Hans-Georg Backhaus was born in Remda, Germany (later the German Democratic Republic) in 1929. In the 1950s he emigrated from East to West Germany where he studied philosophy, sociology, and political economy in Heidelberg and then in Frankfurt. In 1965 he presented the fundamentals of his own interpretation of Marx’s theory of value in Adorno’s advanced seminar [Oberseminar] at the University of Frankfurt. In 1969 he wrote his best known and widely translated article Zur Dialektik der Wertform [On the Dialectics of the Value-Form] (Backhaus, 1969), which can be considered the founding document of what is now known as the Neue Marx-Lektüre [New Reading of Marx].1 From then on, in an enduring process of self-criticism and self-correction, carried out over the course of many articles (now partially collected in the volume Dialektik der Wertform: Untersuchungen zur Marxschen Ökonomiekritik (Backhaus, 1997b), he developed his interpretation of Marx’s critique of political economy.
As Backhaus himself acknowledges, his reading of the critique of political economy is profoundly indebted to Adorno’s critical theory of society. Adorno conceived of society on the basis of the concept of socialization [Vergesellschaftung]: ‘when we speak of society in the strong sense [...] we are referring essentially to the element of “socialisation”, which does not apply in the same manner to the [pre-bourgeois] societies’ (Adorno, 1969b: 29). What marks the difference between the different forms of society is the form in which ‘we, born as separate biological entities […] are able to become zoon politikon’ (Adorno, 1969b: 114). From this perspective, Marx’s critique of political economy is interpreted by Adorno as the unfolding of a definite form of socialization that is specific to capitalist society.
For Adorno, the specific form of socialization in bourgeois society is entailed in the exchange relationship. It establishes an objective, total connectedness among the social subjects. In this form, society presents itself as autonomous from the subjects that comprise it. Adorno describes the relationship between object and subject as ‘the domination of the universal over the particular’ (Adorno, 1969a: 14). In the analysis of exchange, Adorno underlines the contradiction between individuals and society: while individuals act according to intentional and free actions, they create an objective [gegenständlich] process that imposes itself as if by nature on them. Society is a human construction that imposes itself on individuals that have created it. As Adorno says, ‘society – what has been made autonomous [Verselbständigung] – is, in turn, no longer intelligible [verstehbar]; it is only the law of becoming autonomous’ (Adorno, 1969a: 15, trans. mod.).
For Adorno society is thus a totality, and the totality character is an objective property of society itself:
This latter use of the term implies that there exists between people a functional connection, which varies considerably, of course, according the historical level of development of the society, and which leaves no-one out, a connectedness in which all the members of the society are entwined and which takes on a certain kind of autonomy in relation to them. (Adorno 1969b: 29–30)
This totality character of society has to be understood in connection with exchange as the specific form of capitalist socialization. In this context Adorno turns to the idea of real abstraction, an idea he borrows from Alfred Sohn-Rethel. Exchange is where real abstraction takes place, in the abstraction from the concreteness of the objects which are reduced to a common and abstract value dimension. Such an abstraction is not a subjective process carried out by social individuals in the act of exchange. It is a real abstraction, independent of their consciousness. The process of the socialization – exchange – entails social individuals as character-masks of their own social world: it is here that society becomes autonomous. The real and objective reduction of commodities to their common dimension, to their essence, shows exactly what Adorno means when he talks about ‘the conceptuality of social reality’, ‘not merely the constitutive conceptuality of the knowing subject but the conceptuality which holds sway in the thing itself [Sache selbst]’ (Adorno, 1957: 80).
Consequently, for Adorno, the critical theory of society has the task of understanding the process of autonomization: how relationships among men have become autonomous from human beings themselves. More specifically, the task is to understand how these social relationships have become autonomous from the individuals that comprise society.
In a dialogue with Sohn-Rethel, Adorno expresses the necessity of a ‘systematic-encyclopaedic analysis of the abstraction of the exchange’ (Adorno, 1965: 226), a task Adorno accomplished only in a fragmentary way. It is possible to find openings in his sociological writings and in his lectures that suggest the manner in which he might have developed the critique of the capitalist exchange relations further. Backhaus’ transcription of a seminar held by Adorno in 1962 is most decisive in this context (Adorno, 1962).
Here Adorno’s analysis of exchange is developed in two connected directions. On the one hand, according to the idea of an immanent critique of society, he wants to show ‘the semblance’ and superficial character of the equality in the exchange between two equal values; on the other hand he wants to describe the fetish character assumed by social relations of production in the exchange of commodities – that is, to understand their social nature. When Adorno describes the process of reduction of commodities to their common dimension, i.e. the process of real abstraction embedded in every exchange of commodities, he explicitly refers to Marx’s theory of value. For Adorno, Marx’s notion that ‘it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness’ (Marx, 1859: 263) finds its explanation in comprehending the commodity form as the Urform, the original form of bourgeois ideology; in fact, the commodity ‘is not the simple false consciousness but results from the structure of political economy’ (Adorno, 1962: 508). In other words, the ideological forms, by means of which social agents understand the process of production and reproduction of capitalist society, are not simply misleading categories: they are objective forms in which the relations of production manifest themselves. Fetishism is real. That is, ‘the theory of ideology [Ideologielehre] has its gravity only in the fact that false consciousness manifests itself as a necessary figure [Gestalt] of the objective process which holds together society’ (Adorno, 1962: 508).
Adorno explains the objective form of capitalist social relations by turning to the concept of abstract labor. ‘The unity of socially necessary labor-time’ [die Einheit der gesellschaftlich notwendigen abstrakten Arbeitszeit] is what makes the commodities exchangeable. This real and objective abstraction is an abstraction from ‘the conditions [Bedingungen] under which a commodity comes into being [zustande bekommen ist]’. The social conditions, under which a product of human labor acquires the form of a commodity, manifest themselves as qualities of the objects exchanged: ‘the concept of commodity fetishism is nothing but this necessary process of abstraction. By performing the operation of abstraction, the commodity no longer manifests itself as a social relation, but it seems as if value was a thing in itself’ (Adorno, 1962: 507). In the form of the commodity, social relations manifest themselves as natural qualities belonging to exchange relations between economic things of ostensibly equal value. Exchange entails a process of the realization of profit. In this context Adorno asks himself how to understand profit on the basis of an exchange between equal values. For Adorno, ‘the semblance [der Schein] is not exchange, because exchange really takes place. The semblance in the process of exchange lies in the concept of surplus-value’ (Adorno, 1962: 508) – that is exactly where the process of production assumes the form of the process of valorization.
Adorno conceives of Marx’s critique of political economy as an explication of the process of autonomization of society. The critique of commodity fetishism is the theoretical tool to understanding the social nature of capitalist social relations. It amounts to an ‘anamnesis of the genesis’ (Adorno, 1965: 223) of autonomized social forms, its task is to understand their social origin. According to Adorno, the anamnesis of the genesis lies in the process of exchange as a real abstraction – the objective reduction of the concrete quality of human labor to social abstract labor – that conceals the specific social character of capitalist economic relations.
However, in Adorno’s critical theory of society the relation between abstract social labor and the fetish character of the commodity remains undetermined. What has to be explained – that is, why the reduction of commodities to their unity in abstract social labor assumes an objective form – is assumed from the beginning as a character of exchange. The fetish character of the commodity seems to be the result of exchange. Even if Adorno’s analysis often refers to the concept of surplus value and to the process of exploitation, the link between the private expenditure of labor and the process of socialization in exchange remains unspecified. The questions that have to be asked, if the task of the theory is to understand the ‘anamnesis of the genesis’, are why the processes of socialization assume the form of a system of the private monetary exchange of commodities, and why labor privately expended has to assume the form of money in order to count as social abstract labor.
This is exactly where Backhaus’ reading of Marx begins. From Adorno, Backhaus gained a clear insight into the importance of social form in Marx’s thinking. This insight was fundamental to his elaboration of value as a social form. For Backhaus, the autonomization of capitalist social relationships, that Adorno linked to the process of exchange, has to be brought back to Marx’s theory of the form of value and to the contradiction between the private expenditure of labor and the process of socialization by means of exchange in the form of monetary circulation. Backhaus thus argues that money is the objective social form of privately expanded labor. Adorno’s idea of historical materialism as the ‘anamnesis of the genesis’ is thus actualized by Backhaus through the analysis of the form of value – as the central moment of Marx’s critique of political economy – by means of which he grounds the constitution of money in the social relation of production.
In Adorno’s critical theory, the money form – the ‘media [...] accepted by naïve consciousness as the self-evident form of equivalence and thus as the self-evident medium of exchange’ – is understood only insofar as the real abstraction of exchange ‘relieve[s] people of the need for such a reflection’ (Adorno, 1969b: 32); but according to Backhaus, what remains unexamined is the analysis of the form of labor that has to assume the form of money in order to count as socially abstract labor. If money is the social medium that relieves people of the need for subjective abstraction in the act of exchange, what needs to be understood is why money assumes that social role, and the answer lies, Backhaus argues, in Marx’s analysis of the form of value. The real abstraction achieved in exchange is only a consequence of the specific capitalist form of labor. Private labor expended in production is valid as social abstract labor only by assuming the form of money. The process of exchange confirms the social character of privately expended labor by means of a particular and at the same time universal form: money. Money manifests that social dimension which Marx calls value.
Backhaus’ elaboration of Adorno’s insightful interpretation of social form begins with a close analysis of value as a social form. This leads to a critical evaluation of the readings of Marx that neglected the problem of form as well as to his own reconstruction and then interpretation2 of the critique of political economy as a critique of the social constitution of perverted social forms.
In his first essays Backhaus proposes a reconstruction of Marx’s theory of value on the basis of a logical reading of Marx’s method of presentation [Darstellungsweise]. He also identifies a misunderstanding that has plagued the reception of Marxian value theory. Both inside and outside Marxism, Marx’s theory of value has been read in continuity with the Ricardian labor theory of value. This misses the problem of form and Marx’s subsequent critique of Ricardo and classical political economy.
