Reconceiving Race and Capital

Communists in Situ recently reposted Jehu’s series of notes on privilege politics as a single post (alongside the also interesting and clearly related essay by Paul Mattick Sr., “The Scum of Humanity”), which I had not read in some time, and I have to commend them on doing so. While I will put forward a different way of conceptualizing racialization because I consider the labor competition thesis to be wholly inadequate, I have to say that I really do recommend reading the essays for their clear comprehension of competition between individuals within classes; the very good reasons that between (Marxist) privilege theory (Racism, sexism and other forms of domination do not simply end with the overthrow of capitalism) and “orthodox” Marxism (With the overthrow of capitalism, racism, sexism and all forms of oppression will be done away with), “orthodox” Marxism is simply idiotic and why a real consideration has to begin with the dilemmas posed by privilege theory within Marxism; how elements within Marx’s own work, such as in the Critique of the Gotha Program, allow us to grasp the necessary internal differentiation within the class that will not simply be overcome by “the revolution”; and finally the point that the demand for racial equality is a demand that capitalism can in no way accommodate without destroying itself. Finally, Jehu makes two additional points that everyone really needs to comprehend: the working class was never a single, internally cohesive class merely divided by “bourgeois ideology” foisted on it a manipulative capitalist class and the working class today is mostly non-white women on a global scale, so that the overcoming of capital won’t happen if it isn’t also the overcoming of race and gender as well as class.

As a minor prefatory note, I don’t generally use the term 'racism' because it is commonly used to indicate some bad ideas in people’s heads, whether subjectively bad like prejudice or objectively bad produced by “the system”, frequently only taking into account the oppression of one race by another, but taking for granted the very production of race as a social category or form. At best, it refers to unequal relations of power between groups, which may be naturalized (as if races existed in nature, which many people certainly believe, including many people who should know better) or treated as socially constructed. For my part, I prefer the term racialization because it implies an ongoing process, of the formation and potential crisis of what I believe is an objectively produced social relation, as much as gender or class.

There is no need to address whether or not race exists biologically in any detail. The idea is as absurd as any other naturalization of relations of domination and has no standing in biology, though the rightward drift since the 1970’s has given the idea some limited credence even among those who ought to know better. The fact remains that genetic variation is greater within so-called races than between them in the human species, thus making the idea of such groupings incoherent and arbitrary.

The approach here assumes that any meaningful discussion of race is a discussion of relations of domination. This also means that nationalist approaches to race that would elevate the so-called black race or which accept race as positive will not be addressed as worth serious consideration. However, insofar as identity politics plays a great role in the present, the question of identity will have to be dealt with in some detail, especially as it pertains to intersectionality on one side and the class identity politics of the labor Left on the other.

Part of the difficulty of this discussion comes from a difference in the method of treatment. My argument is first and foremost not explanatory and sociological. Such a treatment would put forward a directly historical analysis or structural analysis, most likely trying to establish correct definitions or starting from empirical material (historicism often beings in this manner). Rather, what is required is an adequate concept of the production of racial relations in capitalist society. Explanatory distinctions, definitions, and sociological categories already presume, whether they wish to admit it or not, whether they are aware of those commitments or not, a concept of their object and its validity.

What is missing in most Marxist treatments of racialization is not historical material or a structural analysis, but a comprehension of how racialization develops immanently from within capital, that is, without presuming its external or prior existence and without looking for explanations outside of capital, but also without reducing race to an effect of class or class struggle. Racialization, as I am arguing it be understood, is specific to capitalist society, just as modern slavery is part of capitalist production. It would be a mistake to treat racialization as merely a continuation of xenophobia or older notions of race. Just as Marx conceptualizes the capital-labor relation, but does not engage in sociological discussions of class in Capital, so I believe we need to conceptualize racialization as a moment of the capital-labor relation, albeit in a manner closer to Roswitha Scholz’s conceptualization of gender as value dissociation (itself building on the work of Frigga Haug), rather than reducing race to an effect of class and without losing the specificity of either class or race.

This is an important task because previous conceptualizations of race, like gender, treat it in generally one of two inadequate ways. Marxists tend to treat it as a mere side-effect of class. Ellen Meiksins Wood formulates “race as ruling class ideology” in a classic manner as cited in Endnotes 3 in the essay on race, but the labor competition thesis is another variety of this analysis. Marxist privilege theories a la Race Traitor/Sojourner Truth with “white skin privilege” or Theodore Allen’s alternative “social control” theory, reject the "race as ruling class ideology" approach, and yet are still at their core reductionist. Alternatively, from within liberal social theory, the identitarian analyses tend to treat race as a wholly autonomous, and maybe even anterior relation, to class. Intersectionality is the latest incarnation of this perspective because it poses race, class, gender, etc. as semi-permeable identities of equal validity, but it’s critique of identity is only a more sophisticated approach to identity c.f. Crenshaw, Collins, et al. Older approaches reflect something akin to feminist dual-systems theory, in which there is a racial order alongside the class order. Ironically enough the “white skin privilege” analysis of RT has become the foundation stone of liberal white privilege theorizing. The identitarian analyses continues to have critical validity because the “race as effect of class” positions cannot grapple with the seeming autonomy of race nor the revelation of class politics as itself a kind of identity politics.

If one takes the point Theorie Communiste makes regarding the working class and class struggle, that the working class struggles as a class of capital and that it’s struggles are part of the engine of the development of capital, then class politics cannot avoid being identity politics. The collapse of the conditions in which working class identity still implied progressive politics has exposed more clearly the identitarian, non-universal quality class politics always had in relation to race and gender (and nationality, sexuality, etc.), whether in colonial settler states, slave states or under colonial regimes, none of which are mutually exclusive. The association of working class with white, male, heterosexual has become so lopsided in the present that “blue collar” in the U.S. is little more than a code phrase for white nationalism.

It is possible to overcome the limitations of identitarian and class reductionist approaches by comprehending class, race, and gender as forms of appearance of the inner contradiction of generalized commodity society, as specific mediations of the capital-labor relation at different points/times in the total cycle of capital, grasping them as concrete forms of capital’s heteronomy, and thereby grounding each in capital and their overcoming as predicated on the overcoming of capital, and yet granting each its own determinations non-reductively, therefore not collapsing the effects and experience of each into the other without granting each of them the status of autonomous identities external to each other. Such an approach must allow for a comprehension of empirical material and in fact only an adequate conceptualization can help us grasp what is and what is not valid empirical data and in what way it is valid. There is no unmediated, brute reality, but there are facts in the sense of what is experienced and organized by the reigning ideas (in their variety), which must in some manner be addressed as objectively valid. In an untrue society, all manner of untruths are nonetheless valid.

Capital provides the ground for an adequate conceptualization of racialization because generalized commodity production and the complete capital cycle constitute wage labor as “doubly free” as the ground of the class relation between labor and capital. The importance of this doubly free labor is not only the freedom of the laborer from any means of reproduction other than their own capacity to labor, and thus freedom from any means to sustain themselves except the exchanging of their labor, but the fact that this labor can be freely sold for a wage (that is, that the capacity to labor, as opposed to the laborer, is a commodity exchanged for money like any other commodity). This relation between labor and capital gives rise, immanently, to law and contractuality because the treatment of labor power as a commodity implies an agreement freely entered between the worker and the capitalist. Hence Marx’s quip about the realm of exchange is both earnest and sardonic because one cannot remain in this realm, which is

“a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each.”

Marx’s point about the freedom to sell one’s labor is related to the wage-laborer being free relative to any particular capitalist or capital. Capital is not a relation of direct, personal forms of domination. Workers are not actually dominated by individual capitalists or even the capitalist class, but by capital as such, by the fact that the means of survival must be procured using money and in order to get money, most individuals must sell their labor power. As the next paragraph of that section indicates, this freedom does not extend into the hidden abode of production, which is essential to understanding why value-form and domination in Marx are not merely relations of circulation and exchange, but of production itself.

To extend this a little, I would argue that in Capital labor is not identical with class. Labor is the determinate social form pace Postone, Kurz, et al, whereas class actually is produced where labor appears in its exchange-form, as wage-labor. Class is exactly labor in its form as doubly-free, as freely exchanged.

I would suggest that race is the way in which the recognition/non-recognition of property in oneself and personhood before the law exists, and thus is about the relation of labor to contractuality and freedom of exchange. In a different instance, but I would argue with a related logic, Roswitha Schulz conceives gender as immanent to the value-form, as dissociation. That is, value entails a separation within reproduction itself, of household from public, of waged- from unwaged-labor, of production from reproduction, immanently.  My suggestion is that at the point of the exchange of labor power as commodity, racialization takes place specifically where the exchange is absolutely or relatively attenuated and the resultant recognition of the property in oneself that makes one a person before the law is also absolutely or relatively attenuated.

One problem is that the universality of gender and class relations seems self-evident, since everywhere there is value, there is its dissociation, i.e. gender. Racialization appears, on the contrary, localized and particular, i.e. utterly not universal. However, this manner of objection mistakes what is being claimed, which is that racialization is the outcome of a specific dynamic inherent to capital which is not a mere side-effect of class, but is an inner moment of the value form.  This does not entail that racialization is generally present everywhere in some phenomenal sense, nor that it has the exact same expression everywhere.  Then again, class and gender formation cannot in any way lay claim to an abstract general expression, but are always the specific class and gender relations of a given time and place.  In other words, there is a dilemma at the heart of what makes class or gender relations capitalist and yet how to account for their particular phenomenal forms of expression at any given moment, in any given place.  After all, we would say that all states are capitalist states, but what makes them capitalist states in their otherwise broad variety?

In reference to race, class and gender, labor is the determinate social form, albeit via the idea of value dissociation at the nexus of value-productive/non-value-productive for gender, and at the dissociation of persons/non-persons at the nexus of the exchange relation for race.

Freedom of the world of exchange means that the social norm of the surface of capitalist social relations is individual freedom: persons entering into freely willed exchanges, the governance of which would be contractual law. The enforcement of contracts cannot be relegated to either party in the exchange or contract and thus arises a necessary third party invested with the power to enforce, hence the state form and the forms of legal relations appropriate to generalized commodity and exchange relations. Under such a situation, all individuals having property (at the very least Locke’s property in themselves) are also persons, that is, abstractly equal legal subjects pace Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

However, the systematic attenuation of the status of person, of abstract legal subject, indicates that this too is not a direct form of personal domination, hence not some pre-capitalist or non-capitalist form of domination. We should here not get caught up in sociological or historicist complaints that workers really do have less power than capitalists who employ them, that workers were at various times subject to direct domination, or that slaves really are personally dominated by slave-owners because these objections miss the point that the compulsion to obey the dictates of capital doesn’t come from this or that person, but from the autonomization of an abstraction from our own control and the requirement to obey that abstraction (the injunction from capital isn’t “obey this boss” or “swear fealty to this man, obey the king”, but “get a job, make money” and “as a citizen, obey the law.”) In the case of racialization, the form of domination is still abstract and impersonal: the abstract determination of individuals as things, as objects of the law, the determination of unfree labor as an indication of being an object of the law, a thing, rather than a subject of the law, a person, as a group. If class is a moment of the capital-labor relation grounded in the relation of the doubly free laborer to capital, race is a moment of the capital-labor grounded in the (absolute or relative) attenuation of the ownership of property, in oneself and in socially productive inorganic wealth. In other words, racialization is a process of the ascription of full freedom to sell one’s labor and to be treated as a person before the law for those racialized as elect versus those who cannot freely sell, do not freely control the exchange of, their labor and are not treated as a full person before the law for the those racialized as inferior.

My argument is about the conceptual comprehension of state and law as moments of the logic of the formation of the capital-labor relation. This is about the forms and their development logically, not yet their manifestation in historical time. The manifest forms of appearance are important in a complete working out of the relation. However, we must comprehend the logical forms that give continuity to capital’s self-reproduction, and only then do the manifest forms, as the changing expression of that logic over time, find their coherence. This is why it is very important to attend to not merely the valorization process, but the labor process as the changing manifestation of the valorization process. In Marx’s work, the development of the forms and their appearance is a lengthy process which happens organically, that is, the categories and forms must develop out of their own process, they cannot be shot from a pistol. The historical presentation of originary accumulation is only addressed by Marx at the end of Vol. 1 once the categories through which that mass of material might make sense is already developed. The concrete as the outcome of many determinations can only be reached at the end and any attempt to start with the concrete poses a concrete which is immediate and hence false.

Therefore, what I am drawing on in volume 1 of Capital is only an implicit, not yet fully-developed conception of law and contractuality, but which is already inherent to the very basic forms of capital in its earliest moments. Just as capital produces wage labor in this doubly-free form, it also involves labor in not so free forms. Scholz has of course her notion of value dissociation vis-a-vis the relation of value and gender, which I think is the right track even though her presentation is quite poor because, like so many others, she fails to venture into the actual transformations of gender relations, instead talking as if the actual forms of appearance of value dissociation in 1848 would be the same as in 2016, and so she sounds like she is describing the 1950’s in her essay in the issue of the journal Mediations dedicated to the journals Krisis and Exit!. And yet the very crisis of the value form Kurz and Scholz point out elsewhere goes hand-in-hand with a crisis of gender, especially as capitalist development undermines the division of labor in reproduction as it turns more and more of its functions into commodities and the labor of the household is less and less done by only women. This actually leads to an intensification of gender enforcement in the areas which are not so obviously socializable: sexual reproduction. Hence the weakening of gender dimporhism alongside increasingly bitter struggles over reproductive rights and the hypersexualization of women and the blurring of the line between pornography, prostitution, and “normal” sexual relations.

Racialization arises where one group is constituted as having no property in themselves and thus is not a group of persons, that is, abstractly equal subjects of the law whether as people to be enslaved or even waged under conditions of contingency before the law or, as with so many indigenous peoples, as nature-like impediment to capital’s development and expansion for which capital has no use, and the other group is constituted as embodying lawful, subject, person. The logic of race is the logic of a group (or more than one group, in fact) whose personhood is absolutely or relatively attenuated, their treatment as objects rather than subjects of the law, and of a group, those in the racial group free to sell its property, including its property in itself, which represents person-hood as such. Even where there is formal legal recognition of personhood in the law, as in the United States after the 13-15 amendments, a wide variety of laws were put in place locally, regionally and federally that undercut this recognition in both law and practice. Even after the legal forms of such undermining are largely removed, as has been the case in the United States since roughly 1968, as long as the institutions on which that racialization was founded remain intact, and the social hierarchies generated by those arrangements are not practically undone, then racialization will be reproduced through the typical mechanisms of interpersonal competition universal to capitalist social relations that Jehu points out in his series notes on privilege theory’s critique of Marxism.

However, we should understand this process in the same way as Werner Bonefeld suggests we understand Marx’s notion of so-called primitive accumulation. The central dynamic of primitive accumulation is the actual separation of the producers from the means of production, the historical breaking up of the peasant’s relations to the land and the craftsman’s control over their own tools and products and production, but process of separation as historical precondition becomes the inner logic of capital. For capital to persist, it must of necessity constantly reproduce the separation of the producers from the means of production, their products, and each other. There would be no reproduction of labor as determinate social form, no indirect coercion of money and market, without the reproduction of individuals as propertyless or rather with no property but their capacity to work for another. So it is with racialization, which is produced first through slavery and the distinction in early accumulation between free and unfree labor, between the labor of persons and the labor of non-persons. However, the distinction between persons and non-persons becomes a central moment of the state-form and the constitution of law in capitalist society, both between states (citizen and non-citizen) and within states (racialization as the attenuated and contingent status of citizenship for some groups who are internal to the state, as against another group is constituted through their entitlement to the fullness of citizenship as a group.) Historical precondition becomes logical dynamic.

Thus the historical, as opposed to the logical, exposition of racialization requires an exposition of the actual process of the accumulation of capital in which certain groups were enslaved (their labor exploited for the production of commodities, but denied the status of free wage-laborers), while others were wiped out (indigenous peoples as psuedo-natural, as impediments to the expansion of capital to be removed by elimination aka genocide.) However, that would entail an exposition on the concept, not the concept as such. And it would only be an exposition of specific historical moments under specific conditions. To tease out the arc of the phenomenal forms of racialization requires a working through of the transformations of of the phenomenal forms of capital vis-a-vis the labor process, law, forms of thought, etc.

For example, racialiazation under mono-crop agricultural slavery is expressed differently from Jim Crow de jure segregation which rested largely on personal servitude and rural agricultural penury, which is different from Northern de facto segregation in a waged work force where labor racialized as black was contingent to the wage as such (last hired, first fired, always expendable) and largely restricted to the worst, lowest skilled, lowest paying jobs. To be clear, to be contingent to wage labor not as an individual (all workers are contingent as individuals to successfully selling their capacity to labor, but not as to whether or not they have the right to sell their labor or as a restriction on attempting to sell their labor to fulfill kinds of positions), but as a group, as opposed to the group racialized as entitled to waged work (an entitlement clearly felt in the self-consciousness of white workers in their own racialization of social welfare and rights to jobs), is also a form of unfreedom, albeit relativized and predicated upon an exacerbated and absolutized contingency, but which nonetheless finds its reflection in an actual lack of equal treatment as persons before the law (this lack of equal treatment is extremely well-documented and its systematic nature thoroughly analysed.)

Each of these moments would have to be grasped within the larger transformations of capital, not to mention the various contingencies that shape any and all social relations from place to place (slavery in Brazil did not produce race in the same way as it did in the U.S. or as it did in Haiti or Cuba, though in all of those places the racialization of society is indeed endemic and real.) And this also means that the crisis of capital is the crisis of the race-form, a crisis of the reproduction of the racial relation. We see today that the collapse of the necessity of living labor globally has eroded the distinction between black labor as collectively, racially contingent and white labor as entitlement to a wage and as racially guaranteed to the point that the contemporary intensification of racial hostility expresses the collapse downward, as it were, of those racialized as black to the status of expendable indigenous peoples and a regression to forms of unfree labor vis-a-vis prison labor and of those racialized as white to a loss of collective protection from the contingency of their labor, that is, to a condition that previously been the preserve of African-Americans.

The changing phenomenal forms of racialization only make sense, however, if we can also understand the continuity and the difference. The logic of racialization, its inner dynamic, does not change any more than the transformations of capitalism from 1850 to 2016 have somehow made the value-form invalid unless capital were to be overcome. Rather, to say that the value-form itself is in crisis, that capital has undermined value and valorisation through its own development, is to exactly reaffirm the validity of the value-form to capital. So we see today a situation in which living labor as such forms a smaller and smaller part of the production of wealth in capitalist society, even as it remains determinate of the social form of wealth. The crisis of class is thus not merely a crisis of the end of the working class as an estate, but also the increasing contingency of living labor to the production of wealth. If any particular labor has always had a contingent relation to employment by capital (capital always only needs an amount of labor, but not any particular laborer), one of the essential benefits of racialization was that white labor was differently contingent because certain kinds of labor, the best paying and most highly skilled, and the legal status of peronshood were essentially reserved for labor racialized as white.  Even on the side of the petit and grande bourgeois, it restricted competition over capital between possible capitalists, and it did have the effect of reducing the coherence of resistance to the domination of capital. of those three moments, the first and second less and less hold true, as race plays less and less of a materially compensatory role for those racialized as white in the working class or as owners of capital, and yet it continues to be extremely effective in undermining the cohesion of resistance to capital.  Capital has less and less need for anyone’s labor and racialization of the labor market is increasingly merely experienced by capital as illiquidity in labor markets (Adolph Reed Jr. makes this point in his essay on post-Civil Rights racialization.) Racialization thus increasingly only guarantees that African-Americans and Native Americans are disproportionately subject to mass incarceration and impoverishment, that they continue to be targeted for explicit political disenfranchisement, but people racialized as white primarily experiences this crisis as the failure of whiteness to grant security, experiencing a degree of contingency in relation to self-sustaining waged labor hitherto reserved for those racialized as non-persons. The increased anger and rage, especially of working class whites, is an anger and rage driven by the unconscious fear that the racialized bottom has fallen out, which of course to some extent it has. The psychology of this is expressed quite clearly in The Authoritarian Personality.

What does this say about the struggle to overcome capital?  Firstly, if the struggle over the working day and the wage are the rational forms of struggle of labor internal to capital, then the struggle for full legal recognition as persons before the law is thus the rational form of struggle against racialization within capital. Therefore, the idea that reducing intra-class competition would go at the root of racialization in capitalist society is a non-sequitir.  Secondly, the struggle against racialization does go to the roots of capitalist society, not because racialization functions to keep workers from struggling as a class, which is a functionalist understanding of race because it gives ontological priority to class and reduces race to a function of class, but because racialization, like gender, is an essential moment in the constitution of capital as a totalizing form of social domination.

On the matter of racism as being essentially caused by competition between workers, I would say a few things. There are a number of problems with this idea that have been developed by other writers. Gregory Meyerson, in his summary of the differences between David Roediger, Alexander Saxton, and Theodore Allen (“Marxism, Psychoanalysis and Labor Competition”, Cultural Logic Vol. 1 Issue 1) presents a cogent set of reasons to reject the labor competition thesis as inadequate, which I will briefly restate here.

Firstly, racialization is not limited to the working classes. Any understanding of racialization has to take into account that it actually functions across all classes in society as a whole.

Secondly, in the case of the United States for certain, during the first 200+ years from 1650-1860, Africans were rarely competing with Europeans/white Americans for jobs since most were slaves. Also, American Indians have almost never been in economic competition, so much as being a physical impediment to taking the land.

Thirdly, competition in no way can account for the especially murderous and cruel and systematic violence visited upon black people and American Indian peoples by whites as compared to conflicts between Anglo-American whites and European immigrants (Irish immigrants did not typically lynch, castrate and burn German or Italian immigrants and “native born” whites did not generally do this to European immigrants, though more 'normal' forms of violence were certainly common), whom they were actually much more in competition with for jobs since the majority of the Northern working class was Anglo-American and European immigrants and only a small minority of black people lived in the North before the migrations of WWI and WWII.

However, the idea that race is a product of the need of the capitalist class to split the exploited (as expressed in the work Theodore Allen) is still a functionalist analysis, since race is assumed to have a function, and also to be the voluntary product of what still amounts to a class conspiracy. This is supposedly unlike class, which is a social form organically produced by the relation between capital and labor, and not merely the outcome of an ideology of divide and conquer. Racialization then is simply one kind of divide and conquer policy, that is, is still treated as an ideology as it is by the “orthodox” Marxists.

This is more or less sociological conspiracy theory, as if race were somehow the outcome of a collective class decision. Never mind that this approach assumes a semi-omniscient class perspective and intentionality to produce race that assumes race as something already able to be deployed, rather than as a product. At best, one might then argue for a process of trial and error in which the ruling class plays upon certain already existing differences, but then that begs the question “Where did these existing differences come from?” Competition between workers like competition between capitals only explains the mechanism by which antagonisms are reproduced and resolved, but it provides no ground for comprehending class, race, capital or value as such. It is essentially confusing the metabolic mechanism of an organism for the organism itself.

It may be that the ruling elites wanted to split the populations they exploited, but it is not clear that racialization was the only way to do this. I think Jehu does an excellent job of making this point clearly and repeatedly in his series. Solidarity is not the only outcome of the struggle between capital and labor. Competition, as noted above, is baked into exchange relations, and is more or less the normal state of affairs and class (and one might argue, racial and gender) solidarity only trump that intra-group competition when the struggle against the dominant social relations become rather pitched.

David Roediger, who has been a leading proponent of a different version of the racialization thesis, takes up its psychological dimension as rooted in the formation of capitalist labor discipline, deriving this in part from W.E.B. DuBois’ notion of a psychological wage. Roediger is much more serious about the psychological dimension of racialization, but it is unclear that he can address why racialization happens or its logical relation to capitalism. It is posited as more of a psychoanalytic reaction of Europeans coming to grips with the repression of their agrarian lifestyle in favor of the discipline of capitalist work and their interaction with peoples who were not so repressed.  I think this is not only an unmoored bit of analysis, but a kind of historicism that does not really allow us to come to grips with the reproductions of racialization in the 20th and 21st centuries, even if it had a certain validity in the 16th-19th centuries.  It is not that the psychoanalytic dimension is wrong, so much as this formulation lacks a way to grasp the persistence and differential reproduction of racialization over time.

There we should reject comprehending racialization as any of the following:
1) a contingent relation within capital and thus something that can be eliminated within capitalism,
2) as a grand class plan to divide and conquer (even if it does this),
3) as a mere ideology, rather than an inner relation of domination (though it is most certainly operative in the realm of ideas, relies on pre-existing ideas for some of its self-justification, and has deep psychological dimension,
4) as a part of intra-class competition (which is most certainly is in many ways), nor finally as
5) a secondary relation of domination to class, which is the “real” relation of domination in capitalist society.

Instead, what we must do with race is what we must do with gender and class; grasp it as a moment of capital as a totalizing social form which necessarily produces a multiplicity of immanent forms of domination mediated through the ways in which it constitutes labor in its total social reproduction. Those forms of domination are not "intersecting", so much as interwoven in their very constitution because they are not autonomous social forms but moments of capital as determinate concept.  As such, a politics of positive identification, of affirmation, can only reinforce capital as it reinforces those relations of domination, and this includes an affirmation of class identity.

Revised 6/4/2017

I am not including this section now, but it was the basis of the points raised by Noel Ignatiev in the comments below, so I am leaving it here as a kind of appendix.  I incorrectly lumped Ignatiev with Allen re: treating whiteness as a class conspiracy.

"Noel Ignatiev’s analysis, which like Alexander Saxton, David Roediger, and Theodore Allen, was a discussion from within Marxism and about the possible conditions for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, but I want to point out a specific difference between his view and mine that I consider crucial. Race Traitor took up the argument that European immigrants who moved here had a choice about racialization, a choice of being white or a choice to be Americans. It is hard to express how profoundly this formulation misunderstands the connection between America as a particular capitalist state and its particular brand of racialization. I would argue that that notion is an inversion of the actual state of affairs, in which the only way to become American is to become white. This is not to neglect the contributions of African Americans, American Indian peoples, and Chicanos to the best of what this country is, but to recognize that what is best about America will eventually be what destroys it as a capitalist state. This particular formulation is what opens up what is in many respects a serious and engaging analysis of racialization by Ignatiev & Co. to appropriation by liberal privilege theory."

A Note on "Use-Value" and "Useful" in Capital

Jehu has been having an extended argument with the Value-Form reading of Marx at his blog, which is of mixed interest. However, in this post he takes up whether or not military goods are use-values and useful, and thus whether or not they are potential values and sources of surplus-value or if they are "fictitious capital", as the kids say these days.

They key to Jehu's notion of useful is clear in his last paragraph:

"While the value-form school denies labor is the source of value, their approach to value paradoxically ends up saying all labor expended in our society which is realized in prices, no matter how unnecessary and even toxic to life [italics mine - CDW], produces value. In the value-form school argument, all labor produces value when the product of that labor is sold for money[italics mine - CDW]."

The first problem to note is that this is a moral evaluation of useful and use-value. I don't mean this in a strictly negative way, but to point out that the idea of "useful" is already treated in a specific way.

So the first question is, is Marx using a moral evaluation of use-value and usefulness? Not primarily. Rather, Marx's notion of useful and use-value operates largely on other levels.

Firstly, I would suggest that the concept of use-value in Marx is, from the beginning, not a strictly universal concept, that is, there technically are no "use-values" in non-capitalist societies because there is no value. There certainly are "useful" things in all societies, things that exist and have meaning in that society because they are used purposefully. Food, generically speaking, is transhistorically useful in this sense and Marx certainly conceptualizes use-value as the capitalist social form of transhistorical usefulness, as one moment of the social form of wealth. However, use-value only arises as a term in relation to value, in the split of value into use-value and exchange-value. In the absence of Marx working through the rationalist division of the commodity as a value into use-value and exchange-value, the notion of use-value would have no meaning. Use-value is a value-theoretic concept, the particular social form of a universal, that is, of some things being useful to some people. Just as Marx makes the point that "eating" is universal, but what is eaten and how is always particular and those aspects tell us something about who is eating. The universal only has existence in and through the particular, that is, there is no universal as such except as a bare abstraction, and at the same time the particular would be merely contingent if it was not also universal.

I would suggest this argument depends on us being wholly immersed in capitalist society from the first sentence of Capital. Marx is not arguing about use in a transcendental, trans-historical sense as such.

Secondly, use-values are use-values in relation to capital not only as a prerequisite for something to be exchanged (something without use-value cannot be sold because it has no use for anyone, and in the world of political economy no one would exchange something for nothing), but because they serve valorization as the other aspect to exchange-value. If a commodity can only be an exchange-value if it is a use-value for someone else, in turn, a commodity is only a use-value for capital if it can be used in the production of commodities, that is, for exchange.

As a side note, one distinctly Hegelian dimension to Marx's writing is his understanding that all relations cut both ways; in this case that 1) use-value is and is not transhistorical, 2) use-value is determinate of the validity of the exchangeability of a commodity and is simultaneously determined as useful to its seller only as exchangeable. I'm making this point because of all of the anti-Hegelian nonsense, which largely gets its Hegel from traditional Marxism, and which fails to grasp that one of the key aspects of Hegel's way of conceptualizing that Marx carries into his own work ("dialectical" conceptuality) is not simply contradiction or opposition (which are not the same in Hegel), but the self-contradiction of each pole of an opposition, that is, Hegelian doubling. Marx is intimately aware of this doubling and the inadequacy of the binary oppositions in the kind of thinking Hegel relegates to the Understanding and whenever one sees some kind of antinomy or binary in Marx, one should be aware that generally it indicates a conceptual inadequacy Marx is presenting in order to surpass.

Thirdly, while Marx never abandons use-value, exchange-value, concrete labor, abstract labor, etc., he will point out their limitations as inadequately developed and justified by political economy, without abandoning them, much as Hegel critiques the underdetermined, abstract quality of sense-certainty, perception, and the Understanding, even as he will return to them again and again later in the Phenomenology of Spirit as more and more richly determined.

Fourthly, it is a mistake to assume that Marx has had his final say on these concepts at the beginning of his work. In fact, the beginning of the work is necessarily where the concepts appear in their most underdetermined fashion. The separation of the producers from the means of production here appears only as an assumption which will eventually have to be validated in the results of Capital, so it is only fully fleshed out in the last chapters of Capital on originary accumulation and, as Werner Bonefeld has argued in his essays on it, that originary accumulation is not merely historical - which would be a historicist explanation, something Marx is actually never guilty of - but becomes the structural precondition of all accumulation. In other words, all accumulation is the reproduction of the separation of the producers from the means of production, the reproduction of the determinate social relation (Capital) and its constitutive social form (Labor).

To this end, the concept of use-value comes up again and again. Use-value is thus embedded within value and valorization (chapter 1), later within production (starting in chapter 7), and then within reproduction and circulation (Vol. 2 vis-a-vis the departments.) It is not merely about what is useful to individuals, but about whether or not a commodity is sufficiently useful for buyers to exchange money for them, whether it is useful for capital (for production undertaken for the generation of surplus-value), and then whether it is useful for the reproduction of either capital or labor.

In its first moment, therefore, the use-value of a commodity comes closest to the moralistic view of a useful thing for a person because some person with money has to want the thing, and here it is only considered as a thing of use in consumption. After chapter 7 Marx develops the idea that labor is what is useful for capital because it is the determinate social form of the production of abstract wealth, of value and, most importantly from the point of view of capital as self-expanding, surplus-value. Labor is only useful for capital if it contributes to valorization.

What kind of labor contributes to valorization? Is it the kind of labor that produces a commodity as a material thing, as is seemingly implied in the first chapters of Capital? This is, after all, what many critics of Marx argue, that he has a self-contradictory notion of value and labor in this section. However, before Marx completed Volume 1, we know that in his notebooks published as Theories of Surplus-Value, Marx has a famous and under-appreciated discussion of what makes labor valorizing in his discussion of the labor of a clown. Marx's humor and fine sense of irony, much like Hegel's, is rarely appreciated, so the joke is generally missed (as are all the jokes in Capital, especially in footnotes, as Nichole Pepperell has brilliantly written on in her dissertation and her excellent Uncomfortable Science blog.) Marx distinguishes between two ways in which the clown might labor. In the first, the clown sells his labor to a family and then goes about his clowning for them. This is explicitly not capitalist labor or value-producing, this is just a service. However, if the clown is employed by a capital(ist), is payed a wage because he/she sells his/her labor as a commodity, and has his/her clown services (the product of his/her labor) sold as a commodity to customers, we have entered the realm of the value-form, of value-producing labor, The product of labor need not be a material thing, but can be a service, a material relation if you will, because what determines the validity of the labor is its usefulness for the capital as a commodity it can sell and its usefulness for the consumer, in this case, enjoyment or entertainment.

However, Marx's thinking on usefulness and use-value goes further. In Volume 2 of Capital, Marx discusses circulation and reproduction and the two departments. Department 1 involves reproducing capital qua means of production and Department 2 involves reproducing labor as expanded labor power. At this point, Marx notes that a commodity and the labor that produces it is only a use-value if it contributes to the reproduction of the means of production or of labor power. Our fine friend the clown, a wage-laborer to Clown Temps, Inc., has his services sold to people who are entertained by his services, which may certainly refresh them in order to then go back to work and might in fact entertain their children as future labor, thus contributing to the reproduction of labor. Further, the sale of the clown's services results in a surplus to the employing entity, which can then reinvest the value in the existing means of clowning (costumes, clown cars, balloons, etc.) and in the labor of the clown qua wage, but the surplus may also be used to engage in expanded clowning, whether more clowns or the selling of clowning videos or live clown streaming.

I would argue that this means that state ownership of the means of production does not in-itself mean that the production is not adding to the accumulation of value. The issue is never who owns the means of production, but whether the activity conforms to the capitalist social form. If the state owns a concrete factory, pays its workers a wage, sells the concrete to construction companies, and the factory makes surplus which it plows back into expanded reproduction, it is doing nothing differently from any other owner of capital.

Finally, we should note that, for Marx, artistic works that are not reproducible don't count as values. If the commodity cannot be reproduced, then it isn't a commodity. All that monetization indicates in this instance, is that someone is willing to part with income they would otherwise spend on something else, not that it contributes to the production of value. In fact, it might detract from the accumulation of capital in some small way.

This certainly means that many forms of labor that crass Marxism looks down its nose at, such as computer programming and flipping hamburgers, are in fact socially valid useful labors, producing use-values as long as the programmer and line cook are employed as wage-labor by a capital who sells their service as a commodity, and the programs and hamburgers go to the reproduction of capital and/or labor. The materiality of the commodity is not at issue. The harmful or helpful nature of the commodity is not at issue. Even the social form of the labor, taken in isolation, is not adequate.

Does this lead to a conflation of use-value with the problem of productive vs. unproductive labor? After all, lots of labor and a variety of products of nature have a use-value for capital without necessarily contributing to the production of value.

For example, in Historical Materialism Vol. 4, Murray Smith, taking a view similar to Fred Moseley, proposes that two types of labor are essentially unproductive: labor expended in the circulation of commodities and labor expended in supervision. Moseley notes the unproductive aspect of both as essentially 1) labor involved in the changing of titles to a commodity and 2) enforcement of labor discipline.

The first is useful, but unproductive, labor because...

"Circulation labour is labour related to the exchange of commodities and money, including such functions as buying and selling, accounting, check processing, money exchange, advertising, debt-credit relations, insurance, legal counsel, securities exchange, etc. Marx argued that circulation labour does not produce value and surplus-value because exchange is essentially the exchange of equivalent values. Circulation labour only transforms a given amount of value from commodities to money, or vice versa."

As for supervisory labor, as Marx notes in the beginning of Chapter 7 of Capital, supervision of the worker because...

"He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be."

Does this mean that use-value isn't necessarily connected to exchange-value? Was the entire point that use-value is always-already the social form in which usefulness is made actual in capitalist society therefore false?

That would be an incorrect conclusion.

Firstly, these unproductive labors are certainly use-values for capital within the total circuit of capital, activities that are necessary for the completion of the circuit and the maximization of efficiency in labor-time. Secondly, like everything that counts as a use-value to capital, they can be monetized. In a peculiar reversal of the typical conception of the relation of use-value to exchange-value, in which something can have exchange-value because it is a use-value, being expressed as an exchange-value, that is, being expressed in money, gives something a use-value. Arguably, the hypertrophy of this aspect of the doubled relationship of exchange-value to use-value within society as a whole is a central proposition of Guy Debord's notion of spectacle.

Murray Smith proposes an interesting way of thinking about where this unproductive labor falls within the circuit of capital, since most Marxists who accept the notion of unproductive labor treat it as part of Constant Capital (but not Fixed Capital), but that is beyond the scope of this note. He and Moseley both see the extensive expansion of non-productive labor since WWII as the second greatest source of the declining rate of profit, alongside the increasing organic composition of capital.

Neither Smith nor Moseley are really considering whether or not the production of military goods purchased by the state would count as value-producing. In fact, based on their conception, there is no reason that the production of military goods or luxury items for non-workers would not be values, that is, part of surplus-value production. For example, it seems that even if military goods are not productively consumed, their production and purchase, even if it is being paid out of taxes, is going towards expanded reproduction of new capital and labor, and, maybe because it is coming out of tax money, is essentially a redistribution of wealth from workers' incomes to capital.

On the other hand, if we think of it from the perspective of use-value in the sense in which Anselm Jappe uses it, then the scope of unproductive labor in the economy is much, much larger than Smith or Moseley account for, putting even greater pressure on the rate of profit. Military production, among other kinds of production that do not reproduce either department or, to put it another way, which cannot be productively consumed, would essentially be what is called "fictitious capital". However, it may be worth asking if "productively consumed" here is not just sneaking a moral category back into the discussion. If tanks are produced and purchased by the state, could they be productively consumed? If the tanks are used to overthrow a hostile regime and secure access to resources at a lower cost, were they unproductively consumed? Or to put it differently, what constitutes "productively" in our "productively consumed"? I would suggest that once again, we can only work through by paying attention to the doubling in productively consumed.  After all, the productivity of the tank for the producer is not in question, as they sold it for a profit.  However, since the tank cannot be consumed by another capital as capital (as means of production, raw materials or labor power) and cannot be consumed by workers as part of the reproduction of labor power, that is, since tanks cannot be productive in the sense I believe appropriate to Vol. 2 of Capital, then overall they are not bearers of value and do not add to valorization, but constitute a loss from the total social value, as the money going to unproductive production could have gone to value-producing capital.

More importantly, however, is whether or not the non-identical conceptualizations of value-producing labor here can work together or are they mutually exclusive. We have two very different conceptions of what would allow us to conceive of a distinction between productive and unproductive labor. The Smith/Moseley conception distinguishes between labor that adds value and labor that does not, but it's use-value is not in question, as it is most certainly useful, insofar as capitalist reproduction cannot take place without exchanges, changes of title, etc.. Instead, what is at issue is whether or not the labor contributes to the production of the commodity directly, but what if the commodity is the activity? Isn't the service the commodity? In which case, if the labor is the commodity itself, a particular activity, wouldn't that drive us back to the distinction between useful and not useful in the sense used by Anselm Jappe, which I have suggested is certainly present in Marx's work?

One thing I can say for sure is that I have not seen anything in the conceptualization by Smith/Moseley that would necessarily be rejected by Value-Form theorists. In fact, Smith considers himself a value-form theorist. As such, there is no basis for saying that value-form theory necessarily precludes distinguishing between productive and unproductive labor, though as I point out, if labor services can be commodities then there might be a problem with the way Smith/Moseley draw their distinction. It is possible that Arthur, Tony Smith, and the various Neue-Marx Lekture reject the the distinction between productive and unproductive. Jappe's conception is not necessarily at odds with Moseley and Smith. His point that "it has to be “productive labor” in the capitalist sense (that means that it does not only consume capital but helps to reproduce it)", is not far from their conception, since circulation and supervisory labor "consume capital" but do not help to reproduce it insofar as they aren't the labor actually producing the commodity, but a policing labor and therefore a faux frais of the requirement of capital to impose "close attention".

Further, if the distinction is primarily normative, as it is in that statement by Jehu, then there is no basis for it in Marx. Whether Marx's conception of use-value as it develops over the course of Capital in the way I have indicated, or that used by Anselm Jappe, or the conception used by Smith and Moseley, it is never a primarily normative concept. It is immanent to capital as a totality. That it comes into conflict with the ethical is not something to deny, but that problem is internal to the conflict over what is useful to actual individuals and what is useful to capital as a form of domination.

I believe there is still a conceptual difficulty with Jappe and Smith/Moseley, however, and this is around the idea that particular labors can, in and of themselves, be useful products as services, whereas both their conceptions lend themselves towards only conceiving of commodities as things.  I am going to call this "the clown problem" because clearly in Marx's conception in Theories of  Surplus Value, it is the social form of labor that determines it as value-producing, not the physicality of the product of the labor.  If I am right about the 3-fold (at least) determination of use-value and therefore the distinction between productive and unproductive labor in Marx's work, then there also is no contradiction in Marx's conception of value but a contradiction in the conceptions of those who mistakenly believe Marx fully worked out his concept in the first three chapters of Volume 1 of Capital,

Jim Kincaid's Reading of Capital: Notes on his contributions to Historical Materialism 13:2

This will be a series of notes focused on Jim Kincaid's contributions to the journal Historical Materialism.  Kincaid is cited by Nicole Pepperell as a kindred spirit in his reading and so I have wanted to read his work in detail for some time.  My reading of Chris O'Kane's doctoral thesis has spurred me to take this up now.

HM 13.2 Debating the Hegel-Marx Connection: Editorial Introduction

28
Raises the question as to whether or not the value-form analysis is capable of going beyond a "high level of generality":

" At  stake  is  how  Marxist  political  economy  can  contribute scientifically and in a concrete way to the theory and practice of anticapitalism today. The value-form reading of Marx, which Arthur and others advocate, involves a root-and-branch repudiation of capitalism as an essentially inhuman totality  and  finds  practical  expression  in  a  politics  of  uncompromising opposition to capitalism. But its account of capitalism tends to remain only at a high level of generality. Is it possible to derive from value-form theory more detailed Marxist accounts of the structural diversity and varying historical trajectories of the economic and political formations within which everyday struggles  of opposition  and  transformation  have  to  be  waged?"

Just as a grumble, though we will see if this grumble finds substantial issues later, why do we want a Marxist Political Economy?  Was Marx doing an alternate, "more accurate" political economy?  I don't think we or Marx wanted anything of the sort.

29
My next objection is with the following:
"Familiarity with Marx’s great work can lead us to forget the strangeness of its argument. Its major topic is how capitalism works as a productive system [italics mine], using nineteenth-century England as its prime example."

I don't actually think that this is the major topic of Capital since that would assume Marx's priority is a kind of positive sociology at best and a Marxist Political Economy at worst.  It also simply ignores the subtitle of Marx's work, a critique of political economy.  Certainly, the book is concerned with "how capitalism works", but that would assume that 1) it does work, and 2) that it's main feature is as "a productive system" rather than a system of domination.

Next:
"Hegel’s  Logic (in  its  two  versions)  was  a  vital influence in Capital because Marx learned from it a method of developing an argument in which the essential mechanisms of capitalism as a system were explained in terms of dialectical necessity and interdependence."

The first question I have is what Marx means by a "method of treatment"?  The answer is undoubtedly in the oft-quoted introduction where he discusses the method of research versus the method of presentation, which is actually like Hegel's: the extensive appropriation of the material and their minute analysis pulling together all of the interconnections in the material, but then a method of presentation which starts with the results of the finished analysis and presents them logically, rather than historically or in the same manner as the appropriation of the material happened, so that we also end up with a work that has the appearance of an an a priori construction.

Mechanisms and system are, well, mechanistic rather than organic.  In fact, the mechanistic and systemic appearance of capital is part of the mask of it's autonomy and totality.  We should not therefore think of Marx as himself falling into the trap of the very fetish-character of capital he is intending to lay out.

30
A rather hackneyed notion of dialectic.

This is the presentation of dialectic as a positive logic, a kind of alternative to formal logic, which has its own "forms of thought and science", but it is forms of thought which have their own dialectic, not dialectic which has "forms of thought".

31
I cannot help my allergic reactions (philosophically speaking) to "a complex economic system who elements are interdependent".  This is Whitehead's process philosophy, but not Marx.  There is no trace of Cartesian atomism, in which "elements" are "interdependent" in a "complex system", like a machine.  There are no elements or parts composing a system (complex or not.)  Neither Marx nor Hegel is given to a genus-species ordering of elements under the complex system.  As Hegel criticizes this ordering in Observing Reason in the Phenomenology of Spirit, so Marx does the same in Capital regarding the money-form.

Also, Marx is not writing about a totality as "a given whole", but as something which is only a totality qua capital.  Postone is much clearer on totality in Capital than this.

31-32
This account of Hegel's Logic is embarrassing.  Hegel does not begin with "the simplest and most elementary concepts which are used in everyday life."  His work in the Logic presumes the achievement of the Phenomenology.  Further, he begins with the most abstract concepts, which are not simple, elementary or everyday.

HM 13.2 A Critique of Value-Form Marxism
This is the second piece by Kincaid in response to Chris Arthur.

86
The idea of "a counter-text which unfolds in two dimensions" is interesting.
"(1)  An  explicit  set  of  arguments  about  the  omnipresence  of  use-values,  at work  at  the  heart  of  the  value-form  system  and  its  sequence  of  trans-formations. We can agree with Arthur that Capital is centrally concerned with social forms. But, in Arthur’s account, only exchange-value has form; use-value is defined solely in qualitative terms. Something of fundamental importance is being overlooked. Embedded in Marx’s story is an account of the forms assumed by use-values, and the ways in which they disrupt the regular rhythms of capitalist reproduction."[Italics mine - CDW]

"(2)  The  text  of  Capital is  rich  in  poetry:  an  astounding  array  of  metaphors and  rhetorical  strategies  are  deployed.  These  function  to  qualify  and subvert the abstractness of the political economy discourse of Capital. The counterforces which surge through Marx’s text register that his concern is  not  just  to  explain  capitalism  but,  in  every  way,  to  contest  it.  That challenge is enacted within his own text. There is a performative dimension in Capital. It does not just talk about the need to oppose capitalist abstraction. Disruptive  and  subversive  forces  are  released  within  the  text  itself  to undermine abstraction. Marx does use Hegel’s idealist logic in ways which Arthur’s  discussion  helps  to  clarify.  But  Marx  also,  in  his  own  phrase, ‘coquets’  with  Hegel,  and  refuses  to  play  along  with  the  strict  rules  of Hegelian dialectic, which include a ban on metaphors and images. 3" [Italics mine - CDW]

I see no problem with the first point yet, though this is a preliminary note.  I wait to see how Kincaid develops it.

The second point is partially correct about Marx, but wrong about Hegel.  Hegel does not ban metaphor and images, but is keenly aware of their limits.  In fact, thinking is strictly impossible without representation, but cannot remain bound to the level of representational thought.  A keener appreciation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, especially in the Revealed Religion section, but many other places as well, esp. in Spirit, is required because there Hegel deals with the dialectic of representational thought and properly conceptual thought.  This is also true of Marx's work, and thus we should be aware of the how Marx puts forward representational thought, inverting images and metaphors to undermine their claim to complete representation (to complete truth), and at the same time, displaying the inadequacy of images and metaphors conceptually.

This second point is clearly where there is an affinity with Nicole Pepperell's work, though so far I feel that Pepperell has a much better grasp of Hegel.

87
"Finally, Arthur is insistent that a clear line of separation must be drawn between the type of dialectic
used  to  explain  systems,  and  dialectical  explanations  of  historical  change. What is underplayed in his discussion is that systems themselves are subject to historical development, processes of formation and disintegration. Capitalism as a mode of production has gone through a number of fundamental structural mutations. I argue that, in explaining capitalism historically, what is essential
in Marxist political economy is not value-form theory, but Marx’s dynamic theorisation of capitalist competition, summarised in the shorthand term law of value. 5"

I don't know if this is true of Arthur's account, though I see elements of a similar dualism in Chris O'Kane's account of a distinction between a critical-genetic method of analysis and a dialectical method of presentation (see p. 46 of Chris O'Kane's doctoral thesis.)  If it is correct, then the dynamism and fluctuation of the phenomenal forms would be something Arthur could not really account for, being trapped between a static "system" on one side and a separate logic of change on the other.

What bothers me, however, is the idea that "what is essential... is not value-form theory, but Marx's dynamic theorisation of capitalist competition, summarised in the shorthand term law of value."  This strikes me as completely in error since it immediately puts the central point of Marx's work not on the constitution and the constituens of that constitution of capital as a historically specific social form which therefore is limited and mortal, but an emphasis on the competition of capitals, that is, a rather banal treatment of "how capitalism works as a productive system", to refer back to Kincaid's introduction to this volume of HM 13:2.  How this is going to be more than just Capital as a better, more accurate political economy eviscerated of all of its critical content escapes me.

It is interesting that he cites Heinrich as something of a kindred spirit from within the value-form camp.  This also returns me to a point I made in an earlier post that even if one accepts Backhaus' monetary theory of value (and I think at the level of the concept that value can only appear as money, that the money-form is the mode of existence of value, is in fact correct, and that Postone and Murray agree with that point), there is no need to accept the ways in which Arthur or Heinrich develop it.

90
I like his point about The Value-Form or Exchange-Value
"One of the key threads which runs through Marx’s chapter about the value-form  is  that  the  equivalence  between  two  commodities  which  exchange  is based  on  their  being  the  products  of  quantities  of  labour.  ‘As  values, commodities  are  simple  congealed  quantities  of  human  labour . . .  abstract labour’. 8 Abstract  labour  has  been  defined  earlier  as  ‘the  value-forming
substance’,  measured  as  quantities  of  socially  necessary  labour  time. 9"

Of course, Postone and Murray have no problem with this, having laid out the same critique of Arthur, and so it would seem that the issue is with a certain reading of the value-form theory, rather than the value-form theory as such.  Murray, and I agree with this, is lively to the necessary element of any form-analytic approach having the Aristotelian dimension, in which forms are never empty and thus Arthur is following a rather non-Hegelian, non-Aristotelian notion of form that puts it forward as an empty abstraction.  This is also visible in my criticism of Chris O'Kane's doctoral thesis, which however does not succumb to Kincaid's claim that value-form theory ignores this section.  Quite the contrary, O'Kane deals with it openly and clearly.

91
Other writers have noted (Murray 1988, I believe, among others) that Marx'd dialectic is not presuppositionless in the sense Hegel would use the term, since human existence at any given moment presupposes the necessity of human self-reproduction.  God, not "producing or reproducing" Itself, is capable of being purely sans presuppositions.

However, there is the other sense of presuppositionless that is appropriate to Marx, which is that the historically specific and determinate categories cannot be presupposed, but must be posited and then grounded, but in such a way that what begins as abstract is made concrete.

Werner Bonefeld's new book Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy does exactly this with his analysis of value and originary accumulation and should be taken up as a significant contribution to the critique of political economy.

93
His point that "Marx brings use-value into the heart of the value-form" seems very good to me, but then again I have long ceased to entertain the fantasy that imagined that use-value wasn't itself part of the value-form, that is, that it was not itself the socially specific form of something being 'useful".  How the qualitative dimension could escape form-determination escapes me.

I also see no reason why this would pose a problem for Postone or Murray and they see themselves as inheritors of the Backhaus/Reichelt tradition of critical theory and value.

95
References to "material things" may be infrequent in Hegel's Logic, but they are very common in the Phenomenology of Spirit and I would suggest that Marx's Capital is simultaneously a Phenomenology and a Logic, and this is quite possibly necessary for a materialist philosophy of practice.

97-100
Hard to say how accurate of a critique of Arthur this is, but as an account of money, it seems relatively good.

"In the risky transition from commodity  to  money,  lies  the  possibility  of  capitalist  crisis,  and,  in  later sections of Capital, Marx develops detailed accounts of the concrete ways in which  disproportionality  between  supply  and  demand  (in  the  market  for means of production, as well as for consumer goods) finds expression in crises of  over-investment,  inadequate  levels  of  consumption,  and  falling  rates  of profit. 35 The use-value category is decisive here. If the commodity does not make the grade as a use-value needed by a buyer on the market – then the value  of  that  commodity  remains  only  virtual,  not  realised . . .  not  yet  real. It is crucial to see the flow of production, circulation and the sale of commodities – as taking place in real time, that is, as transactions conducted by actors who make their decisions at a particular point in time, and faced with an inherently uncertain future."

From this point, Kincaid goes into a much more intensive analysis of Marx's use of language, which I think is worth reading itself and so I may wait to comment on it until a later time or add to this later.

Notes on Chris O'Kane's "Fetishism and Social Domination in Marx, Lukacs, Adorno and Lefebvre", Part 3

66

“In contrast to the analysis in chapter one, Marx’s account of the dominating properties of the money form accounts for the agents who exchange commodities.”

For such a significant claim, this sort of dangles out there under-justified.  Not that it isn’t correct, but it needs some validation and fleshing out. At least a footnote.

66-7

I am always struck by the failure, IMO, to grasp that the worker is the owner of a commodity at this point in Capital’s development.

67

This is interesting as s summation:

“I argued earlier that Marx’s account of the fetish grows more complex as his analysis progresses, and one can see from the above that the fetish-character of money possesses more pronounced characteristics than the fetish-character of commodities. On the one hand, money is socially constituted as the general equivalent by the logic of the relations of commodities, which grants it the autonomous and personified properties of the universal incarnation of human labour. On the other hand, the means by which these autonomous properties invert and dominate individual action is concretised in the determinate form of the legal contract and the determination of the actions of commodity owners.”

69

I don’t think I can actually overemphasize the degree to which talk of “capitalists do this” and “capitalists do that” sounds so very 19^th century.  It has been a long time since individual capitalists played the key role in representing capital.  Capital needs representation in particular capitals more than in individual capitalists. 

The legal recognition of the corporation as a legal person by the United States Supreme Court is both horrific and rational.  Rational because corporations have been the particular capitals for a long time, but horrific because capital has survived to this point in its development wherein personification entails recognition of these homunculi of capital as persons.

“The domination exerted by the capitalists results from their actions, but the latter are in turn shaped by their role as personifications of capital; as individuals determined by the fetish-characteristic forms of value that are external to them, and which compel them to dominate and exploit the proletariat. Thus, because capitalists - as capital personified - are ‘fanatically intent on the valorization of value’ they ‘ruthlessly compel the human race to produce for production’s sake.’”

Seriously, domination is not exerted by capitalists in the 21^st century in all but marginal cases.  Individual capitalists don’t ruthlessly compel the human race.  If only!!!  Then we could point to “the capitalist class” as a bunch of robber barons, but no one outside of the Left sees the matter this way anymore.  It is anachronistic at best.

As I complained with Werner Bonefeld’s new book, there is still this residue of a need to show the domination of “society” or “the working class” by the capitalist class, this class of individuals, when we have surpassed that point long ago.  Capital has shown very little need for these antediluvian phenomenal forms.

Check the quote from Marx on function and personification (Ehrbar translation, 989).  I wonder if Mar refers to the function of the proletariat in production, versus the function of the capitalists.  Function is a funny word with all sorts of overtones to people raised in a world after Parsonian sociology and functionalist explanations.

70

“As a result the worker ‘exists to satisfy the need of the existing value for valorisation, as opposed to the inverse situation, in which objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development’205”

So one could argue that if the worker exists to satisfy the need of the existing value for valorization, then valorization has to be at least posited in production, not in exchange or simply in the transformation of a commodity into money.

Doesn’t Marx’s theory of value also account for the centrality of labor and “relations of production” to the determinate social relations?  Or is that the same as 2?

70

Someone really ought to print The Trinity Formula in English in the correct order.  Or, you know, Volume 3 of Capital in a correct form.

71

I really like the way O’Kane follows through the thread of fetish-character and fetishism through to the end.  This is really an exciting way to read the book productively that is not another Marxist Political Economy reading.

The point about the collapse of fetish-characteristic form/fetishism/mystification into one mess is reasonable, as is the explanation of it being from an earlier period.  This point could be amplified by the changes Marx makes between the first and second German editions of Vol. 1 and the French edition.  A lot of the changes and work go into the fetish-characteristic section, so that was clearly something he was still working out as late as the mid-1870’s!

75

Para 2

“In this context ‘the mystifying character ’ mirrors his usage of fetish-characterisation which transforms ‘social relations’ into the ‘properties’ of things themselves (commodities), still more explicitly transforming the relation of production itself into a thing(money).”

This clarification is nice.  Not sure if it was used earlier in the book, but it is very concise.  Could further add that capital is the transformation of the total cycle into an autonomous, self-producing Subject which is Substance.  This may be the third usage of mystification.

I would add that is works very well with Nicole Pepperell’s reading of the first chapter as a phenomenology: the fetish characteristic of commodities explains how the various notions of value up until that point, while having a certain validity, are similar to empiricism, rationalism, and absolute idealism (which would cover the range of sense certainty, perception, and the understanding in Hegel.)

81

RE: esoteric/exoteric or money theory and neo-Ricardian, that Pepperell’s reading shows that this is a failure to read the text phenomenologically.  Taken so, Marx’s comments about labor as physical as opposed to his clear treatment in the “Theories of Surplus-Value” where even a clown, employed in the social form as wage-labor, can produce value, are comprehensible.

I think one has to work with Marx as one would with any opponent: take the strongest way of reading their argument.

Pepperell’s is not only reasonable, it is coherent and the strongest form of the argument.

RE: ideal average, Marx was not attempting a theory of society, a sociology.  One could further make the argument, pace Cyril Smith, that Marx’s critique of political economy is not a critique of capitalism, and as such is not concerned with empirical minutiae or historical representation except insofar as it is subordinated to the critique of political economy.  The critique of capitalism is a practical criticism, a question of struggle and overcoming.  Marx’s work is aimed at an ideological impediment, the ideology, to that struggle.  His is a work of clarification, and of bildung, a part of the self-education of the class.

In other words, I think this criticism of Marx mistakes the intent and purpose of the work, in the same way one might criticize Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit for not being a rigorous criticism of philosophy or specific philosophers, though it certainly does that.  It is not a pedantic work, but a working through of forms of consciousness.

82

I like this point and no doubt Adorno, Lukacs and Lefebvre respond to the “gaps” in Marx’s work, but also to maybe what they see as gaps that are not gaps at all.

Moving to Section 2 Next.

Notes on Chris O'Kane's "Fetishism and Social Domination in Marx, Lukacs, Adorno and Lefebvre", Part 2

48

Good quote in letter to Kugelmann.

“It is self-evident that this necessity of the distribution of social labour in specific proportions is certainly not abolished by the specific form of social production; it can only change its form of manifestation. Natural laws cannot be abolished at all. The only thing that can change, under historically differing conditions, is the form in which those laws assert themselves. And the form in which this proportional distribution of labour asserts itself in a state of society in which the interconnection of social labour expresses itself as the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange-value of these products.127”

Still think that since O’Kane follows Heinrich in misunderstanding the structure of Marx’s work (it is a Phenomenology pace Pepperell), and so is going to read each step in Chapter 1 incorrectly as Marx’s contradictory views, rather than as a working up of the contradictory moments.

[Rumination provoked by page 50

It occurs to me that the reason that human labor is able to be abstract, and thus to produce value, is that human labor in the abstract becomes the only thing in common between unlike use-values.  Their ability to be abstractly commensurate relies on the ability to abstract human labor temporally into a purely quantitative form.  Machines cannot do this because machines as such are inherently concrete, use-value producing.  They can only pass on the abstract human labor already embodied in them.  Only human labor can exist as labor power and as abstract labor.  There is no such thing as abstract machine activity.  Of course, there is also the later point that the wage-form conceals that the worker never receives the total of their labor-time back in the wage, but only a part of the time.  Machines cannot be subjected to the wage-form, and again, as such can only be bought more or less at their value and used as such.  There is no way to exploit a machine, to make it work for more than it materially requires to keep going.]

50

“Abstract labour is not generated by concrete production nor is this abstraction carried out conceptually prior to the act of exchange. Rather, it is an abstraction that stems from atomised production and is realised in exchange.”

As usual, I feel like this misses the fact that labor power is always-already exchanged prior to production.  That the first use-value of which Marx speaks is the one that walks itself to the market: labor power.  Labor never reaches production without already having been commodified.  Marx can only take this up later once he enters production, but that only means that this section cannot be read as finished.  Rather, it exists to some extent in the way that the first three chapters of the Phenomenology function, as prior to self-consciousness.  It is with wage-labor and entering the abode of production that we enter into the realm of self-consciousness.  Prior to that, we are looking at mere Consciousness.

The sentence itself has an odd aspect to it: “it is an abstraction that stems from atomized production…”  What is this “stems from”?  And then “is realized in exchange” does not mean that is it produced in exchange. From what I can see, abstract labour is not generated anywhere in this schema, it “stems from” whatever that means, and then is realized, though how something that does not exist can be realized is a question. 

There is no doubt that exchange determines the validity of the labor time expended in production, that is, whether or not and to what extent the labor power expended qua labor time is socially necessary.  Whether or not this is what constitutes labor as abstract is a different question.  I think that for both Postone and Pepperell, this is not the case.  Postone might even argue that this is once against a theory of value operating at the level of exchange relations, i.e. distribution, rather than in production relations.

[Rumination provoked by this section in general

If I was going to level a critique of the money theory of value interpretation of Marx, I guess it would start with the idea that their analysis misses the presumption of Marx’s critique: that there is a use-value that walks itself to the market, which is already a commodity, which is already bought by the user and sold by the owner, but the sale of which does not result in any surplus-value for its owner, only the buyer, which is to say, labor power.

Value as social form most certainly exists prior to the sale of the commodity which is not labor power because the commodity which is sold is the sum of previously purchased 1) means of production, 2) raw materials, 3) labor power.  Thus, the producer already has made a wager that the amount spent on those three items will be less than what the number of products can be sold for.

Now, this does introduce a loop insofar as we have something of a chicken and the egg scenario, except that, IMO the purchase of labor power, not the money form, is what is here determinate because it is the only commodity sold which does not produce a possible surplus-value for its owner.  Rather, it goes only towards the purchase of means of consumption.  Therefore, broadly speaking, neither the social form nor the value are determined in the act of exchange, but rather we see the validation or not of the social form and the actualization (realization) or not of the value.  The form and content determinations both precede the act of exchange of the commodity that results from the labor process qua valorization process and is only validated and realized through exchange, that is, the transformation of C into M'.  this is why Marx calls the book Capital and not Money or Value.  Capital is the totality.]

NEW NOTE[12/13/2014]
I think that my position is very similar to Patrick Murray, "The New Giant's Staircase" Historical Materialism 13:2, in his reading and critique of Chris Arthur's notion.

This in particular sums up the issue:
"(iii) Marx’s theory insists on the inseparability of value, whose substance is congealed  abstract labour  of  a  particular  social  type,  ‘practically  abstract’ labour (labour that is socially validated – in commodity exchange – as abstract), from money, which is value’s necessary form of appearance. (Consequently, though time is the ‘inner’ measure of abstract labour, value can be observedonly in the movements of price.) According to Marx’s theory, the qualitative and quantitative determination of value overlaps production and exchange (in keeping with the inseparability of production and exchange), so that value is ