodities and monetary circulation a form of motion for the contradictions in commodities. But an examination of the movement of circulation as it is given in ordinary experience reveals a different presentation:
The circulation of money is the constant and monotonous repetition of the same process. The commodity is always in the hands of the seller; the money, as a means of purchase, always in the hands of the buyer. And money serves as a means of purchase by realizing the price of the commodity. By doing this, it transfers the commodity from the seller to the buyer, and removes the money from the hands of the buyer into those of the seller, where it again goes through the same process with another commodity. That this one-sided form of motion of money arises out of the two-sided form of motion of the commodity is a circumstance which is hidden from view. The very nature of circulation itself produces a semblance of the opposite … As means of circulation, money circulates commodities, which in and for themselves lack the power of movement, and transfers them from hands in which they are non-use-values into hands in which they are use-values; and this process always takes the opposite direction to the path of the commodities themselves. Money constantly removes commodities from the sphere of circulation, by constantly stepping into their place in circulation, and in this way continually moving away from its own starting-point. Hence although the movement of the money is merely the expression of the circulation of commodities, the situation appears to be the reverse of this, namely the circulation of commodities seems to be the result of the movement of the money (Vol. 1, pp. 211–2).
Here Marx distinguishes between two motions: a real motion which is the movement of value, a movement which is concealed in the repetition of the process of circulation, and an apparent motion, a movement accredited by everyday experience, and which presents the inverse of the real motion.
We find that this relation of inversion is confirmed as we pass from the most abstract and least developed forms of the capitalist process to its most developed and most concrete forms. It is the development of these ‘concrete forms which grow out of the process of capital’s movement considered as a whole’ (Vol. 3, p. 117), forms determined by the unity of the production process and the circulation process in the process of capital as a whole, that forms the object of Volume Three of Capital. This development ends with the forms which are manifest at the surface of capitalist production, those in which different capitals confront one another in competition, and which are perceived in their daily experience by the economic subjects to whom Marx gives the name of agents of production.
The development of the forms of the process is thus governed by the law of inversion; the forms in which the process of capitalist production presents itself or appears are rigorously inverted with respect to its inner determination. They present a connection of things (Zusammenhang der Sache) which is the inverse of the inner connection (innere Zusammen-hang), an apparent motion which is the inverse of the real motion of capitalist production. It is this form of the apparent motion or of the connection of things which is given to the perception of the agents of production.6
We shall study this law in a precise example – the theory of the ‘grounds for compensation’ expounded by Marx in Volume Three (pp. 310ff.). However, before beginning our study of this text, I must first make two preliminary remarks.
1) The analysis of the grounds for compensation presents the application of the following passages from Volume One:
The general and necessary tendencies of capital must be distinguished from their forms of appearance. While it is not our intention to consider the way in which the immanent laws of capitalist production manifest themselves in the external movement of the individual capitals, assert themselves as the coercive laws of competition, and therefore enter into the consciousness of the individual capitalist as the motives which drive him forward, this much is clear: a scientific analysis of competition is possible only if we can grasp the inner nature of capital, just as the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies are intelligible only to someone who is acquainted with their real motions (Vol. 1, p. 433).
In the relation between these three terms – tendencies immanent to capitalist production (real motion), movements of individual capitals (apparent motion), and the motives of the capitalists – we can see the outline of a theory of capitalist subjectivity, a theory of motors and motives, completely different from that of the 1844 Manuscripts. It is not the motives of the capitalist that turn against him in the form of objectivity; it is the tendencies specific to capital, the structural laws of the capitalist mode of production, that, through the phenomena of competition, are internalized as motives by the capitalists.
In Volume One this problem could only be posed incidentally. In Volume Three, on the contrary, the analysis of the inner nature of capital reaches the point where Marx is able, without analysing competition in itself, to pose the basis for such an analysis – the determination of the relation between real motion and apparent motion.
2) The analysis of the grounds for compensation is a part of the study of the equalization of the rate of profit through competition. Its understanding demands that we recall the broad outlines of the transition from surplus-value to profit and the establishment of an average rate of profit.
i) Surplus-value and profit
Let us start with the formula c (constant capital) + v (variable capital) + s (surplus-value), which expresses the value of commodities. We derive from it the rate of surplus value = s/v. The formula s/v expresses what Marx calls the conceptual connection. In fact it expresses the origin of surplus-value as the ratio of unpaid to paid labour.
At the level of the concrete phenomena of the process of capital as a whole, surplus-value does not appear. What does appear is a form of appearance of surplus-value – profit. Like all forms of appearance, profit is at the same time a form of concealment. In fact, what is considered in it is no longer the conceptual connection of surplus-value with variable capital, but its a-conceptual (begriffslose) connection with the whole of capital, a connection in which the differences between the component elements disappear. In which, therefore, according to Marx, ‘the origins of surplusvalue and the mystery of its existence’ are obliterated.
The rate of profit is expressed by the formula
which in reality represents s/v, the mass of profit being equal to the mass of surplus-value and the sum c + v determining the cost of production.
ii) The establishment of the average rate of profit
Unlike the rate of surplus-value, the rate of profit is determined by variations of constant capital. Independently of the rate of surplus-value and the mass of profit, the rate of profit will vary as a function of the lesser or greater importance of constant capital in relation to variable capital (which alone produces surplus-value).
If a capital has an organic composition lower than the average, i.e., if the proportion of constant capital in it is lower than the average, then the rate of profit will increase, and vice versa.
In a situation of perfect competition, there will be a flow of capital towards the spheres in which the rate of profit is higher than the average. This inflow of capital will induce an expansion of supply in relation to demand and vice versa in the spheres from which the capital has been withdrawn. Thus an equilibrium will be established:
This constant migration, the distribution between the various spheres according to where the rate of profit is rising and where it is falling, is what produces a relationship between supply and demand such that the average profit is the same in the various different spheres, and values are therefore transformed into prices of production (Vol. 3, p. 297).7
As a consequence, capitals of the same size will yield equal profits, independently of their organic compositions. The law of value is thus overturned, or, more accurately, it is realized in the form of its opposite. But this determination by the law of value is known only by science. The forms of competition in which it is realized conceal it. This is what Marx shows in the passage on the grounds for compensation:
What competition does not show, however, is the determination of values that governs the movement of production; that it is values that stand behind the prices of production and ultimately determine them (Vol. 3, p. 311).
On the contrary, competition does show three phenomena which go against the law of value:
1) The existence of average profits independently of the organic composition of the capital in the various spheres of production, and therefore of the mass of living labour that a capital expropriates in a determinate sphere;
2) The rise and fall of prices of production consequent on a change in wages;
3) The oscillation of market prices around a market price of production different from the market value:
All these phenomena seem to contradict both the determination of value by labour-time and the nature of surplus-value as consisting of unpaid surplus labour. In competition, therefore, everything appears upside down. The finished configuration (fertige Gestalt) of economic relations, as these are visible on the surface, in their actual existence, and therefore also in the notions with which the bearers and agents of these relations seek to gain an understanding of them, is very much different from the configuration of their inner core (Kerngestalt), which is essential but concealed, and the concept (Begriff) corresponding to this (ibid.).
We have in this passage the elements of a theory:
– of the structure of the process;
– of the place of the subject in that structure;
– of the possibility of ideological discourse and its difference from science.
Let us put the relevant terms together in a general table. We can complement this table with a certain number of equivalent terms. The level of the fertige Gestalt is also that of the connection of things, of the apparent motion and of reality (Wirklichkeit). The level of the Kerngestalt is that of the inner connection and of the real motion.
To start with, this table enables us to specify the concept of science. In order to do this, let us recall the passage which defined classical economics as a science:
Classical political economy seeks to reduce (zurückführen) the various fixed and mutually alien forms of wealth to their inner unity (innere Einheit) by means of analysis and to strip away the form in which they exist independently alongside one another. It seeks to grasp (begreifen) the inner connection in contrast to the multiplicity (Mannigfaltigkeit) of outward forms (Erscheinungsformen) (Theories of Surplus-Value, MECW 32, p. 499).
We noted that in this project of classical political economy the dimension of science was installed by the establishment of a difference whose concept was not thought. Let us try to look more closely at why it was not, by examining the system of terms which in our text define the operation of begreifen, the pattern of the Begriff.
| zurückführen | Mannigfaltigkeit |
| Einheit | Erscheinungsformen |
It is a question of the reduction to a unity of the multiplicity of phenomenal forms, which defines a Kantian-style project. By utilizing this Kantian vocabulary, Marx designates a certain type of relationship between the science and its object of investigation, which in the Theories of Surplus-Value he characterizes as formal abstraction, false abstraction, insufficient abstraction.
By restricting itself to an external relationship between the inner unity and the multiplicity of the Erscheinungsformen, this type of abstraction misses the development of form, which enables the Kerngestalt to be realized in a fertige Gestalt that contradicts it, which makes the apparent motion a function of the real motion. This is linked to the fact that the conditions of possibility of this unity have not been thought, the fact that the motor of the system has not been discovered. Having thought these conditions of possibility, Marx is able to formulate the concept of the constitutive difference of science, to assign science its exact function. If, in the development of the forms of the process, the inner essence, the essential pattern, disappears, concealed and inverted in its developed forms, if it becomes an invisible element (as surplus-value does in the form of profit), science is founded as the science of that invisible, a reduction of the visible movement to the invisible movement. It is therefore possible to replace the first definition of science by this new definition, which may seem just as schematic at first sight, but which we shall be able to explain rigorously: ‘it is one of the tasks of science to reduce the visible and apparent movements to the actual inner movement’ (Capital, Vol. 3, p. 428).
This reduction of the apparent motion is in fact no more than the presentation of the real motion. That is why the term which designates scientific activity, in our text, is that of Begriff. It is a matter of grasping the movement by which the inner determination of the process manifests itself.
It is by no means useless to situate the concepts of Begriff and begreifen in relation to the 1844 Manuscripts. There the operation of begreifen designated a translation into an anthropological discourse of reference. From then on all the categories of political economy could be rediscovered as expressions of the same concept (alienated labour). Each was only a ‘developed and determinate expression’ of those ‘prime bases’ constituted for Marx by private property and alienated labour. He gave as examples of categories which could thus be developed – commerce, competition, capital, money.
In this ‘developed and determinate expression’ we have a formulation very close to that of Capital. But what it in fact designated was a simple relationship between the (anthropological) essence and the phenomenon which was its particularized expression. Begreifen merely established a difference of level between an essence and phenomena which for their part were all at the same level, expressions of the essence with the same status. What was neither developed nor determined in the enumeration of categories (commerce, competition, capital, money) was precisely the difference of levels between money and capital, between the movement of capital and the movement of competition; it was the articulation of these categories in the system of capitalist production.
In Capital, begreifen consists on the contrary of the location of each of these categories by grasping the movement of the forms by which the process of capitalist production takes place. The conceptual work grasps the articulation of the forms in so far as it grasps what determines their articulation, i.e., the social relations. Thus the conceptual connection of the rate of surplus-value makes it possible to apprehend the social relation concealed by the a-conceptual connection of the rate of profit.
By this conceptual grip the science is able to grasp the articulation of the structure. By that very fact it can provide the conditions of possibility of the discourses which can be sustained about it by determining the site from which those discourses are sustained, the site in which are active the representations (Vorstellungen) of the subject.
b) The function of subjectivity
The subject, the agent of production, is defined here and in numerous other passages as a bearer (Träger).
This concept is crucial. We have already seen Marx use it to define the economic objects. That this concept serves to define both the subject and the object clearly shows the displacement of concepts that has been brought about. In the 1844 Manuscripts the central couple was the couple subject/object (or person/thing). The relations defining economic reality existed in the sphere determined by this subject/object couple: action of the subject on the object; inversion of the subject/object relation; recognition of the subject in the object. In Capital it is the position of eccentricity of the relations of production which determines the place of the subject and the object. The subject/object couple is no longer the matrix determining the constitution of the domain of economic reality. The subject is only the bearer of the relations of production constitutive of economic objectivity.
We are dealing with the following series of transformations:
Subject → Agent of production (bearer)
Act → Process
Object → Sensuous-supersensuous thing (bearer)
In the first column it is the subject which is the motor; in the second, the relations of production.
We can measure the distance between the theory of subjectivity in Capital and the theory of subjectivity of the young Marx with reference to the schema of his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. We can see what a gap there was in this schema between the real, substantial subject which Marx defined as the hypokeimenon, and the mystical subject, that bearer of the autonomous idea, the Mystical Idea. Here the substantial subject comes to coincide with the bearer. The concept of the bearer, which designated one of the terms of the speculative operation that confirmed the separation of the subject and its essence, here serves to situate the determination of the subject in the real process. By a double movement, Marx closes the structure of speculation while opening the structure of a process in which the subject finds its place.
On the one hand, the subject loses the substantial density which made it the constitutive principle of all objectivity, of all substantiality, retaining only the meagre reality of a bearer. On the other hand, if, as we have shown, speculation and mystification, far from being the result of a transformation produced on the basis of Wirklichkeit by a certain discourse, characterize the very mode in which the structure of the process presents itself in Wirklichkeit, the essential content of the subject function will consist of ‘being-mystified’.
We observe a transformation of the same order if we envisage the second concept which determines this subject function; this is the concept of personification, which also finds a counterpart in the model of the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. The capitalist and the worker are found to be determined as personifications of those relations of production, capital, and wage-labour. In this way, Marx writes, in a text all the more interesting in that we rediscover in it the problematic of enjoyment and calculation founded on a new basis:
Except as capital personified, the capitalist has no historical value, and no right to that historical existence … It is only to this extent that the necessity of the capitalist’s own transitory existence is implied in the transitory necessity of the capitalist mode of production. But, in so far as he is capital personified, his motivating force is not the acquisition and enjoyment of use-values, but the acquisition and enjoyment of exchange-values … Moreover, the development of capitalist production makes it necessary constantly to increase the amount of the capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition subordinates every individual capitalist to the immanent laws of capitalist production, as external and coercive laws (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 739).
The agent of production is thus defined as a personification or bearer of the relations of production. He intervenes here not as a constitutive subject but as a perceiving subject trying to explain to itself the economic relations that it perceives. The verb erklären, which was the young Marx’s expression for the critical activity, here designates the necessarily mystified manner in which the capitalist subject tries to understand the structure in which it is caught (befangen). Its representations are, indeed, according to Marx, only ‘the conscious expression of the apparent motion’. Its instruments of knowledge are intuition and especially experience, linked to the regularity of the apparent motion, to the stable forms of the fertige Gestalt. Experience teaches certain regular connections, for example a connection between wages and the prices of commodities from which can be drawn the conclusion that an increase in wages raises prices.
Let us see how this system works in the case of the grounds for compensation:
[A]s soon as capitalist production has reached a certain level of development, the equalization between the various rates of profit in individual spheres which produces the general rate of profit does not just take place through the interplay of attraction and repulsion in which market prices attract or repel capital. Once average prices and the market prices corresponding to them have been established for a certain length of time, the various individual capitalists become conscious that certain differences are balanced out in this equalization, and so they take these into account in their calculations among themselves. These differences are actively present in the capitalists’ view of things and are taken into account by them as grounds for compensation. The basic notion is this connection is that of average profit itself, the idea that capitals of equal size must yield equal profits in the same period of time (Capital, Vol. 3, p. 311–2).
The illusion of the capitalist subject can be broken down into two elements:
1) It internalizes as the motives for its actions the phenomena of the apparent motion through which is realized the law of the real motion, of which it is ignorant. Thus the grounds for compensation are merely the phenomenon of the equalization of the rate of profit by competition internalized by the capitalist as the motive determining his calculations:
This idea is then the basis of the capitalist’s calculation, for example, that a capital that turns over more slowly, either because the commodity in question remains in the production process for a longer period or because it has to be sold on distant markets, still charges the profit it would otherwise lose by raising its price and compensates itself in this way (Vol. 3, p. 312).
2) On this basis, capitalism imagines that it is the grounds for compensation which determine the existence of the profit, whereas they do no more than translate the distribution of the mass of profit constituted by the total exploited surplus labour in all spheres as a function of the importance of the individual capitals:
[The capitalist] simply forgets (or rather he no longer sees it, since competition does not show it to him) that all these grounds for compensation that make themselves mutually felt in the reciprocal calculation of commodity prices by the capitalists in different branches of production are simply related to the fact that they all have an equal claim on the common booty, the total surplus-value, in proportion to their capital. It appears to them, rather, that the profit which they pocket is something different from the surplus-value they extort; that the grounds for compensation do not simply equalize their participation in the total surplus-value, but that they actually create profit itself, since profit seems to derive simply from the addition to the cost price made with one justification or another (Vol. 3, pp. 312–3).
We can disengage from this analysis three important elements.
1) We see that at the level of the consciousness of the agent of production, there is a perception of the apparent motion and a confirmation of the inversion which is constitutive of it.
In the real motion, profit depends on surplus-value, i.e., on unpaid labour. It is the total mass of the exploited surplus labour which determines the mass of surplus-value, which therefore determines the limits within which the distribution of profit can take place. The law of labour value thus plays the part of a regulatory law for the whole of production. The category of profit does not concern the production of surplus-value, but its distribution. The apparent motion makes this movement of distribution of surplus-value appear as constitutive of surplus-value. The capitalist subjectivity which internalizes these phenomena under the rubric of grounds for compensation can thus pose its motives as constitutive.
2) We see at the same time what is represented by the representations (Vorstellungen) of the agent of production. It is the categories of his practice. The capitalist has no reason to concern himself with the internal structure of the process. The categories he needs are those which express the forms of the apparent motion in which he lives his practice and carries out his calculations. The constitutive categories of the process are for him in some sense the rubrics of his account book.
Thus the system of capitalist illusions is expressed in a theory of magnitudes. The determination of the value of commodities by labour time is something which takes place behind the back of the capitalist, surplus-value does not figure in his account book. For his calculations he needs given regulatory magnitudes. He finds them in the magnitudes determining the distribution of the value produced – wages, profit, and rent. At the surface of capitalist production, and therefore in the capitalist’s experience, these latter appear as the elements constituting the value of commodities. Thus the capitalist makes them enter his calculations as magnitudes constitutive of value:
Experience shows here in theory, and the self-interested calculation of the capitalist shows in practice, that commodity prices are determined by wages, interest and rent, by the prices of labour, capital and land, and that these price elements are in fact the governing elements of price formation’ (Vol. 3, p. 1014).
3) Lastly, we can determine in this concept of calculation the displacement which has taken place vis-à-vis the 1844 Manuscripts. In this case, the theory of calculation was the index of the capitalist subjectivity turned against itself. The capitalist, in calculating for himself, served as a business agent not for the Hegelian universal spirit, but for the development of the human essence. Here the calculation of the capitalist is located at the level of the apparent motion of the structure. The capitalist believes that his calculation determines the movement of value whereas the former is determined by the latter. The capitalist’s theory of calculation is a theory of the illusion necessary to the capitalist for him to occupy his place as agent of production, as bearer of the capitalist relation.
We rediscover here the mechanism of appearance (Schein) as a dislocation between the constitution of forms and their perception. The capitalist subject qua perceiving subject becomes conscious of certain relations presented by the apparent motion. When he makes them the motives for his action, he comes to take himself for a constitutive subject. He thinks he sees in the Erscheinungen the results of his own constitutive activity. In this manner in which the subject presents itself as constitutive we see the ultimate form of the mystification which we have said is constitutive of its being.
Another example is provided by the fall in the rate of profit, similarly taken for an operation determined by the will of the capitalist:
The phenomenon arising from the nature of the capitalist mode of production, that the price of an individual commodity or a given portion of commodities falls with the growing productivity of labour, while the number of commodities rises; that the amount of profit on the individual commodity and the rate of profit on the sum of commodities falls, but the mass of profit on the total sum of commodities rises – this phenomenon simply appears on the surface as a fall in the amount of profit on the individual commodity, a fall in its price, and a growth in the mass of profit on the increased total number of commodities produced by the total social capital or the total capital of an individual capitalist. The matter is then conceived as if the capitalist voluntarily made less profit on the individual commodity, but compensated himself by the greater number of commodities which he now produces (Vol. 3, p. 337).
Here again, full light is cast on the relation between three terms – immanent tendencies of capital, apparent motion, and the consciousness of the capitalist:
Here the decline in the rate of profit appears as a result of the increase of capital and the capitalists’ consequent calculation that a lower rate of profit will enable them to tuck away a greater mass of profit (Vol. 3, p. 332).
The place of the agents of production in the process thus determines the necessary representations of their practice as mere expressions of the apparent motion of capital and therefore as totally inverted with respect to its real motion. This explains and founds the concept of inversion (Verkehrung) which was used even in The German Ideology to define ideology, but which then remained unfounded, due to the fact that Marx did not establish the difference between the Kerngestalt and the fertige Gestalt. In The German Ideology, Marx was still a prisoner of an ideological concept of Wirklichkeit. For him, science was situated at the level of Wirklichkeit. It was, he said, a matter of studying reality as an ordinary man. As he did not think the difference between reality and the real motion, the inversion appeared as a mere function of a subjectivity – explanation being provided by the characterization of that subjectivity as petty-bourgeois. Stirner and Bauer were petty-bourgeois, and it was the essence of petty-bourgeois subjectivity, which was incapable of seeing reality, to reflect it upside-down.
Here the inversion is founded in the structure of the process itself. The difference between this concept and the concept of Verkehrung which characterized the speculative operation for the young Marx has likewise been established.
The place of the agents of production thus defined determines at the same time the site from which a certain discourse on economics is pronounced – the discourse of vulgar economics:
Vulgar economics actually does nothing more than interpret, systematize and turn into apologetics the notions of the agents trapped within bourgeois relations of production (Vol. 3, p. 956).
In the Third Manuscript of 1844, political economy featured as the discourse of capitalist subjectivity. Here that function falls to a particular discourse – that of vulgar economics. Classical economics on the other hand is located on the terrain of science, and it is on that terrain that the difference between it and Marx’s scientific discourse is established.
c) Value and price of production – a return to the problem of abstraction
We now have the means of specifying this difference. We shall do so à propos of a problem which has given rise to considerable discussion, the relation between value and price of production.
Let us recall the definition of price of production:
the production price of a commodity equals its cost price plus the percentage profit added to it in accordance with the general rate of profit, its cost price plus the average profit (Vol. 3, p. 257).
In the price of production the inversion we have already examined is realized; equal capitals yield equal rates of profit independently of the organic composition of capital, which seems to overturn the theory of value.
Indeed, the basis itself – the determination of the value of commodities by the labour time embodied in them – appears to be invalidated as a result of the conversion of values into cost prices (Theories of Surplus-Value, MECW 32, p. 484).
Since the publication of Capital Volume Three this contradiction has given rise to discussions whose echo we find in Engels’s Supplement to that volume. More recently we find it problematized in an article by an Italian economist, Pietranera – ‘La Struttura logica del Capitale’ (Società, 1955). Pietranera attempts to give an explanation based on the concepts advanced by Della Volpe to define the scientificity of Marxism.
To start with, he criticizes a type of explanation founded on an analogy with physics. According to this explanation, the law of labour value is a theoretical law, valid in vacuo. But in the reality of economic phenomena, we are dealing with a full space. As a result there are a number of accidental perturbatory phenomena analogous to the phenomena of friction. The difference between value and price of production thus expresses the difference between a law operating in vacuo and a law operating in fullness.
For Pietranera this empty/filled opposition refers to a theory of abstraction that is not Marxist. To it he opposes a theory of determinate abstraction, i.e., of the abstraction representing a determinate stage of historical development.
He supports his interpretation with the following quotations:
1) a passage from Volume Three (p. 277):
The exchange of commodities at their values, or at approximately these values, thus corresponds to a much lower stage of development than the exchange at prices of production, for which a definite level of capitalist development is needed.
2) the Supplement to Volume Three written by Engels in order to reply to various objections and interpretations aroused by our problem. In this text, Engels wants to refute the opinion that the law of value is no more than a ‘theoretical fiction’ or an abstraction corresponding to nothing real. This leads him to write:
Marx’s law of value applies universally, as much as any economic laws do apply, for the entire period of simple commodity production, i.e., up to the time when this undergoes a modification by the onset of the capitalist form of production … Thus the Marxian law of value has a universal economic validity for an era lasting from the beginning of exchange that transforms products into commodities down to the fifteenth century of our epoch (Vol. 3, p. 1037).
If Engels’s commentary is correct, we have the rather surprising result that the law of labour value was valid before capitalism but stopped being so with the development of the capitalist mode of production. Within developed capitalism the dominant category is no longer value but price of production.
Pietranera takes this interpretation of Engels’s as his basis. For him, value is a determinate abstraction corresponding to an earlier stage of development. Price of production, on the other hand, presupposes the average rate of profit, it presupposes the existence of different branches of industry characterized by the different technical compositions of their capitals and thus by different organic compositions and different rates of profit. It is thus the determinate abstraction which accounts for the stage of development which is that of capitalism in the nineteenth century.
Given this, Pietranera sets to work one of Della Volpe’s essential theses, according to which the scientificity of Marxism is characterized by the establishment of a logical order of categories which is the inverse of the chronological order of appearance. This thesis depends on a famous passage from the 1857 Introduction, where Marx declares:
It would therefore be unfeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development (Grundrisse, p. 107).
This text refers to the theory of the Grundform (fundamental form). It is clarified by the preceding paragraph, where Marx declares in particular that:
In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others (ibid.).
In the capitalist mode of production, the fundamental form is the form of industrial capital. It is the last in order of appearance. The forms of commercial capital and finance capital are older. It was these forms which made possible the birth of industrial capital. But in so far as industrial capital becomes the fundamental form of the capitalist mode of production, it subjugates these pre-existing forms, it makes them particular forms of its process.
Thus industrial capital has, says Marx, a way of its own to subjugate interest-bearing capital. This is the creation of a form which is peculiar to it, the credit system. In the form of credit, interest-bearing capital appears merely as a particular form subordinate to industrial capital.
This is the schema that Pietranera uses for the relation value/price of production, without taking into account the level at which these categories are situated. He establishes the same relation between value and price of production as that which Marx established between interest bearing capital and industrial capital.
Thus, given a chronological sequence:
market price → value → price of production → (monopoly price)
or, what is just another way of expressing it:
surplus → surplus-value → profit → (monopoly revenue).
By inverting this sequence (the order of historical appearance of the categories) we obtain the theoretical order of their subordination in capitalist society. Each category historically subordinates the preceding category and enables us to understand it theoretically. At the time Marx was writing, the dominant category was that of price of production. The category of value, the dominant category of earlier stages, was then theoretically and historically subordinate. Here, too, we have reached a very surprising result, and one not easily reconcilable with the theory of forms of manifestation.
Why is this application of the passage from the 1857 Introduction illegitimate? In the first case, we were concerned with a relation between forms of existence of value. Industrial capital, the fundamental form of existence of value in the capitalist mode of production, made commercial capital and interest-bearing capital forms of existence of value which were subordinate to it. In the second case (the value/price of production relation) we are concerned with the relation between value and its forms of existence, with the relation between the Kerngestalt, the essential pattern of the process, and its most developed and concrete forms. Profit does not represent a perturbed form vis-à-vis surplus-value. No more does it represent the dominant form which succeeded surplus-value. It is its form of manifestation.
Value and surplus-value are the motors of the system. But as such they are its hidden element:
Surplus-value and the rate of surplus-value are, relative to this, the invisible essence to be investigated, whereas the rate of profit and hence the form of surplus-value as profit are visible surface phenomena (Vol. 3, p. 134).
Likewise, Marx says of the price of production that it is ‘a completely externalized (veräusserlichte) and at first sight a-conceptual (begriffslose) form of the value of commodities’.
In moving from surplus-value to profit, from value to price of production, we do not move to a more advanced historical stage but to another level of the process. We are at the level of the phenomena of the fertige Gestalt and no longer at the level of the essence, of the Kerngestalt. But the inversion of the phenomena is the realization of the law of the essence; what determines the production of surplus-value for the whole of the capitalist class is the law of value. Profit and price of production are categories which concern only the distribution of surplus value between the members of the capitalist class. They are the forms taken by surplus-value and value at the level of the process as a whole.
Thus what Pietranera overlooks is the radical difference which enables Marx to explain what had remained inexplicable to classical economics, because of an inadequate theory of abstraction – the relation of value and surplus-value to their modified forms. The classical economists faced the following problem: how to reconcile the law of labour value with the phenomena of bourgeois production which negate it. Here in particular is how the problem was posed for Adam Smith, according to Marx:
Although Adam Smith determines the value of commodities by the labour time contained in them, he then nevertheless transfers this determination of value in actual fact to pre-Adamian times. In other words, what he regards as true when considering simple commodities becomes confused as soon as he examines the higher and more complex forms of capital, wage-labour, rent, etc. He expresses this in the following way: the value of commodities was measured by labour time in the paradise lost of the bourgeoisie, where people did not confront one another as capitalists, wage workers, landowners, tenant farmers, usurers, and so on, but simply as persons who produced commodities and exchanged them (Theories of Surplus-Value, MECW 29, p. 298).
Now let us remember Engels’s statement, that Marx’s law of value was valid ‘for the entire period of simple commodity production’, before the change brought about by the ‘capitalist form of production’. But it is for just such a conception that Marx attacks Adam Smith. In short, Engels and Pietranera want to exonerate Marx of the Ricardian sin of abstraction by making him adopt the Smithian theory. As for Marx, he leaves us in no doubt as to his own theory: ‘This in fact means that the full development of the law of value presupposes a society in which large-scale industrial production and free competition obtain, in other words, modern bourgeois society’ (ibid., p. 300).
The fact that commodities are exchanged individually at their value is one thing; the law of value is another. The theory of the process and of the development of forms makes it possible to understand that, in its full development, the law of value is realized in its opposite – the exchange of commodities at their prices of production.
It is hard to explain this interpretative error by Engels, who had posed the problem perfectly correctly at the end of the Preface to Volume Two – if not by a ‘realist’ reaction due to circumstances. On the other hand, it is clear enough what gave rise to Pietranera’s. The latter declares that value and price of production correspond to two different levels of abstraction – which should not he says be confused with abstract models. It is indeed a matter of different levels of abstraction, but the latter are not only thought by Pietranera as the expression of different stages of historical development. Abstraction is only thought here as a moment detached from a linear history.
Here Pietranera places himself on a terrain which was that of the 1844 Manuscripts, which represented the theory of the identification of the structure of the process as an object of science with the development of a history. If Pietranera identifies a form of development of the process with a stage of historical development, it is because, like Della Volpe, he stands on the terrain of a historicism and a theory of abstraction as separation, i.e., on the terrain of an empiricism outlined, as we have seen, by the presuppositions of the 1844 Manuscripts. In struggle against abstract dialectics, he cannot conceive of the constitution of an objectivity which does not coincide with the development of a history.
We have here a misrecognition of the structure in the name of a historicist parti pris, whereas, precisely, only an analysis of the determinations of the structure makes it possible to grasp indirectly the historicity of economic forms and categories. The same goes for the analysis of the commodity as a sensuous-supersensuous object, which made it possible to pose it as the expression of certain social relations, that is, of a certain stage of historical development.
Pursuing our study from this point we rediscover our point of departure – Ricardo’s misrecognition of the form of value. Ricardo had posed labour as the substance of value without concerning himself with the particular character of that labour and without taking into account the fact that the labour was represented in a very particular form. He was still content with the affirmation of the law of value. But we know that the perceived phenomena contradict that law.
Two possibilities then present themselves. Either to abandon the law of value, which means abandoning what Marx called ‘the foundation and subsoil of the scientific attitude’. This was the solution of vulgar economics; it was also that of the exoteric Adam Smith, who, having sent the law of value packing to pre-Adamian times, determined the value of commodities by the theory of the three sources (wages, profit, and rent). Or alternatively, to maintain the law of value, like Ricardo; but then violence was needed to make the law fit facts which are in contradiction to it, such as the average rate of profit. Ricardo did this violence by a double negation:
– a negation of the difference between surplus-value and profit. For him profit was merely a different expression for surplus-value, and price of production – which Ricardo called natural price – the money expression of value.
– a negation of the inversion. Thus the average profit which appears as the contradiction of the law of value was for Ricardo a confirmation of it. More generally, in Ricardo, the apparent motion was presented as the confirmation of the real motion.
This double operation reveals Ricardo’s method, the type of abstraction he resorted to:
Ricardo … consciously abstracts from the form of competition, from the appearance of competition, in order to comprehend the laws as such. On the one hand he must be reproached for not going far enough, for not carrying his abstraction to completion … On the other hand one must reproach him for regarding the phenomenal form as immediate and direct proof or exposition of the general laws, and for failing to interpret it. In regard to the first, his abstraction is too incomplete; in regard to the second, it is formal abstraction which in itself is wrong (Theories of Surplus-Value, MECW 31, p. 338).
On the first point, Marx takes a position opposed to the normal criticism of Ricardo, which was also that of the young Marx. Ricardo was not too abstract, he was not abstract enough.
One can see that though Ricardo is accused of being too abstract, one would be justified in accusing him of the opposite: lack of the power of abstraction, inability, when dealing with the values of commodities, to forget profits, a factor which confronts him as a result of competition (ibid., p. 416).
In fact, in his first chapter, which should only have treated the value of commodities, determined by labour time, Ricardo introduced, says Marx, categories such as wages, capital, profit, the general rate of profit, etc. In opposition to his principle (the dissolution of the fixed forms of wealth), Ricardo took as given the particular forms of surplus-value which he did not distinguish from the pure form. Thus, from the first chapter, he presupposed the general rate of profit. Marx, on the contrary, proceeds to a radical dissolution. Look how, in a letter to Engels of 8 January 1868, he defines one of the ‘three fundamentally new elements’ of Capital:
that in contrast to all previous political economy, which from the very outset treated the particular fragments of surplus-value with their fixed forms of rent, profit and interest as already given, I begin by dealing with the general form of surplus-value, in which all these fragments are still undifferentiated, in solution as it were (MECW 42, p. 514).
If Ricardo did not distinguish general form from particular forms, this was fundamentally linked to his misrecognition of the determination of form (Formbestimmungen).
Here we touch on the second point: Ricardo’s abstraction was formal and false in itself. Further on Marx counterposes it to true abstraction, and elsewhere he characterizes it as a forced abstraction. The foundation of this false abstraction is analysed by him at the beginning of his study of Ricardo in the Theories of Surplus-Value:
Ricardo’s method is as follows: He begins with the determination of the magnitude of the value of the commodity by labour time and then examines whether the other economic relations contradict this determination of value or to what extent they modify it (MECW 31, p. 390).
Ricardo’s abstraction did not constitute the simple element whose development permits the reconstruction of the concrete process. Ricardo took the economic categories one by one and sought to find in each the determination of labour value. According to him, it should have been possible to find the abstract essence in the phenomena. To do so it was enough to eliminate the interfering elements. This presupposed that the phenomenon was constituted by:
– an essence;
– various inessential accidents.
Everything which apparently contradicted the law was an accident, it fell within the inessential. An invariant had been posed which was value. Everything which did not reproduce this invariant belonged to the inessential.
Ricardo retained a classical conception of abstraction which could much more legitimately be described as the theory of tritration which some would like to apply to Marx. Not having studied surplus-value in its pure form, Ricardo could not recognize that the apparent perturbations of surplus-value are in fact modes of existence of surplus-value, modes of realization of surplus-value in the form of its opposite. He was therefore obliged to set aside these perturbations and to affirm identity where there is contradiction and inversion, to treat the apparent motion, a contradiction of the real motion, as its immediate confirmation. Marx sums up Ricardo by saying that he wanted to ‘provide the science before the science’ (letter to Kugelmann, 11 July 1868; MECW 43, p. 69). For this reason, we find in Ricardo side by side but not articulated in a system, on the one hand, scientific determinations (the law of value), on the other, the fixed forms of wealth, forms of appearance of value which are taken as given.
If we follow the advice to seek the source of the errors of the economists in their points of departure, we shall establish that the situation in which Ricardo found himself was due to the misrecognition that Marx has registered here at the level of the point of departure. Ricardo did not understand the true relation between profit and surplus-value for the same reason as that which prevented him from understanding the relation between the simple value-form of the commodity and its money form. After having posed the substance (labour) as the invariant, he let the value form fall within the inessential. He took this value-form as something self-evident. It was necessary to problematize this form; to pose the critical question and thus to expose ‘all the secrets of the critical conception’ – the dual character of the labour represented in the value of the commodity.
From here on, it is possible to understand the development of forms of capitalist production. Marx indicates this in a footnote to Chapter 1; the value-form of the product of labour is the most abstract form of the capitalist mode of production. Its analysis enables us to understand the later development of its forms (the money form, the capital form, etc.). On the contrary, if this analysis is lacking, if the critical question of the form is not posed, then the problem of the relation between the essential faun and the concrete forms cannot be posed either. One is reduced to a comparison between the existing categories and the categories which express the inner determination. One is left with a false abstraction which is not developable.
If we recall the text already cited where the method of classical economics was defined by the fact of reducing the different forms of wealth to a unity, we can grasp the difference of Marx’s method in the following text:
Classical political economy occasionally contradicts itself in this analysis. It often attempts directly, leaving out the intermediate links (Mittelglieder), to carry through the reduction and to prove that the various forms are derived from one and the same source. This is however a necessary consequence of its analytical method, with which criticism and understanding must begin. Classical economy is not interested in elaborating how the various forms come into being, but seeks to reduce them to their unity by means of analysis, because it starts from them as given premises. But analysis is the necessary prerequisite of genetical presentation, and of the understanding of the real, formative process (Gestaltungsprozess) in its different phases (Theories of Surplus-Value, MECW 32, p. 500).
If we were to restrict ourselves to the letter of Marx here, classical economics would simply be incomplete. It would fulfil only the first of the two tasks of science – analysis, the reduction to a unity – and neglect the second, the genetical development of forms. In fact, as we have seen, it is the analysis itself, the manner of investigating the unity and determining its mode of existence which separates Marx from Ricardo. Only the analysis of form Marx performs makes possible the second movement, the genetical development.
From here on, the genetical development makes it possible to escape the juxtaposition, comparison and iteration which, in Ricardo’s theory, characterize the relations between economic categories, that is, alone make it possible to constitute a system of political economy. But this constitution is only possible given the renunciation of an understanding of this genetical development as the forward or backward reproduction of a real historical process.
Here again, it is necessary to protect oneself against a historicist interpretation. According to such an interpretation, Marx’s abstraction is developable because it is historical and thus receives from history its movement. What in fact distinguishes Marx’s abstraction is the fact that it grasps the formal properties of a space, the constitution of a domain of objectivity. It is this that enables Marx to develop the complex categories from simple categories.
The difference between Marx and Ricardo is not a difference between a system posed as eternal and a historical system in which the categories have been marked with a ‘+’ sign (the sign of their historicity). Only Marx succeeded in formulating a system in the Kantian sense of the term. There is only one way for political economy to be systematic, and that is to accede to that radically new type of objectivity, which Marx determines in the very first chapter of Capital.
Marx’s revolution does not therefore consist of historicizing the categories of political economy. It consists of making a system of them, and we know that a critique is made of a system by its scientific exposition, i.e., that this system reveals a structure which can only be understood in the theory of the development of social formations.
Correlatively, Ricardo’s ‘system’ appears as a coup de force. By his ‘forced abstraction’, which set out to make all the phenomena that contradict the law of value fit into it by violence, instead of developing the law to show how these phenomena are its modes of existence (in the form of concealment and inversion), Ricardo wanted to assert the science within the non-science. He did not therefore succeed in completing the project of dragging the given forms of wealth from their fixity, their mutual indifference, and of relating them to their inner essence. For this reason, in Ricardo, who represents classical economics in its greatest rigour, the possibility of fetishism is always present. Fetishism was exorcised by Ricardo’s coup de force. It was not understood.
(3) Critique and Science in Capital: ‘Veräusserlichung’ and the Constitution of Fetishism
Preliminaries
The concept of fetishism in Capital poses a problem which can be initially formulated in the naive form: What is involved in fetishism?
We know that this is the conception which acts as a foothold for those who interpret Capital on the basis of the anthropology of the young Marx. For them fetishism is only a new name for alienation. In fetishism relations between men become relations between things. Thus the activity of men passes into an alien being; it becomes a determination of things and men are dominated by these relations between things. Fetishism is therefore an anthropological process analogous to that of alienation.
An opposite interpretation denies fetishism any of the character of a real process and says that it is only a conception of economic relations, an ideology.
In fact we shall only understand fetishism if we think of it in continuity with what I have said about the structure of the process and the development of its forms.
We have seen that as we passed to more and more concrete forms of the process of capitalist production the inner determination that governs their motion disappeared, that the nuclear form disappeared in the completed form. It is this movement that is constitutive of fetishism. A certain connection presents itself on the surface of the process that we can call a fetishistic structure. The fetishistic discourse is the elaboration of this connection of concrete forms presented on the surface of the capitalist process and reflected in the consciousness of the agents of production.
This fetishistic discourse is summed up by Marx in what he calls the trinity formula. The latter is constituted by three couples:
– capital/profit;
– land/rent;
– labour/wages.
The three elements, capital, land, and labour, appear as three sources, each of which produces a revenue. Capital naturally produces profit, labour wages, land rent. This trinity represents the systematization of what the agents of production perceive of the forms in which their activity is inscribed.
Comment
Marx notes that it would be better to replace the first couple (capital/profit) with what it in fact subsumes, namely the capital/interest couple. Profit is indeed a phenomenal form, that is to say, a form of concealment – of surplus-value. But it is still not the most concrete or the most mediated form of surplus-value. It is still related to the sphere of production. Interest, which is itself a phenomenal form or form of concealment of profit, a phenomenal form or form of concealment in the second degree, represents the most concrete and most mediated form of surplus-value. It is manifested outside the sphere of production. Its mechanism is as follows. A sum of money M advanced returns to its owner in the form M′ (M + ΔM), and that by virtue of a contract. There is no longer any question here of a process of production but only of a contract between two persons and of a mysterious power which money possesses of increasing itself.
It is in this form that capital appears on the surface of the capitalist process. Thus it is the capital/interest formula that really constitutes the first couple of the trinity formula.
In order to study the constitution of fetishism I shall examine the conditions of possibility of one of the three couples, the capital/profit (i.e., capital/interest) couple. This condition of possibility is what Marx calls the Veräusserlichung of the relations of capital. In order not to anticipate my elucidation of the meaning of this concept, I shall translate it directly as externalization.
The problem of the Veräusserlichung of the relations of capital – by which should be understood capital as a relation of production – is thematized by Marx particularly in Chapter 24 of Volume Three: ‘Interest-Bearing Capital as the Superficial Form of the Capital Relation’.
In this text the form of interest-bearing capital is characterized as the most externalized (äusserlichste) form of the relations of capital. On the basis of this text and other texts in Capital Volume Three and in Theories of Surplus-Value I can give a certain number of synonyms for this superlative – they define interest-bearing capital as the most concrete, the most mediated, the most fetishized, and the most alienated (entfremdetste) form. This leads me to two interesting comments. On the one hand, the movement of fetishization seems to be identical to the movement of externalization. On the other, we find the key concept of the anthropological critique, Entfremdung (alienation), appearing as equivalent to the concept of Veräusserlichung. In Volume Three and Theories of Surplus-Value we are concerned with an Entfremdung/Veräusserlichung couple strangely reminiscent of the dominant couple of the 1844 Manuscripts – Entfremdung/Entäusserung. Hence the necessity to specify the meaning of the couple we are concerned with here so as to see whether it refers to the same thing as the one in the Manuscripts.
What, therefore, is Veräusserlichung? Let me pose the concepts by which we can account for the structure of the process, in order to define the structure of this movement which makes the constitution of fetishism possible. These are the concepts of:
– relation, by which of course should be understood relation of production, in so far as it is these relations that underlie the whole process;
– form, in so far as the form is that by which the relation is manifested, by which it is represented in Wirklichkeit;
– origin and limit of the process;
– motion or development of the forms;
– result.
I propose to study the transformation of these elements which make possible the fetishized form (figure) of the process.
a) The ‘Begriffslosigkeit’ of the form
The externalization of the relations of capital depends first of all on the fact that the form of interest-bearing capital is a begriffslose form, an a-conceptual form or, if you prefer, a form deprived of a concept. This is the form M − T where M′ = M + m (or M + ΔM). The Begriffslosigkeit lies in the fact that, in this form, the process that makes it possible disappears.
In fact the movement M − M′ which is posited here as a spontaneous movement of M is only possible if the money-capital M enters into a process of production in which it is expanded in value. It is this expansion of value within the process P of reproduction of industrial capital that makes possible the increase ΔM.
For the true circuit undergone by this M, it is necessary to posit, in the interval between M and M′, the whole circuit of money capital, which is one of the three circuits, one of the three functional forms of industrial capital studied by Marx at the beginning of Volume Two.
We shall then have:
This process alone permits the transition from an initial value M to a value M′ equal to M + ΔM.8
The question which interests us here is to know what are the relations between M and M′ in this circuit. Let us ask first what is the specific form of M in the stage 
.
Here is Marx’s answer:
In this first stage, M circulates as money. It functions as money capital simply because it is only in its monetary state that it performs a monetary function, and can be converted into the elements of P that face it as commodities, L and mp. In this act of circulation, it functions only as money (Vol. 2, p. 130).
This means that M is not in itself capital. By itself it does not possess any power of increase. It only fulfils a money function (a purchasing function) and not a capital function (a function of self-expanding value). What is it that transforms this pure money function into a capital function? It is the nature of its link with the other stages of the process. ‘[B]ut because this act9 is the first stage of capital value in process, it is simultaneously a function of money capital, by virtue of the specific useful form of the commodities L and mp that are bought’ (Vol. 2, p. 130).
This last phrase means two things:
1) is a function of money capital, it plays a part in the capitalist process of reproduction in so far as it makes possible, by virtue of the special character of L and mp, stage P, which is that of the expansion of value.
2) More particularly, the decisive thing here is the nature of the commodity L (labour-power). The process of the expansion of the value of M is made possible by the presence on the market of this absolutely unique commodity, labour-power. The form we are concerned with thus conceals the opposition between capital and wage-labour; its study reveals capitalist relations of production as the motor of the circuit:
Firstly, this whole circuit presupposes the capitalist character of the production process, and hence considers this process itself as a basis, as well as the specific social relations determined by it. M − C =
; but M – L implies that the wage-labourer, and therefore the means of production too, are a part the productive capital; hence the labour and valorization process, the production process, is already a function of capital (Vol. 2, p. 142).
Now let us consider M′. It can neither be said to be the product of M nor even that of P (except in certain special cases such as the production of gold). It is the converted form of C′. The return to the money-form is a function not of money capital but of commodity capital C′. The difference m, the money-form of the difference c produced by stage P, does not represent a movement which is attributable to M itself.
[W]ithin the circuit of industrial capital, money capital performs no other functions than those of money and … these money functions have the significance of capital functions only through their connection with the other stages of the circuit. The representation (Darstellung) of M′ as a relation between m and M, as a capital relation, is not a direct function of money capital, but rather of the commodity capital C′, which in turn expresses, as a relation between c and C, only the result of the production process, of the self-valorization of the capital value that takes place within it (Vol. 2, p. 157).
It follows that in the formula M′ = M + ΔM which expresses the result of the circuit, there is no relation between M and M′. The equation is an impossible one. This positing of an impossible relation is, as we know, expressed by Marx in the concept of the imaginary or irrational.
Naturally a reason for this irrational or imaginary is found in the conceptual formula which expresses the totality of the circuit of money capital and its link with the other circuits. The imaginary and a-conceptual formula M′ = M + ΔM is explained by the complete formula:
This formula expresses the conceptual relation, that is,
1) it grasps the set of permutations and changes of form which constitute the circuit and unite it to the other circuits in the ensemble of the process of reproduction of capital;
2) it indicates the determinant character of the relation of production which underlies the whole process of the self-expansion of value.
The impossible relation of M′ to M can only be sustained by what governs the whole capital – capital as a relation of production, with its complement, wage-labour.
Thus the circuit of money capital is the one which best expresses the capitalist process. In fact it is a peculiarity of this process that it has as its principle the self-expansion of value, as the circuit from M to M′ clearly expresses. But this determinate form of the process of reproduction of capital, the process of self-expansion of value made possible by the relations of production of capital and wage-labour, tends to disappear in its result:
M′ thus appears as a sum of values which is internally differentiated, undergoes a functional (conceptual) self-differentiation, and expresses the capital relation. But this is expressed simply as a result, without the mediation of the process whose result it is (Vol. 2, p. 128).
This circuit is therefore characterized by the disappearance of the process in its result. It thus lends itself, should it happen to be autonomized, to the misrecognition of the capitalist process.
In the ensemble of the process of reproduction studied by Marx in Volume Two, there is no risk of this autonomization occurring. The autonomy of the circuit of money capital disappears in the circuit of commodity capital:
The appearance of independence that the money form of the capital value possesses in the first form of the circuit (that of money capital), vanishes in this second form, which thus constitutes a critique of form I, and reduces this to a mere particular form (Vol. 2, p. 154).
The criticism of this form (figure) is performed by the development of the whole process of reproduction. But this development only appears in science.
In reality this autonomization, this loss of concept (Begriffslosigkeit) and imaginariness, will in fact manifest themselves the closer one gets to the more concrete and more mediated forms of the capitalist process.
This sequence reaches its extreme in the form of interest-bearing capital. This form is indeed the most concrete and mediated form of capital. It not only presupposes the transformation of surplus-value into profit, but the division of profit into profit of enterprise and interest. The finance capitalist who advances the sum of money M remains outside the whole process of production and reproduction. All he does is to advance a sum M and withdraw a sum M′. What happens between these two acts does not concern him.
Thus the whole capitalist process has disappeared in the faun M − M′. The Begriffslosigkeit expresses the disappearance of all the intermediary terms whose connection makes the relation of M to M′ possible. It thereby expresses the disappearance of what underlies this connection and makes it possible, the capitalist relations of production. This disappearance of the relations of production in the Begriffslosigkeit of the form is the basis for the externalization (Veräusserlichung) of what Marx calls the relations of capital.
We know that this disappearance is made possible by the development of forms which leads to the most concrete, most mediated form, that of interest-bearing capital. This development of forms and this concatenation of mediations themselves disappear in the resultant form. This form which is the most mediated form of the capitalist process presents itself as pure immediacy, as a pure relation of money capital itself to itself.
Starting from here we can understand the concept of Veräusserlichung. We know in fact that it marks a relation between relation of production and form of the process. Moreover, we have already recognized the general mechanism of the link relation/form and characterized it as a link of metonymic causality. In the begriffslose Form which has lost all the characteristics which located it in a definite place in the development and articulation of the forms of the process, this metonymic causality produces its most radical effects.
Before going into the details of these effects I can already note that the terms of the problem exclude a certain type of interpretation of Veräusserlichung (and of Entfremdung). The terms present are not subject, predicate, and things, but relation and form. The becoming alien in question here does not mark the externalization of the predicates of a subject in an alien entity, but designates what becomes of the relations of capital in the most mediated form of the process.
b) The Veräusserlichung of the relation
The concept of Veräusserlichung is almost ritually accompanied by three other concepts; those of Verrücktheit (absurdity), Versachlichung (materialization) and Verkehrung (reversal).
I shall leave the first term on one side; it has no conceptual significance of its own. The concept of Verkehrung, though, does pose a problem. On the one hand it designates the inversion of the inner determination of the process in its completed forms, which has already been studied. But here it takes on a new meaning which I shall examine later on.
The concept of Versachlichung must be understood on the basis of what I have already said about the constitution of Gegenständlichkeit and the mechanism of Darstellung. In the analysis of the commodity form we saw that the thing, the object, was the bearer of a relation and that the misrecognition of this bearer function, of the sensuous/supersensuous character of the thing, transformed what was the expression of a social relation into a natural property of the thing.
More precisely, everything turned on the function of the form. The latter was simultaneously the form (guise) of the thing and the phenomenal form of the relations of production.
We rediscover the mechanism of Darstellung brought to light by Marx in the relation between capital as a thing (a sum of money or a mass of material elements – raw materials, machines, etc., and capital as a relation of production for which the former serves as a bearer. ‘But capital is not a thing, it is a definite social relation of production pertaining to a particular historical social formation, which simply takes the form (sich darstellt) of a thing and gives this thing a specific social character’ (Vol. 3, p. 953).
We rediscover the Verhältnis–Ding opposition, an opposition which has its mode of existence in Darstellung. Misrecognition of the Darstellung cancels the opposition and transforms capital into a mere thing. The three terms here are:
– capital as a relation of production;
– the capital form, which here is the a-conceptual form of interest-bearing capital;
– the thing (the material elements of capital), which acts as a bearer to the capital-relation by adopting the guise of the form of interest-bearing capital.
Now the form of interest-bearing capital has lost all memory of what made it a special and determinate form of capital. Its formal determinations will thus be confused with the material determinations of the thing.
The form ceases to perform its function as a form because of its Begriffslosigkeit. The social determinations of the relations of production will thus find themselves reduced to the material determinations of the thing. Hence the confusion between what Marx calls material foundations (things which perform the function of bearers) and social determinations. The latter become natural properties of the material elements of production. Thus the capital-relation has become a thing.
But this thing has some very special properties. Its mysterious character can be expressed in two ways:
– If M is considered as a sum of value, the relation M − M′ will take the form of the incomprehensible (unbegreiflich) relation 4 = 5. The issue here is the mystery of the increase.
– The solution to this mystery can be sought in the use-value of the material elements of the thing M. An incommensurable relation is then substituted for an incomprehensible relation; the thing M produces surplus-value, that is, a social relation. I shall state this mystery adequately by giving this incommensurable relation its true name; it is an imaginary or irrational relation.
We can thus understand the possibility of this mystery and its solution. The elucidation of the concept of Verkehrung will provide us with the solution. This concept designates the following motion: the transformation of the social relation into a thing is equally a transformation of the thing into a social relation. The thing in which the social relation has disappeared has inherited the motion that the social relation determines. This motion is present in the thing as a natural faculty or occult quality. Here we have the precise and complete meaning of the concealment by which Marx characterizes the mode of action of the relations of production.
The effect of this mode of action is first manifest in the fact that the thing appears to be an automaton endowed with a determinate motion. The transition from 4 to 5 is possible because the thing possesses in itself a reason for its increase. And it possesses this reason because, as Marx said, it finds itself pregnant through the presence inside it of the social relation. It is therefore the imaginary or irrational that is the reason for the increase of the thing.10 The imaginary or irrational is thus confirmed in every sense of the word as the reason for and of Wirklichkeit. The mode of presence of the social relation in the thing enables the two mysteries to be explained: the mystery of the increase; and the mystery of the production of a social relation by a mere thing. The thing-capital can thus produce interest naturally and in a determinate fashion (as land produces rent). We can summarize this motion by saying that the thing has become an autonomous subject, something that Marx expresses in the concept of Versubjektivierung (subjectification).
We are therefore dealing with a double motion: the materialization of the social determinations of production; and the subjectification of its material bases, of the things in which these social determinations are represented and concealed. Marx explains that this double motion was already perceptible in the simplest determination of the capitalist mode of production – the commodity-form of the labour product:
What is also implied already in the commodity, and still more so in the commodity as the product of capital, is the reification (Verdinglichung) of the social determinations of production and the subjectification (Versubjektivierung) of the material bases of production which characterize the entire capitalist mode of production (Vol. 3, p. 1020).
It is this double motion that constitutes the second meaning, evoked above, of the concept of Verkehrung, which I shall translate here as reversal (renversement). The result of this reversal is ‘the bewitched, distorted and upside-down world’ (Vol. 3, p. 969).
I believe that it is essential to distinguish between these two functions of the concept of Verkehrung, because only the first (inversion as a function determined by the development of forms, by the transition from the Kerngestalt to the fertige Gestalt) is capable of receiving a rigorous conceptual determination. The second function fulfilled by the Verkehrung (double motion of materialization of social relations and subjectification of material bearers) is the one surrounded by a whole anthropological halo, marked by an unreflected and uncriticized reference to an earlier conceptual domain.
We must here examine closely the relation between this image of reversal as a characteristic of the Veräusserlichung of the relations of capital and the classical image of alienation as it is expressed in the 1844 Manuscripts. All the terms of the motion described here by Marx seem to find their equivalents in these Manuscripts. The structure here constituted by the pair of synonyms Entfremdung/Veräusserlichung and the concept of Verkehrung corresponds in the 1844 Manuscripts to the structure constituted by the couple Entfremdung/Entäusserung and the same concept of Verkehrung (this reversal designates, in the anthropological critique, the ne plus ultra of the process of alienation by which the subject becomes the object of its object and at the same time the speculative procedure that confirms the separation and the reversal). On the other hand, here, as in the 1844 Manuscripts, the reversal is situated on the terrain of a person/thing relation. Hence the necessity to specify the significance of the concepts in play here. Let us first consider the motion of materialization (Versachlichung or Verdinglichung). What passes into the thing is not the essence of a subjectivity but a relation. In the Veräusserlichung it is not a subject which is separated from itself, whose predicates pass into an alien entity. It is a form which becomes alien to the relation that it supports and, in becoming alien to it, becomes a thing and leads to the materialization of the relation. This definition of Veräusserlichung applies equally to Entfremdung.
What is lost in fetishism is the structural implication that founds the distance of the thing from itself, a distance which is precisely the site at which the economic relations are in play. This distance is suppressed in fetishism, but it is arguable that it was suppressed just as much in the 1844 Manuscripts, where the thing was seen directly as the object of a subjectivity. It was the suppression of this distance, of this special dimension of the thing manifesting the grip of the structure, that made possible the amphibology of object and product. Thus the Versachlichung of the relations of capital cannot be understood as an objectification of the predicates of a subject, except by suppressing the specific dimension in which capital determines economic relations.
As for subjectification, we can see that it is no more the reversal of the predicate of a substantial subject into a subject. What Marx designates as the subjectification of the thing is the acquisition by the thing of the function of motor of the process. In the process, this function does not belong to a subject or to the reciprocal action of a subject and an object, but to the relations of production which are radically removed from the space of subject and object in which they can only find bearers. The properties received by the thing are not the attributes of a subject but the motive power of the relations of production. It is in so far as the thing inherits the motion that it presents itself as a subject. The concept of a subject designates a function which has its place in an illusory motion.
I can conclude from this that if, in a theoretical field like that of the 1844 Manuscripts, the concepts of subjectification, materialization and reversal adequately express a certain conceptual content, in the theoretical field of Capital they only designate a different conceptual content. In Capital their register is no longer that of a conceptual adequation to their objects, but rather that of analogy. That is how the terms materialization, subjectification and reversal mask what everything hinges on – the function of motor of the process and the peculiar effectivity of the relations of production.11
Let me briefly express the difference between the two motions. In the 1844 Manuscripts the subject (the worker) invests an object with his essence. This object increases the power of the alien entity (capital), which poses itself as subject in the movement of reversal and reduces the worker to being the object of his object.
In Capital the Veräusserlichung lies in the fact that through the Begriffslosigkeit of the form, the relation sees its determinations reduced to material properties of the thing (materialization); the thing in which the relation has disappeared then presents itself as an automaton-subject (subjectification). The worker and the capitalist do not intervene in this motion. Thus the worker appears here as a bearer of the wage-labour relation of production and not as the primordial subject of the process. The mechanism of Entfremdung does not concern him.
We can therefore easily define two different structures. But Marx tends constantly to confuse them, to think the Entfremdung of the relations of capital according to the model of the alienation of the substantial subject, to think the Verkehrung-inversion as a Verkehrung-reversal.
I should like to take an example of this slide from Chapter 2 of Volume Three which deals with the question of the transformation of surplus-value into profit. We have seen that profit is a phenomenal form/form of concealment of surplus-value in which the determination of value by labour time and of surplus-value by surplus labour has disappeared, a form characterized by the inversion of the real motion of capitalist production. Now in this text we shall see how this inversion reverts to the anthropological image of the reversal and likewise how the first and second models of Entfremdung are confused in that indeterminacy which is characteristic of anthropological discourse:
Yet the way that surplus-value is transformed into the form of profit, by way of the rate of profit, is only a further extension of the inversion of subject and object which already occurs in the course of the production process itself. We saw in that case how all the subjective productive forces of labour present themselves as productive forces of capital. On the one hand, the value, i.e., the past labour that dominates living labour, is personified into the capitalist; on the other hand, the worker conversely appears as mere objectified labour-power, as a commodity (Vol. 3, p. 136).
We are confronted with the following motion:
| dead labour | living labour |
| personification in the capitalist living labour | mere material of labour-power: commodity |
The scheme used here is the classical anthropological scheme:
| thing (object) | person (subject) |
| person (subject) | thing (object) |
The development of the forms of the process of capitalist production, with the inversion which is characteristic of it, is the development of this initial subject/object reversal. If this schema is consistent, my whole proof has been destroyed. But in reality it is not consistent. In fact what corresponds to the transformation of living labour into a commodity is the transformation of past labour into capital and not into the capitalist.
Personification, in the strict sense that this concept receives in Capital, is something quite different. It designates the function of the subject as a bearer for the relation of production. As we have seen, the relation of production determines on the one hand a subject function and on the other an object function. It is this relation of production which carries out the Darstellung of the object and equally what I shall call, borrowing a term from Jacques Lacan, the staging or mise en scène of the subject.12 We know that this excludes the subject/object couple functioning as the motor of the process, or the motion of the process being the motion of the reciprocity of this couple. The rigorous function of personification as it is at work in Capital completely invalidates Marx’s use of this concept here.
If we reconsider our schema we shall have:
Labour-power is now confronted by capital and not by a person (the capitalist). And in the same way the capitalist is confronted with another subject, the worker, and not by a thing. The subject/object inversion no longer has any place here.
That is, anthropology has no place in Capital except the one kept for it by relapses in Marx’s discourse. Where Marx fails to locate his concepts the latter arrange themselves around anthropological reference points. Where the rigour of his discourse slackens we see an anthropological model emerge. Such slides necessarily occur in so far as Marx does not rigorously criticize his vocabulary. The words which express the new concepts introduced by Capital are in many cases the same as those which expressed the anthropological concepts of the young Marx.
It is necessary to insist on this distinction; we really are concerned with different concepts. For example, in Capital we find a concept of Verkehrung and a concept of Entfremdung which are new concepts in relation to the 1844 Manuscripts, concepts which have a different content. But the same words express the anthropological concepts (which I shall call concepts I) and the concepts of Capital (concepts II).
It is interesting to emphasize that in both cases the concepts of Verkehrung and Entfremdung have a relational function. They designate the relations between terms within a certain theoretical space. In theoretical space I, the terms brought into relation by the concepts of Verkehrung and Entfremdung are those of subject, predicate, object, person, thing, the empirical, speculation, etc. In theoretical space II, these terms are simple form and complex form, relation and form, etc.
The two theoretical spaces have different properties. It follows that relations of type I cannot be homologous with those of type II. Rigour therefore requires that the words in which these relational concepts are expressed should likewise be different. As Marx does not meet this demand for rigour, the first form (figure) always threatens to insinuate itself where it no longer has any place. The slide takes place in two stages: establishment of a homology between relations of type I and relations of type II; and reconstitution thereby of theoretical space I in which an attempt is made to insert theoretical space II. Now in this attempt a distortion, is revealed which bears witness to the resistance of space II. It is this distortion that produces for instance the inconsistency of the scheme we have just studied.
We find distortions of the same kind almost every time Marx uses schemata borrowed from the anthropological critique. The texts which take up the old schema of the critique of religious alienation are particularly significant here. Whenever Marx emphasizes an analogy between the process he is studying and that of religious alienation (e.g., in the first chapter of Capital), analysis shows that the analogy is not absolutely rigorous.
Another notable distortion is presented by the formula often used by Marx to characterize fetishism: relations between men become relations between things, a formula in which the two complements surreptitiously take the place of subjects.
The deeper reason for these slides remains to be seen. I have argued that Marx did not carry out a critique of his vocabulary. This absence of a critique is not simply negligence. If Marx did not deem it necessary to establish terminological differences it is because he never rigorously thought the difference between his discourse and the anthropological discourse of the young Marx. We can determine in Marx’s theoretical practice the break that Marx only affirmed, we can formulate the radical difference between the two problematics, but Marx himself never really grasped and conceptualized this difference.
c) Displacement of the origin and transgression of the limit
An examination of what happens to the origin (Urprung), the limit (Grenz), and the result of this process will show us the completion of its fetishized form.
The origin in question is not a temporal origin but the origin of the capitalist process as such.
As the process of capitalist production is the process of the self-expansion of the value of capital, the origin that concerns us is the origin of surplus-value – surplus labour.
This origin is not revealed in the concrete forms of the capitalist process. What is given are the results of this process; that is, the fractions into which the total surplus-value is broken down – profit, interest, and rent. A study of the grounds for compensation has shown us that these fractions expressing the distribution of surplus-value present themselves as its constitutive elements.
It is this appearance that constitutes the basis for vulgar economics, which finds its systematic origin in the theory of the three sources of the exoteric Adam Smith. Adam Smith’s project is to make wages, profit, and rent, elements resulting from the breakdown of the value produced in a determinate period, the constitutive elements of this value.13
Adam Smith’s operation can be divided into two stages. First, wages, profit and rent are detached from their origin (total social labour time realized in the value whose breakdown they represent). They are then autonomized and present themselves as forms indifferent to one another. It is therefore necessary to find an origin of its own for each one of these elements which have lost the formal determination conferred on them by their place in the process. The theory of the three sources does this when it makes labour the origin of wages, land the origin of rent, and capital the origin of profit.
The three sources thus take the place of the misrecognized origin. The opposition Ursprung/Quelle is not found in Marx by accident. It marks the transition from a process of socially determined production to a sort of natural process. The displacement from the origin to the source is complementary to the Versachlichung, to the transformation of the social relations of production into things defined by material properties. It completes the naturalization of the process.
This disappearance of the origin is simultaneously a disappearance of the limit. We know that this limit is determined by the origin of value (labour time) and of surplus-value (surplus labour). It is the total quantity of exploited surplus labour which determines the limits of surplus-value. In this way the law of value acts as a regulatory law which specifies the limits within which the distribution of surplus-value into profit, interest, and rent can take place. All the illusions engendered by a theory of three sources, each naturally producing a revenue, are thus shattered. A qualitative conceptual limit determines the total quantity of value and surplus-value produced.
On the contrary, if capital naturally produces profit, if it functions as an automaton, every qualitative limit is suppressed and the production of profit appears to follow the pure laws of a geometric progression. Hence the ingenious discovery by which Price thought he was able to resolve all the problems of state treasuries:
‘Money bearing compound interest increases at first slowly. But, the rate of increase being continually accelerated, it becomes in some time so rapid, as to mock all the powers of the imagination … One shilling put out to 6 per cent compound interest at our Saviour’s birth would … have increased to a greater sum than the whole solar system could hold, supposing it a sphere equal in diameter to the diameter of Saturn’s orbit … A state need never therefore be under any difficulties; for with the smallest savings it may in as little time as its interest can require pay off the largest debts’ (quoted by Marx in Capital, Vol. 3, pp. 519–20).
Here we see the form (figure) of the capitalist automaton at its most extreme. The illusion of geometric increase is possible because the qualitative limits on the expansion of the value of capital have been misrecognized:
The identity of surplus-value and surplus labour sets a qualitative limit to the accumulation of capital: the total working day, the present development of the productive forces and population, which limits the number of working days that can be simultaneously exploited. But if surplus-value is conceived in the irrational form of interest, the limit is only quantitative, and beggars all fantasy (Vol. 3, p. 523).
The obliteration of origin and limit thus put the cap on the fetishized form (figure) of the process, the form (figure) behind which the economic relations are given to the perception of the agents of production:
Interest-bearing capital, however, displays the conception of the capital fetish in its consummate form, the idea that ascribes to the accumulated product of labour, in the fixed form of money at that, the power (Kraft) of producing surplus-value in geometrical progression by way of an inherent secret quality (Vol. 3, p. 523).
(4) The Bewitched World
I have described the constitution of one of the three couples of the trinity formula. I can draw two important conclusions from this analysis:
1) The process of this constitution introduces quite a different structure from the subject/predicate/object structure of the 1844 Manuscripts.
2) The forms that fetishism presents are not forms deformed by speculation. They are the very forms in which the capitalist process exists for the agents of production:
[I]n the same measure as the form of profit hides its inner core, capital more and more acquires a material form, is transformed more and more from a relationship into a thing, but a thing which embodies, which has absorbed, the social relationship, a thing which has acquired a fictitious life and independent existence in relation to itself, a natural-supernatural entity; in this form of capital and profit it appears superficially as a readymade precondition. It is the form of its reality, or rather its real form of existence. And it is the form in which it exists in the consciousness and is reflected in the imagination of its representatives, the capitalists (Theories of Surplus-Value, MECW 32, p. 484).
Here we return to our starting-point, namely, the fact that the relations which determine the capitalist system can only exist in the form of their concealment. The form of their reality is the form in which their real motion disappears.
The analysis of fetishism confirms that the mystification is a mystification of the structure, that it is its very existence. The ‘bewitched world’ of fetishism ‘haunted by Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre, who are at the same time social characters and mere things’ (Vol. 3, p. 969), is thus the perfect form of this connection of effects determined by the absence of the cause. This absence of the cause is reflected by Marx as a mere distance. It is linked to the disappearance of mediations, obliviousness to the inner determinations of the process.
But this obliviousness is also constitutive since we are no longer concerned with the development of a consciousness endowed with the Hegelian faculty of Erinnerung.
Therefore, beyond the inadequate images of distance and obliviousness, we are led back to the foundation, that is to the fact that the phenomenal forms of the process are determined by something which absolutely cannot be represented in the field of Wirklichkeit without being concealed there, namely the relations of production, relations which bear – that is, do not bear – witness to the process of formation, the Entstehungsprozess, of a determinate mode of production: the capitalist mode of production.
Fetishism thus represents not an anthropological process but the specific dislocation according to which the structure of the capitalist mode of production presents itself in the field of Wirklichkeit, of Alltagsleben (everyday life), and offers itself to the consciousness and action of the agents of production, the bearers of capitalist relations of production. It is on this basis that the forms of fetishism are elaborated and systematized in a special discourse, that of vulgar economics. ‘Vulgar economics actually does nothing more than interpret, systematize and turn into apologetics the notions of agents trapped within bourgeois relations of production’ (Vol. 3, p. 956).
Starting from the forms of Wirklichkeit, of Alltagsleben, vulgar economics systematizes them in the three couples of the trinity formula, the alienated and irrational forms in which mere things (the material elements of capital, land) engender social relations (surplus-value, rent). These incommensurable relations represent the rational kernel of the system for vulgar economics. ‘As soon as this incommensurability is attained, everything becomes clear to the vulgar economist, and he feels no need for any further reflection. For he has precisely reached what is “rational” to the bourgeois mind’ (Vol. 3, p. 957).
From the point we have now reached I can try to characterize all the types of discourse that we have encountered. The starting-point which is given to perception is the ‘fixed forms of wealth’, the forms of Wirklichkeit which are the business of the agents of production.
The vulgar economist is content to systematize these forms, to give their rational kernel, i.e., precisely the imaginary or irrational. His discourse is a reflection of the apparent motion and a negation of the inner essence and real motion of the process.
Classical economics proposes to dissolve these fixed forms, to restore them their essential inner unity. Thus, for example, it reduces rent to surplus profit. But it cannot carry out its project because it does not understand these forms as phenomenal forms of the inner essence of the process. It thus affirms the inner essence by the dogmatic negation of appearances and can only exorcise the forms of fetishism without understanding them.
Marx’s theory, on the contrary, understands these alienated and imaginary forms as the phenomenal forms of the inner essence of the process. It can constitute simultaneously the theory of the process and the theory of its misrecognition.
Here we can return to a fourth discourse, that of the 1844 Manuscripts. This discourse also has as its starting-point the ‘alienated and imaginary forms’ that I have just examined. The First Manuscript starts from the three sources; and the young Marx rejects the Ricardian breakdown as abstract. Thus, he writes in his notes on Ricardo: ‘Political economy, in order to give its laws a greater consistency and determinacy, has to posit reality (Wirklichkeit) as accidental and abstraction as real.’14
The discourse of the Manuscripts is therefore a discourse which starts from the alienated and irrational forms and attempts to confine itself to the level of Wirklichkeit. This means that for it these irrational forms will be forms of unreason, of reason estranged, forms of man become foreign to himself. In other words, these alienated forms – and we have seen what meaning this term should be given here – are for this discourse forms of alienation in the anthropological sense of the term.
Thus the reduction of the forms of wealth to the determination of alienated labour does not constitute a true critique of the forms of economic Gegenständlichkeit, but maintains the mere form of a reversal in which determinations of the human subject and of intersubjectivity are introduced everywhere in place of material determinations and relations between things (the most remarkable example of this occurring in the amphibologies of wealth and of commerce). This discourse thus still remains captive to the illusions of Wirklichkeit.