Rough Theory

Human Labour in the Abstract

An Aside on the Category of Capital

Value and Its Form – from Deduction to Dialectic

Abstraction, Critical Theory, Fetish, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity

Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1: Value and Its Form – from Deduction to Dialectic

4 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on October 7, 2007

Once again, I’m finding it incredibly difficult to carve out a discussion-sized section from the material in Capital’s introductory chapter – in this case, the third section, on “The Form of Value or Exchange Value”. Once again, the problem is that the meta-commentary going on in this section is densely packed and intricate, and much of the power of the section hinges on drawing attention to this too-tacit argumentative layer of the text.

I read this section, among other things, as Marx’s somewhat playful virtuoso demonstration of the ease with which he can (from his perspective) surpass Hegel by embedding certain core concepts of “dialectics” by revealing the ways in which certain dimensions of collective practice possess practically dialectical properties. It’s not an accident that Aristotle figures in this section, in a discussion of the historical determinants of logical deduction – a passage in which Marx will both relativise the deductive form of reasoning on which he had been apparently relying in the previous sections, and also suggest the need for an immanent and reflexive theory to account, not simply for the content of its own theoretical claims, but for the very form of theoretical analysis itself. The tacit argument here is that theories – even (especially?) critical ones – must locate themselves as determinate moments of the objects they theorise.

This is almost over-clever stuff, and I don’t really think I can do it justice without writing something that moves back and forth between Hegel and Marx to draw out the elements of this complex master-apprentice conversation much more clearly. For the moment, unfortunately, “not doing justice” is what I’ll need to settle for – perhaps I can come back to this more adequately over the summer break, when I’ll need to explore Hegel in more detail to prepare for an event where I’ll be speaking on Hegel and Marx… For present purposes, I’ll simply mention that one layer of this section begins to suggest an unacknowledged practice-theoretic dimension to Hegel’s analytical technique, while another layer hints at the potential for theorising how notions of reciprocal intersubjective recognition might arise as a moment within a more overarching impersonal social dynamic. Beautiful, provocative, generative material – much of which I won’t cover with anything close to adequate complexity here.

Okay. So what to say. In this post, I think I’ll limit my comments primarily to the question of how I understand the meta-commentary Marx is offering here on the reflexive relationship of theory to its context.

We’ve previously discussed Marx’s statement that the first chapter of Capital presents the “greatest difficulty” in grasping the analytical strategy of the text. In section 3A, Marx confronts us with the difficulty of that difficulty:

The whole mystery of the form of value lies hidden in this elementary form. Its analysis, therefore, is our real difficulty.

Let’s see what this might mean.

Section three begins by reminding us that we are still operating within the form of phenomenological experience that is “given” in the way that wealth “presents itself” in capitalist society. As Marx has already outlined in the first section, this form of subjectivity perceives commodities as dual entities, possessing use values that are conditioned by their qualitatively specific, bodily, natural, “material” properties, and exchange values that appear to entail accidental and purely relative quantitative proportions, and that relate to supersensible social properties that bear no intrinsic relation to the material form the commodity possesses. In the present section, Marx expresses this in the following way, incorporating elements from the discussion of value that Marx has unfolded in the previous sections:

Commodities come into the world in the shape of use values, articles, or goods, such as iron, linen, corn, &c. This is their plain, homely, bodily form. They are, however, commodities, only because they are something twofold, both objects of utility, and, at the same time, depositories of value. They manifest themselves therefore as commodities, or have the form of commodities, only in so far as they have two forms, a physical or natural form, and a value form.

The reality of the value of commodities differs in this respect from Dame Quickly, that we don’t know “where to have it.” The value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition. Turn and examine a single commodity, by itself, as we will, yet in so far as it remains an object of value, it seems impossible to grasp it. If, however, we bear in mind that the value of commodities has a purely social reality, and that they acquire this reality only in so far as they are expressions or embodiments of one identical social substance, viz., human labour, it follows as a matter of course, that value can only manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to commodity. In fact we started from exchange value, or the exchange relation of commodities, in order to get at the value that lies hidden behind it. We must now return to this form under which value first appeared to us.

Every one knows, if he knows nothing else, that commodities have a value form common to them all, and presenting a marked contrast with the varied bodily forms of their use values. I mean their money form. Here, however, a task is set us, the performance of which has never yet even been attempted by bourgeois economy, the task of tracing the genesis of this money form, of developing the expression of value implied in the value relation of commodities, from its simplest, almost imperceptible outline, to the dazzling money-form. By doing this we shall, at the same time, solve the riddle presented by money.

The simplest value-relation is evidently that of one commodity to some one other commodity of a different kind. Hence the relation between the values of two commodities supplies us with the simplest expression of the value of a single commodity.

Note that this passage still follows the deductive mode of presentation Marx has been spoofing up to this point: Marx “deduces” here that “it follows as a matter of course, that value can only manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to commodity”. This conclusion is positioned in the text as pointing to something that “Every one knows, if he knows nothing else” – that commodities share a common value-form in the form of money. The strategy of the text is important here: the question that motivates this section – how to “solve” the mystery of the value form (the question, ultimately, of why value is expressed, or, what it implies that value is distinguishable from the form in which it nevertheless must appear) – has been posed by forms of analysis that derive directly from how the wealth of capitalist society presents itself.

The question has therefore arisen immanently within a particular dimension of a specific context. Marx argues, however, that this immanently posed question cannot be answered by the forms of perception and thought that have posed it: instead, he argues, “a task is set us, the performance of which has never yet even been attempted by bourgeois economy”. Bourgeois political economy has therefore pointed beyond itself, gesturing to the existence of something that it cannot itself adequately grasp, and opening the way for a more adequate theoretical approach.

With this move, Marx has overtly, if subtly, tipped his hand, and revealed the preceding sections as the opening volleys of a dialectical presentation that has unfolded only with reference to the insights available to a particular phenomenological perspective. At this point in the text, Marx believes he has demonstrated that this initial phenomenological perspective itself betrays the signs that it is not fully adequate to the phenomenon it seeks to grasp – that its perception of the wealth of capitalist societies, as well as its self-understanding, are partial and relate to a specific moment within the reproduction of such societies. Marx’s analysis has shown how this partial character is expressed or symptomatically betrayed within the perspective he is analysing, even though the perspective itself does not recognise its own partial character or realise how it points beyond itself.

So, in this section, what I have been calling the “deductive” mode of presentation, used in the earlier sections of the chapter, is revealed explicitly as a form of theorisation expressive of the phenomenological perspective that, as described in the opening sentences of this chapter, sees the commodity as “an object outside us”. The deductive presentation on which Marx has been relying thus far in this chapter is one that takes the “objectivity” of its object of analysis as a “given” – as something that sits “outside” the perspective from which the theoretical analysis is being offered, and whose properties, once discovered, might be manipulated to serve some human purpose, but that are not constituted through contingent human practices. The deductive presentation thus perceives no intrinsic relationship between its own form, its own analytical method, and the form of its object. Subjectivity and objectivity are not posited in any intrinsic relationship.

This dualistic, deductive form of theory, however, runs aground on the problem of how to grasp the intrinsically relational and reflexive aspects of the value form. In bringing the deductive method to its limits by unfolding from it the problem of the value-form, Marx opens a breach through which some of the elements of a dialectical analysis then enter. As this “dialectical” analysis unfolds, it will react back on some of the claims put forward by the deductive mode of presentation, relativising them as forms of thought that appear adequate only when a very specific slice of an overarching context was being engaged by the analysis. When viewed in the light of the additional perspectives made available by even this introductory “dialectical” perspective, the earlier “deductive” form of presentation comes to appear both plausible, and partial – opening the way for the explicit critique Marx will offer in the section on commodity fetishism.

At this point in the narrative, then, we have moved beyond the phenomenological perspective with which Marx opens Capital. Does this mean that we have now reached Marx’s own “position” – the critical standpoint that provides the tacit “for us” of this text? I don’t believe so. As I mentioned above, I take this section to be, at least in part, a gesture toward Hegel – an acknowledgement of how Hegel’s work moves beyond the forms of thought on display in the previous sections, as well as a rapid-fire set of gestures to where Marx believes Hegel went astray. At the same time, this part of the text continues the work of suggesting how particular political economic perspectives are bound together with specific dimensions of collective practice. Since, however, the “for us” of this text voices the standpoint of an immanent critical theory, Marx will gradually appropriate the alienated elements of the context as his analysis unfolds, leveraging the critical insights unfolded with each stage of the presentation. At this moment, those critical insights are sufficient to begin to point past the dualistic forms of thought with which the text begins, to illustrate (albeit too tacitly) the presentational method of the text, and to open up the critique of commodity fetishism.