As Marx himself pointed out:
It is one of the chief failings of classical economy that it has never succeeded, by means of its analysis of commodities, and in particular of their value, in discovering the of value which in facts turns value into exchange-value. Even its best representatives, Adam Smith and Ricardo, treat the form of value as something of indifference, something external to the nature of commodity itself. The explanation for this is not simply that their attention is entirely absorbed by the analysis of the magnitude of value. It lies deeper. The value-form of the product of labour is the most abstract, 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. If then we make the mistake of treating it as the eternal natural form of social production, we necessarily overlook the specificity of the value-form, and consequently of the commodity-form together with its further developments, the money-form, the capital-form etc. (Marx, 1872: 174)
The misunderstanding in the reception of Marx’s theory of value is linked to the lack of insight in regard to the problem of Capital’s method of presentation and to its dialectical nature, which is often reduced to a simple logical mirroring of an historical process or to a mere rhetorical ornament. Backhaus’ program endeavors to understand the specific differences between the critique of political economy and classical political economy through a deep examination of the method of presentation. To accomplish it, Backhaus critically examines the changes in Marx’s method of presentation from Grundrisse and Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy to the last edition of Capital.3 These different drafts of the theory of the form of value are used as a tool to underline the defects of Marx’s presentation. Moreover, Backhaus utilizes them to argue for the presence of an esoteric and an exoteric theory of value. The latter is traced back to Engels and traditional Marxism; the former requires a dialectical interpretation of the method used by Marx in his presentation.
Backhaus maintains an intentio operis of the critique of political economy that exceeds the intentio auctoris, as Althusser and his school had already expressed from a different perspective some years before. In his first essays Backhaus is convinced that a textual comparison between Marx and his erroneous interpretations can reconstruct ‘the real Marx’s’ method of presentation.
In 1978, in the third part of the essay Materialen zur Rekonstruktion der Marxschen Werttheorie (Backhaus, 1978a), Backhaus’ perspective changes. He now identifies the logical readings of Marx which intend to develop a ‘fair’ interpretation of the texts as a new form of orthodoxy. He also states that it is impossible to ground a logical reading of the theory of value solely on a textual basis. The idea of the reconstruction he developed in his first essays is thus defined ‘an unbearable simplification of the problem of the presentation [Darstellung]’ (Backhaus, 1978a: 133). Instead, it is necessary to recognize the multilayered obscurity of Marx’s text as an actual problem that cannot be set aside by a logical interpretation. The problem of the ‘logical’ and of the ‘historical’ is then not only a problem of the interpretations of Marx’s works: it is a problem Marx himself did not solve univocally. While the logical interpretation is prevalent in Grundrisse and the first edition of Capital, the logical-historical interpretation is prominent in the second edition of Capital and in the Appendix of the first edition. Focusing attention on the different layers of Marx’s work can thus produce opposing interpretations.
However, Backhaus does not abandon the logical reading of Marx: he only discards the idea that it can be reclaimed through a univocal textual reconstruction. Instead, he focuses on substantiating a logical reading in regard to the core theoretical questions Marx’s critical theory was focusing on. Along the lines of this new perspective Backhaus develops his reading of Marx in a continuous confrontation with the different economic traditions (classical, neoclassical, neo-Ricardian, etc.) and with the essential epistemological and methodological problems that lie at the core of economic theory. His interpretation of Marx’s critique of political economy, and especially of his theory of the form of value, addresses on the one hand the unreflected assumptions of economic theory, and on the other it addresses the perspective opened by Adorno: the comprehension of the social constitution and autonomization of the economic realm as the terrain in which the unreflected assumptions of economic theory have their root.
The first step of Backhaus’ reading of Marx is the critique of the historicization of Marx’s method of presentation. According to Backhaus, Engels’ review of Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and his 1895 ‘Supplement’ to the third volume of Capital represent the key writings for understanding the reception of Marx’s theory of value and the historicization of the method of the presentation (Engels, 1859, 1895). The idea of the theory of value as a premonetary and pre-capitalist theory of exchange, and the idea of the method of presentation as a logical mirroring of an historical process, have their roots in these two writings. According to Engels, the first three chapters of Marx’s Capital are devoted to the explanation of ‘simple commodity production’ in which workers are not separated from the means of productions and are the owners of commodities, which are exchanged on the basis of the quantity of labor expended in their production. Engels’ historicist interpretation of the theory of value is based on the interpretation of Marx’s method that he sketches in his review of Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. He maintains that critique of political economy amounts to a critical science of bourgeois society that could be developed in two ways: historically and logically. Marx decided on the logical method only accidentally, because of the lack of preliminary works on the history of economics. Nonetheless, according to Engels, the logical method of presentation is ‘nothing but the historical method, only stripped of the historical form and of interfering contingencies’ (Engels, 1859: 475): logical presentation is interpreted as a conceptual mirroring of the historical development of capitalism.
The critique of the notion of ‘simple commodity production’ and of the related interpretation of the theory of value is the point of departure for Backhaus’ reading of Marx. For Backhaus, two complementary interpretative tendencies originate from Engels’ interpretation: logical-historical and mythodological. The logical-historical interpretation explicitly assumes Engels’ reading of Marx’s theory and recognizes the development of the form of value as the logical unfolding of an historical content: the theory of value is the logical concretion of ‘simple commodity production’ and the analysis of the form of value is the logical reflection of the historical process of the birth of money. Backhaus criticizes not only the philological pertinence of the interpretation but also the historical applicability of the argument. If Engels had no ethnological data on the forms of production and reproduction of ancient communities, actual existing logical-historical interpreters should confront historical investigations and realize that the results of their method are ‘neither logically free from contradictions, nor historically plausible’ (Backhaus, 1978a: 165). Mythodological interpretation understands ‘simple commodity production’ and the law of value as an ideal representation from which Marx’s analysis has to begin in order to reach the mode of capitalist production where commodities are sold at their prices of production. According to this interpretation, the theory of the form of value is only an historical excursus on the evolution of the exchange from barter to the advent of money as a means of circulation.
Backhaus says that at the basis of both interpretations there is an implicit assumption of generalized commodity exchange. Without a proper understanding of money as the universal equivalent, these premonetary theories of value analyze the substance and the magnitude of value without considering the form of value. According to these theories, it is necessary to ‘abstract’ from money in order to examine exchange and grasp its essence in isolation from money. He charges that this approach overlaps with the neoclassical subjective theories of value, which try to explain exchange according to subjective utility, abstracting from monetary mediations. According to Backhaus, what neoclassical economics names the ‘monetary veil’ and the Marxist tradition the ‘phenomenon’ that conceals the structure of exchange, for Marx’s theory of the form of value is the process of the manifestation of the essence of what lies behind the veil.
For Backhaus therefore it is not possible to separate the theory of value from the theory of money: Marx’s theory of value is a monetary theory of value, and the fact that this has not been taken into account is the origin of that odd situation according to which many Marxists agree upon the theory of value and struggle over the theory of money.
According to Backhaus, Marx’s development of the form of value, from the ‘simple’ through ‘expanded’ to ‘universal’ form, has to be explained as a critique of premonetary theories of value: what Marx wanted to show is that the concept of a premonetary market economy or the concept of a premonetary commodity is quite impossible. The notion of a generalized commodity exchange without money amounts to an untenable hypothetical model since in this model commodities present each other as products and use-values, not as commodities that, in distinction to their concrete quality as use-values, have a common social substance that becomes visible in the money form. From this perspective, Backhaus proposes an original reading of Marx’s concept of exchange: it is a universal and transhistorical concept, like labor or product, yet from the beginning of Marx’s presentation it has to be understood as monetary circulation – a specific form of exchange, different from barter, in which the products of labor figure as commodities that assume the form of money and the form of price. This is the reason why it is neither possible to see non-monetary exchange in the first section of Capital Volume I, nor to read it, like Engels, as an historical stage in which exchange relations are regulated by the labor-time contained in the commodities exchanged.
As a critique of premonetary theories of value, Marx’s theory has to understand the immanent link between the private expenditure of social labor and its appearance in exchange in the form of money. Backhaus takes Marx’s use of the Hegelian categories of the logic of essence into serious consideration, expressing that ‘dialectical method cannot be restricted to leading the form of manifestation back to the essence’ (Backhaus, 1969: 102) – that is, discovering social labor behind exchange-value. Hegel’s sentence that ‘essence must manifest itself’ becomes for Marx the necessity of showing ‘why the essence assumes precisely this or that form of manifestation’ (Backhaus, 1969: 102), ‘why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labor is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labor by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product’ (Marx, 1872: 174). According to Backhaus:
Marx obtains [gewinnt] the concept of ‘social labour’ and discovers a contradiction between this form of labour and the ‘actual’ [wirklichen] form of labour which has a private character. This contradiction is considered by Marx the reason of the presentation of labour in value, i.e. the reason of the existence of money. (Backhaus, 1979: 265)
For Backhaus, an interpretation of Marx’s theory of value that does not understand the link between value and money – that is, how capitalist wealth (value) manifests itself in money as the form of value – can be reduced to a theory in which labor is interpreted as subjective disutility, as in neoclassical economics. Interpreting the first section of Capital according to the model of simple commodity production leads necessarily to assuming a subjective measurement of labor-time expended in the production and to understanding commodity exchange as a conscious comparison of the subjective sacrifices of producers. It is the way classical political economy created its ‘Robinsonades’, starting the analysis of exchange from the primordial fisher and hunter exchanging their products according to labor expended in the production. Such a reading of the theory of value eludes the contradictory character of capitalist production in which ‘a priori, no conscious social regulation of production takes place’ and the social character of labor ‘asserts itself only as a blindly operating average’ (Marx, 1868: 69). For Backhaus, the law of value is a supraindividual [uberindividuell] process that manifests itself objectively [gegenständlich] behind the backs of social individuals. Every productive unit expends a certain quantity of labor in the production of its own commodities, but it is not possible to know before the metamorphosis with money the amount of private labor which will be confirmed as social. Marx’s theory is the unfolding of the law of value, its actualization behind the backs of the social agents. According to Marx’s critique, the pre-monetary labor theory of value either posits as a subject a social organization of labor different from the one characterizing the capitalist mode of production or it does not understand the basic contradiction of the mode of capitalist production.
The critique of the historicization of Marx’s method together with the critique of the pre-monetary interpretations of the theory of value lead Backhaus to understand value as a supraindividual process and to connect Adorno’s idea of the autonomization of society with money as the specific, autonomized form labor has to assume to count as social.
In the light of this, Backhaus relates Marx’s theory of value as a supraindividual process with the method of critique of political economy as the critique of the categories of political economy. Backhaus often repeats the idea Marx expressed in 1858 in a letter to Lassalle, according to which the critique of political economy represents a ‘critique of economic categories […] a critical exposé of the system of bourgeois economy. It is at once an exposé and, by the same token, a critique of the system’ (Marx, 1858: 270). Since the theory of value is a supraindividual process in which social individuals appear as personifications of seemingly independent economic categories, Marx develops his method as a critique of the categories of political economy. For Backhaus, the latter express the reality of the capitalist mode of production. The task of the method of the critique of political economy is to show the process of the constitution of the forms, i.e. of the categories of political economy. Marx’s critique of political economy is an analysis of the social constitution of the categories of political economy and at the same time an analysis of the genesis of the objects to which political economy refers scientifically.
Marx’s critique develops the economic categories as ‘forms of being, the characteristics of existence’ [Daseinsformen, Existenz-bestimmungen] or ‘socially valid and therefore objective thought forms’ [gesellschaftlich gultige, also objektive Gedankenformen]. In this his account is entirely at odds with the construction of models of behavior in economic theory. It is not the behavior of agents that determines the law of value; inversely, it is the law of value that imposes itself through economic agents. As Backhaus states, in Marx’s theory we deal neither with ‘ideal-typically modelled economic subjects nor economic subjects actually exchanging with one another in pre-capitalist society; rather, we deal with the analysis of the structure and of the form of commodity-money relation’ (Backhaus, 1979: 277). The point of departure of Marx’s theory lies in the categories of political economy as ‘non-conceptual representations’ [begriffslose Vorstellungen] of a reality, which, through the dialectical presentation, show their own connections and allow conceptual access to their contents:
it is not possible to assert that at the beginning of the conceptual development there are axioms and fundamental presuppositions from which it is possible to deduce other propositions. At the beginning there are the categories [Marx] found in bourgeois political economy handbooks, categories which are themselves an element [ein Stück] of the social reality. (Backhaus, 1975: 101)4
Marx’s distinction between classical and vulgar political economy – the first determining value starting from labor expended in the production of the commodities, the second solely interested in the superficial connections of the sphere of exchange – can be sublated starting from the contradiction characterizing the connection between commodity and money. While classical political economy absolutizes the moment of the process of production of commodities, immediately reducing value to labor, vulgar political economy absolutizes the moment of the exchange between commodity and money, reducing value to utility in exchange. Both classical and vulgar political economy are unable to understand the connection between production and circulation in the capitalist mode of production: if the commodity is the product of private labor that is validated as social (according to socially necessary labor-time) only in the metamorphosis with money, it is necessary to understand that the specific form of labor arrives in money as a social connection in the form of things. This logical development from the substance of value to its own form of value characterizes Marx’s presentation of the value form and the fetish character of the commodity. According to Backhaus, this account of social constitution is the differentia specifica of the critique of political economy. It represents the analyses of the constitutive conditions of a peculiar objective [gegenständlich] dimension of a society in which the objects have supernatural attributes. All the commodities have a price and the aim of the critique of political economy lies in understanding the genesis of this objectively [gegenständlich] valid dimension. In distinction, political economy does not concern itself with the social constitution of the economic categories. The question of genesis is outside the horizon of political economy.
To further explore Backhaus’ account, let us turn to the extremely important discussion Backhaus undertakes with the Austrian economist Gottl-Ottlilienfeld and his notion of the ‘economic dimension’. Gottl-Ottlilienfeld is a strong opponent of every theory of value. In his methodological works he shows the aporetic condition of political economy which is implicitly obliged to presuppose the existence of an ontological dimension that allows the economic object to acquire an objective magnitude. As Backhaus says: ‘when we speak of the commodity […] we are also obliged to think about the absurd condition according to which a supersensible quality inheres in sensous things, so that, it is reasonable to talk about an economic dimension like the natural dimensions of distance, weight, temperature etc.’ (Backhaus, 1978b: 495).5 According to Backhaus, Marx’s theory of the form gives us the tools to think about the autonomization of that peculiar dimension of mediated sociality – value – that asserts itself as if by nature over the individuals who comprise sociality itself. This is what is achieved through Marx’s theory of value, which is able to understand the genesis of a supraindividual structure constituted through the actions of individuals themselves. As Gottl-Ottlilienfeld states, without clarifying the question, we are obliged to think an inversion in which ‘something personal becomes something impersonal’ (Backhaus, 1978b: 495).
With regard to Joan Robinson’s appeal to translate Marx’s terminology into ordinary economic language, so that Marx’s contributions would be included in scientific academic discourse, Backhaus develops the problem of commensurability between Marx’s concepts and economic science. It is a problem that the Frankfurt School faced from the 1930s on:6 Marx introduces philosophical categories into economic discourse not because he coquetted Hegel’s mode of expression but because of the very nature of the economic object. According to Backhaus, the objects of political economy are ‘more than just economic’, and this is the reason why Marx developed ‘a critique of economic concepts in the narrow sense’ (Backhaus, 1992: 55). Thus, in contrast to Robinson, Backhaus expresses the impossibility of fully translating Marx’s theory into the language of economic science. This is due to the double nature of the economic categories – that is, their sensous-supersensible character, which is always presupposed by economic analysis.
In this context Adorno’s conceptualization of society both as subject and as object plays a pivotal role in Backhaus’ argument. The idea of supraindividual social objectivity [Gegenständlichkeit] as something that asserts itself behind the backs (and through the actions) of the economic agents is the means Backhaus exploits in order to understand the sensous-supersensible character of the economic realm. He expounds on Adorno’s critique of traditional Marxism and the trivialization of the architectonic analogy of base and superstructure as the key to understanding the role of ideology:
The difference between the object of traditional theory, that of the natural sciences in particular, and the objectivity of critical theory can be made clear in the following manner. Society is not merely object, but at the same time subject. Its autonomy [Eigengesetzlichkeit] is thus paradoxical. Society is only ‘objective’ insofar as and ‘because’ its ‘own subjectivity is not transparent’ to it. (Backhaus, 1992: 57)
Thus, what in Simmel’s reflection on money assumes the feature of ‘an originary phenomenon and hence an a priori factor’ (Backhaus, 1992: 60–1), what Schumpeter assumes as ‘ultimate ground’ and as a ‘given’ and what Gottl-Ottlilienfeld named the ‘economic dimension’ as a presupposition of every economic analysis has its origin in the specific character of economic objects: it is the ‘economic objectivity or the “objectivity of value” [Wertgegenständlichkeit] which has a “sui generis” objectivity that can be pictured as a “second nature” […] concealed behind what is in itself’ (Backhaus, 1992: 61). The supersensible character of economic objects is presupposed and not recognized by these approaches to economic theory. The presupposition of economic objects is an aspect of economic reality itself, which hides supersensible character under the appearance of the concrete materiality of objects. This is what Backhaus terms the ‘objective semblance’ [gegenständliche Schein] of economic objects. They possess this social character because economic forms are perverted. Marx here intentionally makes use of the ambiguity of this word, an ambiguity which is innate to the German language alone. Thus on the one hand money is a ‘deranged [verrückte] form’ in the sense it is the ‘most nonsensical, most unintelligible form’ – that is, it is ‘pure madness’ [reine Verrücktheit]. On the other hand money is a deranged form in the other, spatial sense of ‘derangement’ [Verrücktheit], as an object which is de-ranged [verrücktes], dis-placed out of its natural locus. It is not merely a ‘sensous’ but also a ‘supersensible thing’, and as such it is a thing which has been transferred and dis-placed into the external world which is independent from consciousness (Backhaus, 1992: 61–2).
Hence the task of Marx’s theory of the form of value is to show the genesis of the supersensible character of economic objects and at the same time the genesis of the perverted form of political economy: on the one hand it is the understanding of the social constitution of value; on the other it is a critique of the lack of methodological reflection of political economy. According to Backhaus, Marx explains the social dimension in which objects have a value objectivity [Wertgegenständlichkeit] only because he recognizes the contradiction between the private expenditure of labor and the process of socialization established by means of separate (in time and space) private exchanges of commodities and money. While the private expenditure of labor is something individual – something that can be recognized in the conscious consideration of the producer – the process of the socialization of this labor is something accomplished in the sphere of circulation, a supraindividual process that imposes itself behind the backs of economic agents.
In the dialogues Backhaus undertakes with economists and sociologists who have acknowledged the peculiarity of the economic realm, it is possible to distinguish a particular topic. Simmel, Amonn, and Gottl-Ottlilienfeld are praised for having shown the duality that characterizes the objects of political economy. In their analysis it is possible to find the problem every subjective theory of value is obliged to face: the separation between individual esteem, as the basis of the utility theory of value, and the validity of the supraindividual unities of account, the passage from the individual to the supraindividual dimension in which objects already have an objective [gegenständlich] value and a price. Hegel is applauded as the first thinker to develop the dual nature of the economic realm, but at the same time since he ‘blends [kontaminiert] continuously subjective and objective [objective] determinations of value, he was not able to accomplish, in a consistent manner, his doctrine of the double, dialectic, character of the commodity’ (Backhaus, 1984: 302).
According to Backhaus, these thinkers were not able to systematize their intuitions of the duality of the economic realm, because it is impossible ‘to develop the objective structures [objektiven Strukturen] of the commodity and money from the elements of a subjective theory of value’ (Backhaus, 1984: 303): ‘there is no step that can lead from the concept of value of the subjective school to the concept of money. Subjective economics is obliged to treat the theory of value and the theory of money as two heterogeneous doctrines that cannot be referred to one another except extrinsically’ (Backhaus, 1975: 96).
In this context Backhaus emphasizes the meaning of Marx’s critique of Samuel Bailey. Bailey developed a criticism of Ricardian value theory. According to Bailey, value is the mere relation commodities have in exchange. Value is ‘power of purchasing’ and it is a relational category: it is impossible to talk about a substance of value just as it is impossible to establish the value of a commodity outside of its relation with another commodity. The concept of value is only a fiction created by Ricardo and Ricardian economists who substantialize the relation of exchange between commodity and money: ‘it is not the determination of the product as value which leads to the establishment of money and which expresses itself in money, but it is the existence of money which leads to the fiction of the concept of value’ (Marx, 1859: 332). Since Bailey’s concept of the ‘power of purchasing’ indicates the lack of mediation between value and exchange-value in Ricardo and his followers, he is obliged to introduce the concept of subjective value in order to explain that power, but he is not able to deduce the objective power of purchasing from the subjective esteem of the exchangers. The problem for Bailey’s theory is the unbridgeable gap between the individual and the supraindividual – that is, between individual exchange determined through subjective evaluation and the objective determination of price which a commodity has before every subjective esteem. Backhaus explains that the subjective theory of value, with the use of the concept of ‘objective exchange-value’, is obliged to recur unconsciously as a ‘transcending’7 relationship that represents a logical structure extraneous to its systematic principles: the subjective theory of value can explain a single act of exchange having place hic et nunc, but it cannot analyze a supraindividually valid category (Backhaus, 1978b: 524).
Bailey is right when he criticizes Ricardo and the gap between the two measures of value: labor as the theoretical measure and money as the actual and objective measure. But his subjective theory of value cannot determine money as supraindividual unity. According to Backhaus, it is only possible to deduce this concept of money from a labor theory of value; Marx’s theory of the form of value is the process of money as supraindividual unity of the private labor expended in production. It is here that the theory of the fetish character of the commodity shows its explicative power, not only as a critique of classical and vulgar political economy and of the naturalization of the forms of the capitalist relations of production, but as the actual exposition of the process in which social relationships assume the form of a relationship between things. Money is the means through which the social connection of private labor is achieved; it constitutes society independently of the consciousness of social agents. Private labor achieves social validity in exchange with money and money is the form of manifestation of that social dimension that Marx calls value. While the subjective theory of value can explain the relationship between men and things, what is absolutely outside its perspective is the idea of a social relationship among things as the specific form of socialization of the capitalist mode of production.
Backhaus’ reading is not limited to the interpretation of the critique of political economy as developed by Marx from 1857 onwards. He also outlines an original reading of the young Marx, especially of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, developing a ‘backward reading’ of Marx as proposed by Helmut Reichelt and Alfred Schmidt.8 He individuates the primitive forms of the critique of the economic categories from the perspective of his mature work. What economistic readings of Marx set aside as a philosophical residue and Althusserians consider as the pre-scientific humanistic approach, Backhaus considers the initial effort to put forth a critical method that acknowledges ‘the isomorphic structures of the onto-theological, social-metaphysical objects or the isomorphic structures of the political and economic objects’ (Backhaus, 1989: 18). The isomorphic structure of theological and economic objects is what induces Backhaus to praise the Feuerbachian anthropological standpoint of the early Marx. The anthropological critique of religion brings back theological disputes to their human-social foundation: a critique of theology is not possible on a theological basis. The same argument is used by Backhaus to understand Marx’s first attempts to criticize political economy. The critique of political economy cannot be developed on an economic basis, because the economic standpoint presupposes as valid those same categories that need to be comprehended. It presupposes value and exchange-value; and it presupposes the economic object without analyzing its social genesis. It is necessary to bring the objects of political economy back to their human-social basis and to establish ‘the social relationship of “Man to Man” the basic principle of the theory’ (Marx, 1844: 328). Backhaus (1992) thus stresses the limits of the economic perspective and maintains that Marx’s critique lies ‘between philosophy and science’. It carries the philosophical categories into the domain of political economy and transforms the economic categories into philosophical concepts.
The young Marx is still far from the wholly developed and conscious critic of the mature works. He is still influenced by the criticism of economic science proposed by Fourier and Proudhon, according to which economics is unconscious of both itself as a discipline and its object: ‘the crux of economics, that is, its inability to determine its economic object, is […] a central topic of the early socialist critique of economics, and was later reiterated by Auguste Blanqui’ (Backhaus, 1989: 16). Differently from socialist criticism of economics, Marx can develop a ‘determinate negation’ of political economy thanks to anthropological critique, as stated explicitly by Marx in 1844: ‘Besides being indebted to these authors who have given critical attention to political economy, positive critique as a whole – and therefore also German positive critique of political economy – owes its true foundation to the discoveries of Feuerbach’ (Marx, 1844: 232). The ‘determinate negation’ and not ‘the abstract negation of economics’ is the standpoint of Marx’s approach based on Feuerbach’s anthropological critique of theology. According to Backhaus, at its core the critique of political economy is an ad hominem critique: it is the understanding of the human basis of the autonomization of the economic realm, the comprehension [Begreifen] of the constitution of the economic dimension and the presentation of the genesis of the object of economic science. The anthropological critique Marx develops in the early writings on the basis of Feuerbach’s approach is linked by Backhaus to the concepts of ‘critique’, ‘comprehension’, ‘inner genesis’, and ‘presentation’, which characterize the mature works.9 Even if Backhaus is never wholly explicit, Marx’s reductio ad hominem should not be confused with Feuerbachian essentialism. The reduction of the social economic world to the human being itself and the genesis of the process of autonomization that distinguishes the economic realm is achieved by starting from the specific social relations of the mode of capitalist production, not from a presupposed human essence: the ‘return’ [zuruckführung] of the second nature to Man [Mensch], not as an abstract individual, but as a member of a ‘definite form of society’, this reduction ad hominem is the most important principle of his [Marx] mature critique or analysis of economic categories. Marx demands the ‘return’ of ‘a relation of objects to one another’ – that is, of economic categories to ‘relation between Men [Menschen]’. This is the anthropological core of economic analysis (Backhaus, 1989: 20).10
Backhaus’ reading of Marx represents an extraordinary effort to develop the critique of political economy along the lines opened by Adorno’s critical theory of society. It is at once an attempt to elaborate and to deepen the critical theory of society and an original interpretation of the critique of political economy. The in-depth analysis of Marx’s theory of value and the critique of historicist and economistic interpretations go side by side with the presentation of the categories of economic theory as socially constituted forms arising from the definite social relations of production that impose themselves on social individuals (and social scientists) as a social nature, as if it were an objective external economic realm.
Marx’s critique of political economy represents for Backhaus the comprehension of the genesis of that objective economic realm in which social relations take on the form of a relationship between the products of labor as commodities. If for Adorno the ‘anamnesis of the genesis’ of the autonomization of society had its root in exchange as the real and objective abstraction imposed on social agents, for Backhaus exchange has to be determined through the analysis of the form of value and hence the ‘anamnesis of the genesis’ has to be brought back to that specific form of exchange in which privately expended labor becomes social only by assuming the form of money. Once the genesis of the social relations of production is accomplished, and at the same time concealed in the system of exchanges between commodities and money, that socially constituted reality becomes the objective domain of economic science. The critique of political economy has the task of taking back the social form to a specific human practice, and to reveal the perversion of a form of society in which human ‘relations of production […] assume a material shape [sachliche Gestalt] which is independent of their control and their conscious individual action’ (Marx, 1872: 187).
1. On the New Reading of Marx see Backhaus, 1997a; Reichelt, 2008; Elbe, 2008; Fineschi, 2009; Heinrich, 2012; Bellofiore and Redolfi Riva, 2015.
2. For Backhaus, the ‘reconstruction’ is the removal of the supposition of ‘interpretations’ in order to unfold the specific proper textual meaning of Marx’s work.
3. The first was published in Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the second in the first edition of Capital, the third as an Appendix to the first edition of Capital, the fourth as the third paragraph of the second edition of Capital, Volume I. Backhaus himself says that he could only develop this perspective thanks to reading the first chapters of the first edition of Capital: the different presentations of the theory of the form of value allowed him to focus his attention on dialectical structures of the argument that in the second edition were only sketched.
4. Backhaus was inspired by an insight of Alfred Schmidt’s into Marx’s concept of knowledge: ‘The immediate object of Marx’s investigations, it is true, is empirically given conditions of production. But […] it is impossible to master this immediate object in a direct way. On the contrary, the factual “system of bourgeois economy” is grasped by means of criticism of bourgeois categories’ (Schmidt, 1968: 95).
5. The quotation comes from the essay ‘Zur Problematik des Verhaltnisses von “Logischem” und “Historischem” in der Marxschen Kritik der Politischen Okonomie’ (Backhaus, 1978b). It is an unpublished German manuscript that has been published in Spanish (nueva politica, 1978) Danish (Kurasje, 1980) and Italian (Marx 101, 1984) translations. We quote from the Italian translation, by Emilio Agazzi, collected in Backhaus, 2016.
6. Both Horkheimer and Marcuse showed the peculiarity of the critique of political economy in comparison with philosophy on the one hand and political economy on the other. Backhaus quotes the essays Traditional and Critical Theory by Max Horkheimer and Philosophy and Critical Theory by Marcuse, both published in 1937: ‘It was Horkheimer who first attempted to clarify the unique methodological status of the Marxian critique of political economy in terms of its position “between” philosophy and science. For this very reason he drew the distinction between traditional and critical theory as the “difference between two modes of cognition; the first was grounded in the Discours de la Méthode, the second in the Marxian critique of political economy” [Horkheimer]. The paradoxical intermediary position of the latter is articulated in the fact that, on the one hand, Marx’s critique of economy opposes philosophy by insisting that it “is an economic, not a philosophical system” and moreover that “philosophy appears in the concepts of economy” [Marcuse]. On the other hand, however, the critique of economy is adamantly opposed to “economism”, stipulating that the “critical theory of society, as critique of economy, remains philosophical” [Horkheimer]. Precisely because “philosophy appears in the concepts of economy”, “every single one of these” is “more than an economic concept” [Marcuse]’ (Backhaus, 1992: 55).
7. Marx employed übergreifen with a double emphasis. Following the translators of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia Logic, the first emphasis may be rendered as ‘to overgrasp’: the reference is to the Aufhebung, the speculative comprehension, which ‘reaches back and embraces within its scope’ the opposition of the moments in its dialectical stage. In the same way that universality ‘overgrasps’ particulars and singulars, thought ‘overgrasps’ what is other than thought, so the Subjekt developing into Geist includes objectivity and subjectivity within its grasp. The second emphasis is ‘overreaching’ and ‘overriding’, bordering on ‘dominant’.
8. Reichelt expresses the need to read Marx’s work employing the same methodology used by Marx in his study of ‘previous social formations (i.e. the fact that Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher development is already known. The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient, etc.) and to interpret earlier formulations from the point of view of later works’ (Reichelt, 1970: 24). It is the same perspective proposed by Alfred Schmidt: ‘the early writings of Marx and Engels, which for a long time were considered to contain the Marxist philosophico-humanist content proper, can only be fully understood by a historico-economic analysis of Das Kapital’ (Schmidt, 1968: 94). The idea of reading Marx backwards is also proposed by Bellofiore, 2013.
9. The expression ad hominem with this meaning can be found in Marx himself: ‘The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical’ (Marx, 1843: 182). It has been used by Adorno: ‘The reductio ad hominem which inspires all critical enlightenment is substantiated in the human being who would first have to be produced in a society which was master of itself. In contemporary society, however, its sole indicator is the socially untrue’ (Adorno, 1961: 122).
10. This lack of distinction between Marxian and Feuerbachian anthropological standpoints led Werner Bonefeld to criticize Backhaus’ critical perspective: ‘According to Backhaus, the critique of fetishism deciphers economic categories on a human basis. It reveals the human content of seemingly extramundane economic things. This argument, however suggestive in its critical intension, comes at a price. The anthropological standpoint is not the critical standpoint. “Man” in general does not do anything. Does not work, does not eat, does not truck and barter and has no natural tendency, needs, consciousness, etc. Man in general does also not alienate herself in the form of value. In distinction to Backhaus, Man has needs only as concrete Man and the “determinate character of this social man is to be brought forward as the starting point, i.e. the determinate character of the existing community in which he lives”. Neither economic nature nor anthropology but the “definite social relations” that manifest themselves in mysterious economy forms are “the point of departure”. That is to say, the reified world of economic necessity is innately practical – it entails the actual relations of life in their inverted economic form’ (Bonefeld, 2014: 8).
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