So what does Marx actually say in this section? The section as a whole gradually moves from accident to necessity. It is easy to read the textual strategy here as though Marx is making a historical argument – moving progressively through an analysis of earlier forms of production for market exchange, through to fully developed capitalist production. My impulse is to resist this interpretation, and to read this text instead as describing a logical, rather than an historical “progression” or development. My impulse, in other words, is to treat all of the forms Marx analyses here as presupposing the full development of capitalism – and, therefore, as expressions of contemporaneous moments within that fully developed social form.

Some of the moments Marx analyses here do bear a stronger resemblance to pre-capitalist institutions: the analysis of the “elementary” form of value, for example, examines transactions that resemble an intuitive notion of the sorts of exchanges that might have taken place in a pre-capitalist market. Yet Marx specifically draws attention to this possible historical interpretation, by saying that he can best cast light on some of the “peculiarities” of the equivalent form (the basis for the money form) through a digression on Aristotle. Marx then uses this digression to argue that Aristotle was not able to “discover” the secrets of the equivalent form because he lacks a concept of value – because he lacked experience with wage labour. Apparently, then, comprehension of even the most “elementary” form Marx analyses in this section, cannot proceed until capitalism is fully formed – or, better, in spite of superficial historical similarities, the “elementary” form of value should not be taken to have been constituted in collective practice until the development of capitalism.

There are some fantastic side points that beg to be made here about the construction of history and of particular imaginaries of the past, organised around moments that are generated within contemporary societies, but that possess qualitative characteristics that suggest that they are somehow historically “primitive”. For the moment, I’ll just leave this hanging as an interesting tangent for later development, as this isn’t something that Marx thematises in any detail at this point in the text.

The section on Aristotle makes a fairly clear case that the forms Marx is analysing here are not historical forms. The language of this section also hints that the forms being analysed, particularly the “accidental” form, lie quite close the surface of everyday phenomenological experience – they point back to the very first discussion of exchange value, in the opening section of this chapter, which argued that exchange value “appears to be something accidental and purely relative”. This reference to the appearance of “accident” is carried over into this section – except that, instead of looking at this accidental characteristic as it relates to the properties of an object – an individual commodity taken in isolation – we are now exploring the appearance of “accident” within a relation between commodities.

Looking at the exchange of two commodities – coats and linen – Marx differentiates two positions each commodity might occupy within the exchange relationship: the “relative form”, a role occupied by the commodity whose “supersensible” value is expressed in terms of the other commodity, and the “equivalent form”, a role occupied by the commodity whose “body” expresses the value of the other commodity. Marx unfolds some complex characteristics from this apparently simple relationship:

The relative form and the equivalent form are two intimately connected, mutually dependent and inseparable elements of the expression of value; but, at the same time, are mutually exclusive, antagonistic extremes – i.e., poles of the same expression… A single commodity cannot, therefore, simultaneously assume, in the same expression of value, both forms. The very polarity of these forms makes them mutually exclusive.

So Marx unfolds a strange, intrinsically dichotomous relationship that simultaneously binds together and opposes the bodily and supersensible qualities of commodities related in this way. Marx then argues that, when the relationship is looked at from the perspective of any two commodities, the specific role that each commodity occupies within the relationship appears arbitrary:

Whether, then, a commodity assumes the relative form, or the opposite equivalent form, depends entirely upon its accidental position in the expression of value – that is, upon whether it is the commodity whose value is being expressed or the commodity in which value is being expressed.

This appearance of arbitrariness will gradually be replaced, as the analysis unfolds, such that necessity closes in – not because the commodity that occupies the role of the equivalent isn’t an “arbitrary” matter of convention (on this level, the accidental appearance of the equivalent form is “true”, and renders plausible the forms of subjectivity that focus on the elements that are accidental within this form), but because, as Marx will argue in the section on commodity fetishism, a focus on the arbitrariness of which commodity comes to play the role of equivalent, involves a partial perspective that fixates on a single, “overtly social”, element of the value form, and thereby deflects its analytical gaze from the impersonal forms of social coercion that exert themselves in part through this form:

in the midst of all the accidental and ever fluctuating exchange relations between the products, the labour time socially necessary for their production forcibly asserts itself like an over-riding law of Nature. The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears.

Marx thus “grounds” theories that focus on the accidental or arbitrary nature of which commodity plays the role of equivalent, by demonstrating such theories to be plausible approximations of a particular aspect of collective practice, while also setting up for a critique that such forms of thought participate in the collectively-constituted trompe l’oeil that grasps the arbitrary nature of “overtly social” dimensions of the context, while failing to grasp the contingent character of impersonal forms of compulsion that also characterise that same context.

Marx next moves to bracket the analysis of the quantitative proportions in which commodities exchange – another apparently contingent aspect of the exchange relationship that he first introduced in the preliminary discussion of exchange value at the beginning of the chapter:

Exchange value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort, a relation constantly changing with time and place.

In section 3.2.a, he puts forward the goal instead of considering the expression of the value of a commodity apart from the quantitative proportions in which commodities exchange:

In order to discover how the elementary expression of the value of a commodity lies hidden in the value relation of two commodities, we must, in the first place, consider the latter entirely apart from its quantitative aspect. The usual mode of procedure is generally the reverse, and in the value relation nothing is seen but the proportion between definite quantities of two different sorts of commodities that are considered equal to each other. It is apt to be forgotten that the magnitudes of different things can be compared quantitatively, only when those magnitudes are expressed in terms of the same unit. It is only as expressions of such a unit that they are of the same denomination, and therefore commensurable.

The footnote attached to this paragraph continues this argument in a less immanent voice:

The few economists, amongst whom is S. Bailey, who have occupied themselves with the analysis of the form of value, have been unable to arrive at any result, first, because they confuse the form of value with value itself; and second, because, under the coarse influence of the practical bourgeois, they exclusively give their attention to the quantitative aspect of the question.

The phrasing in this footnote is interesting: the political economists have been unable to grasp the form of value, because they confuse this form with value itself. Marx calls explicit attention here to a distinction already introduced in the previous sections: between value – as a socially-constituted “essence” of capitalist production – and exchange-value – as a necessary form of appearance of that essence. As the analysis unfolds, Marx will rely on this essence-appearance relationship to unfold an analysis of how a social “substance” like value might be constituted by social actors as an unintentional by-product of practices oriented to other goals.

Here, though, Marx focusses on unfolding an extraordinary set of metaphors to capture the qualitative, rather than the quantitative, dimensions of the value form. (I should note that Sinthome has walked before me here, in a beautiful post I wasn’t able to address adequately at the time it was written, but which picks up on Marx’s use of metaphors of coagulation and congealment in this section of Capital, and then improvises around these metaphors into a much broader set of reflections on materialist philosophy.) Marx reflects back here on the earlier sections, which had seemed to suggest that commodities, as objects, possessed a dual character; he now begins to unfold some of what was tacitly presupposed in this perception of commodities:

If we say that, as values, commodities are mere congelations of human labour, we reduce them by our analysis, it is true, to the abstraction, value; but we ascribe to this value no form apart from their bodily form. It is otherwise in the value relation of one commodity to another. Here, the one stands forth in its character of value by reason of its relation to the other.

By making the coat the equivalent of the linen, we equate the labour embodied in the former to that in the latter. Now, it is true that the tailoring, which makes the coat, is concrete labour of a different sort from the weaving which makes the linen. But the act of equating it to the weaving, reduces the tailoring to that which is really equal in the two kinds of labour, to their common character of human labour. In this roundabout way, then, the fact is expressed, that weaving also, in so far as it weaves value, has nothing to distinguish it from tailoring, and, consequently, is abstract human labour. It is the expression of equivalence between different sorts of commodities that alone brings into relief the specific character of value-creating labour, and this it does by actually reducing the different varieties of labour embodied in the different kinds of commodities to their common quality of human labour in the abstract.

Marx is beginning here to suggest that the perception that commodities are objects with supersensible social properties, always already presupposes some perspective or dimension of social practice within which these “internal” properties are “externalised” or overtly expressed – already presupposes the relation of commodities Marx has here characterised in terms of the value form:

There is, however, something else required beyond the expression of the specific character of the labour of which the value of the linen consists. Human labour power in motion, or human labour, creates value, but is not itself value. It becomes value only in its congealed state, when embodied in the form of some object. In order to express the value of the linen as a congelation of human labour, that value must be expressed as having objective existence, as being a something materially different from the linen itself, and yet a something common to the linen and all other commodities. The problem is already solved.

I’ll leave until next time an exploration of why Marx thinks this discussion has “solved” the problem that thwarted “bourgeois” economics. It’s getting late on my end, and the upcoming passages include some fantastic, suggestive sections on the objective, subjective, and intersubjective relations of commodities of all sorts. Hopefully I can work my way into some of these issues when I next return to this series.

(Apologies for typographical and editing issues above: too late on my end to do a proper review of what I’ve written…)

Previous posts in this series include:

Human Labour in the Abstract

An Aside on the Category of Capital

Abstraction, Critical Theory, Fetish, Materialism, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity

Daily Keynes

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on October 5, 2007

I wanted to put up a pointer to the series on Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money that Mike Beggs has begun blogging over at Scandalum Magnatum. Mike currently has posts up on the first two chapters, with more (much more!!) planned:

Where are the lefty economics blogs? I find myself haunting the philosophy and cultural studies segments of the blogosphere, which is possibly more fun than economics, especially when I need to divert myself from an economics thesis. The web is full of humming radical philosophy and cultural studies blogs, but a radical political economy community just isn’t there. Or maybe I’m just not aware of it?

Anyway, a reading group I’ve been part of in real life is about to turn to Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. I’ve read tons of the secondary literature but never read it right through. It seems important to do so for my thesis at some point, too, so that’s a bonus. So I thought I’d use this spot as a place to work through it, and if anybody wants to join me, great. It’s about 400 pages including the index, and I’ve got a month to get through it for the reading group. So the plan is to do a chapter each working day, starting Thursday. The chapters are not too long – hell, the first one is half a page. But it is dense in places.

(Keynes’ text is available online from MIA.)

Links, Political Economy

Blog Talk Tomorrow

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on October 4, 2007

For folks at my university, there will be a panel session tomorrow on “Online Tools for Building Research Networks”. Different presenters will be discussing the internal DLS system, Facebook, developing a research project website, and academic blogging. I’ve been tagged for the blogging presentation – but, chances are, if you’re seeing this announcement here, you know everything you want to know about blogging in general, and this blog in particular (when I was invited to present, I was told: “Don’t prepare anything special – just show them your blog!” Yeah right…). But if you want to show up and heckle, correct the grandiose claims I’ll no doubt make about what I write here, or similar, feel free – perhaps it will give a live performance version of what blogging is really like.

My thought was to hand out copies of the Ivan Tribble anti-blogging article and my response (although I’ve loosened up a lot on blogging since I wrote that piece…). For fun, I thought I might also toss in Adam Kotsko’s diagnosis of the medium – and perhaps pair this with something that gives a sense of the more productive cross-blog discussions that sometimes range around, although the more productive the discussion, the more difficult it is to show this briefly… I’m tempted to show them some of the results from Scott Eric Kaufman’s unintentional experiment in using the blogosphere for methodological feedback…

I would also like to hand out something simple that gives people the basics about how to find academic blogs specifically, how to set up a blog if they want to give it a try, etc. I’m hoping there’s something lovely and pre-made that I can stumble across in the next 24 hours, rather than making something myself…

The session will be held in the Research Lounge (entrance across from Swanston Library in Building 8 level 5), from 3:00-4:30. There seems to be some rumour about going to the pub after…

Blogging, Events

Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1: An Aside on the Category of Capital

9 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on October 3, 2007

One very quick comment, as I have a very long teaching day today, and don’t have much time to write: just in case it has escaped attention, the first chapter of Capital – although I obviously think it deserves great attention – does not actually deploy the category of capital (which, in the scheme of things, one would imagine would be a fairly important category to analyse…). Instead, the phenomenological perspective it analyses remains within commodity production and exchange, which means, among other things, that the concept of the fetish as discussed here is therefore primarily directed at certain “Cartesian” forms of perception that are expressed in this dimension of collective experience.

Marx will gradually work his way “up” (down?) to the category of capital, over the course of several subsequent chapters, unfolding an analysis of an array of additional immanent phenomenological perspectives as he goes, linking each to an aspect of collective practice. Each of these phenomenological perspectives remains available as a moment within capitalism, understood as an overarching social context: though these forms of experience or thought may “contradict” one another in various respects, they share the common quality of expressing specific dimensions of their shared context, and they do not reflect “historical” forms of thought that have been “superseded” in the course of capitalist development (although particular phenomenological experiences may come more to the fore in particular places and times).

In emphasising the argument about the fetish is such detail, I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that this section of Marx’s argument is still a sort of preliminary gesture. I’m dwelling on this section at such length because I find it a useful way to explore Marx’s presentational strategy and tacit theoretical commitments: a close analysis of this first chapter pays off, when moving forward through the text. Nevertheless, the particular forms of subjectivity being analysed directly in this section are only the beginning moves in an elaborate reflexive theory.

Previous posts in the series:

Human Labour in the Abstract

Next post in this series:

Value and Its Form – From Deduction to Dialectics

Critical Theory, Fetish, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity

Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1: Human Labour in the Abstract

3 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on October 3, 2007

So I’ve decided that I’m not quite ready to let go of the first chapter of Capital. My provisional thought, very much subject to change, is that I’ll write something brief tonight on abstract labour, then at some point soon take up the complex discussion going on in the section on the form of value, and then write something on whatever bits of the section on commodity fetishism I haven’t managed to roll into the other posts.

In my last post in this series, I suggested that:

the first chapter was driving toward the argument about commodity fetishism,
significant aspects of the earlier sections of the chapter were intended to express fetishised forms of perception and thought, rather than Marx’s own “position”, and
fetishised forms of perception involve the attribution of supersensible social qualities to material objects.

In previous posts in this series (I’ve included a full list at the bottom of this post), I’ve suggested that this argument doesn’t simply involve the claim that “supersensible” qualities are inappropriately “projected” onto material nature. First, since this is a reflexive argument, Marx is seeking to ground, rather than simply debunk, the forms of thought he is analysing (including the forms of thought mobilised in his own critique). He therefore won’t treat the fetish as a “mere” conceptual error or a simple “illusion”. He will instead position fetishised perceptions as “forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production”. He will also present the fetish as arising from a particular way of enacting our collective lives, such that fetishised forms of thought are related to determinate qualitative characteristics of social “realities” enacted in particular forms of collective practice:

the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things. (emphasis mine)

This reflexive strategy enables Marx (in principle) to construct a socially immanent critique that accounts for the practical genesis of the forms of thought it opposes, while also using the same analysis to demonstrate that such forms of thought are partial, and thus fail to grasp emancipatory potentials necessarily generated through the same practical, collective process that reproduces capitalism.

Second, I have suggested that the argument about the fetish is not concerned solely with explaining the “supersensible” properties that are perceived to inhere in material objects: it also lays the foundation for grasping the conviction that there are “material objects” – problematising the conception (expressed in many places in the first chapter) that our perception of a “material world” represents some kind of “demythologised” form of thought that arises quasi-automatically, once artificial social determinations have been stripped away, leaving “nature” behind. Instead, the “material world” is grasped in this argument as its own practically constituted “positivity” – as the product of determinate kinds of collective practice. (As a side note, to avoid confusion: This kind of argument is not intended to position human practice as somehow generative of the entirety of the non-human world – evoking a sort of radical social constructivism – but rather to explore connections between our current sensitivity to specific potentials of the non-human world, and other dimensions of our contemporaneous historical experience.)

Note that, since I’m suggesting that Marx is unfolding a reflexive critical theory, this sort of analytical move does not invalidate his own critical deployment of a (grounded) notion of “materialism”. Instead, this move enables Marx to deploy a concept of materialism (or other normative standards) non-dogmatically, in a way that symmetrically applies the same critical framework to his own position, and to positions he criticises, and thus does not rely on critical standards that float above the context being criticised.

I therefore see the “denaturalising” move made by the argument about the fetish as cutting “both ways” – as encompassing concepts of use value and exchange value, sensuous material nature and supersensible laws, subjects and objects, and a constellation of other dichotomies that will be unfolded as having interrelated, practical bases in the course of this analysis. And I see this argument opening up the possibility for an analysis of capitalism as a peculiarly “layered” social context, constituted by intrinsically bound and yet conflictual dimensions of collective practice that mutually differentiate one another to constitute a practical dichotomy between, on the one hand, a “secularised” impersonal world of “material” objects whose interactions are governed by “universal” laws, and, on the other, a contingent, historically-variable, intersubjective realm of human custom.

But I said I was going to write about abstract labour… ;-P I’m realising as I pause here that I’ve become extremely tired, but I likely won’t have much time to write for the next couple of days, and I’d rather not let this line of thought go completely cold. As a least-worst option, I’m going to dash something out that I suspect won’t manage to express what I’m after. Apologies for the confusion this will probably cause, but my hope is that folks will be patient enough to offer criticisms in the gamble that my next attempt might be a bit clearer and closer to the mark.

I’ve already suggested in previous posts that the “deduction” of the existence of abstract labour, as presented in the early sections of this chapter, does not represent Marx’s own position, but rather a form of fetishised thought. Thus, in the first section, Marx writes as though commodities can be exchanged because, as objects, they possess the supersensible property of containing equal quantities of abstract labour:

A given commodity, e.g., a quarter of wheat is exchanged for x blacking, y silk, or z gold, &c. – in short, for other commodities in the most different proportions. Instead of one exchange value, the wheat has, therefore, a great many. But since x blacking, y silk, or z gold &c., each represents the exchange value of one quarter of wheat, x blacking, y silk, z gold, &c., must, as exchange values, be replaceable by each other, or equal to each other. Therefore, first: the valid exchange values of a given commodity express something equal; secondly, exchange value, generally, is only the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it.

Let us take two commodities, e.g., corn and iron. The proportions in which they are exchangeable, whatever those proportions may be, can always be represented by an equation in which a given quantity of corn is equated to some quantity of iron: e.g., 1 quarter corn = x cwt. iron. What does this equation tell us? It tells us that in two different things – in 1 quarter of corn and x cwt. of iron, there exists in equal quantities something common to both. The two things must therefore be equal to a third, which in itself is neither the one nor the other. Each of them, so far as it is exchange value, must therefore be reducible to this third.

A simple geometrical illustration will make this clear. In order to calculate and compare the areas of rectilinear figures, we decompose them into triangles. But the area of the triangle itself is expressed by something totally different from its visible figure, namely, by half the product of the base multiplied by the altitude. In the same way the exchange values of commodities must be capable of being expressed in terms of something common to them all, of which thing they represent a greater or less quantity.

This common “something” cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities. Such properties claim our attention only in so far as they affect the utility of those commodities, make them use values. But the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterised by a total abstraction from use value. Then one use value is just as good as another, provided only it be present in sufficient quantity. Or, as old Barbon says,

“one sort of wares are as good as another, if the values be equal. There is no difference or distinction in things of equal value … An hundred pounds’ worth of lead or iron, is of as great value as one hundred pounds’ worth of silver or gold.”

As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use value.

If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.

In the section on the fetish, Marx explicitly contradicts this claim:

As a general rule, articles of utility become commodities, only because they are products of the labour of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their work independently of each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange. In other words, the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things. It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire, as values, one uniform social status, distinct from their varied forms of existence as objects of utility. This division of a product into a useful thing and a value becomes practically important, only when exchange has acquired such an extension that useful articles are produced for the purpose of being exchanged, and their character as values has therefore to be taken into account, beforehand, during production. From this moment the labour of the individual producer acquires socially a twofold character. On the one hand, it must, as a definite useful kind of labour, satisfy a definite social want, and thus hold its place as part and parcel of the collective labour of all, as a branch of a social division of labour that has sprung up spontaneously. On the other hand, it can satisfy the manifold wants of the individual producer himself, only in so far as the mutual exchangeability of all kinds of useful private labour is an established social fact, and therefore the private useful labour of each producer ranks on an equality with that of all others. The equalisation of the most different kinds of labour can be the result only of an abstraction from their inequalities, or of reducing them to their common denominator, viz. expenditure of human labour power or human labour in the abstract. The twofold social character of the labour of the individual appears to him, when reflected in his brain, only under those forms which are impressed upon that labour in every-day practice by the exchange of products. In this way, the character that his own labour possesses of being socially useful takes the form of the condition, that the product must be not only useful, but useful for others, and the social character that his particular labour has of being the equal of all other particular kinds of labour, takes the form that all the physically different articles that are the products of labour. have one common quality, viz., that of having value.

Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it. Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language. The recent scientific discovery, that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the human race, but, by no means, dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves. The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific social character of private labour carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value – this fact appears to the producers, notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered. (bold text mine)

In between the sections quoted above, Marx scatters a number of indications that the concept of “human labour in the abstract” picks out a very peculiar social entity. In the first section, he argues:

The labour, however, that forms the substance of value, is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uniform labour power. The total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average labour power of society, and takes effect as such; that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is needed on an average, no more than is socially necessary.

When Marx refers to the “total labour power of society”, this initially sounds as though he might be suggesting that “abstract labour” could just be something like “the total amount of goal-directed energy humans expend to transform material nature to meet their needs” – as though the term is just a conceptual abstraction from all the varieties of concrete labouring activities humans happen to undertake. Passages elsewhere in the chapter that speak of labour in physiological terms would seem to reinforce this impression:

Productive activity, if we leave out of sight its special form, viz., the useful character of the labour, is nothing but the expenditure of human labour power. Tailoring and weaving, though qualitatively different productive activities, are each a productive expenditure of human brains, nerves, and muscles, and in this sense are human labour. They are but two different modes of expending human labour power.

From the beginning, however, it is clear that the concept of “human labour in the abstract” is not just a useful conceptual category for classifying and grouping all different sorts of labour activity. Instead, the concept seems intended to pick out something coercive – a sort of unintended collective normative force that adjudicates what gets to “count as labour”. So, as Marx presents it, labouring activities – human physiological exertion, goal-directed transformations of nature, etc. – get to “count as labour” only if they generate a use value for others, and only to the extent that they conform to a socially average level of productivity. And the producers, although they may certainly strategise, plot and scheme, cannot know in advance whether, and to what extent, their labour will “count”.

Marx is already hinting at the coercive nature of abstract labour when, just after he first notes that value is measured by labour-time, he then immediately explains that there is a difference between the empirical expenditure of time in a production process, and the normative measure of abstract labour. He illustrates the potential consequences of this distinction with a well-chosen example:

The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour’s social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value.

Abstract labour figures in this account as a sort of socially-constituted mass with a qualitatively homogeneous, undifferentiated character. Commodities are treated in social practice as though they “partake” of this qualitatively homogeneous supersensible substance to greater or lesser degrees. Concrete labouring activities therefore “count as labour” only to the degree that these activities are productive of commodities that “participate” in this socially-constituted mass. The empirical efforts expended in the production of particular commodities, the empirical form of concrete labouring processes, do not determine the extent to which empirical products serve as receptacles of materialised value. In relation to concrete “sensuous” elements of material production, value stands as a “counter-factual”, sensuously undetectable, social constraint.

Except. Commodities must also be use values. And productivity pertains to the production of some particular kind of use value. So there are determinate connections – conflictual ones – between empirical labouring processes and “human labour in the abstract”. These connections feed into the coercive dynamic associated with value:

If the productive power of all the different sorts of useful labour required for the production of a coat remains unchanged, the sum of the values of the coats produced increases with their number. If one coat represents x days’ labour, two coats represent 2x days’ labour, and so on. But assume that the duration of the labour necessary for the production of a coat becomes doubled or halved. In the first case one coat is worth as much as two coats were before; in the second case, two coats are only worth as much as one was before, although in both cases one coat renders the same service as before, and the useful labour embodied in it remains of the same quality. But the quantity of labour spent on its production has altered.

An increase in the quantity of use values is an increase of material wealth. With two coats two men can be clothed, with one coat only one man. Nevertheless, an increased quantity of material wealth may correspond to a simultaneous fall in the magnitude of its value. This antagonistic movement has its origin in the twofold character of labour. Productive power has reference, of course, only to labour of some useful concrete form, the efficacy of any special productive activity during a given time being dependent on its productiveness. Useful labour becomes, therefore, a more or less abundant source of products, in proportion to the rise or fall of its productiveness. On the other hand, no change in this productiveness affects the labour represented by value. Since productive power is an attribute of the concrete useful forms of labour, of course it can no longer have any bearing on that labour, so soon as we make abstraction from those concrete useful forms. However then productive power may vary, the same labour, exercised during equal periods of time, always yields equal amounts of value. But it will yield, during equal periods of time, different quantities of values in use; more, if the productive power rise, fewer, if it fall. The same change in productive power, which increases the fruitfulness of labour, and, in consequence, the quantity of use values produced by that labour, will diminish the total value of this increased quantity of use values, provided such change shorten the total labour time necessary for their production; and vice versâ.

At this early point, then, Marx has already begun to hint that increased productivity, in spite of the greater material wealth and command over nature it may generate, can provoke counter-intuitively negative consequences under capitalism, as concrete labouring activities are coercively compelled to comply with a new social norm of productivity. Marx describes this situation as “a state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him”. Significantly, the type of social coercion being described here, while grounded in human practice, is impersonal in character – generated as the unintentional consequence of practices oriented to other purposes. This is one aspect of why, as Marx describes, value is a “social hieroglyphic” that needs to be deciphered: compared with other, more “concrete” social institutions whose intersubjective character renders them “overtly” social, the dynamics associated with value confront people, by contrast, as if they are an asocial “objectivity”. Marx describes this strange, distinctive “relation of production” as “the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour” – the first generation Frankfurt School capture something similar when they discuss the domination of individuals by the social totality.

More – and hopefully more adequate – commentary on all of this, once I’ve recovered from teaching this week… Apologies for the many problems in this piece – just too tired to edit in any form…

The previous posts in this series are: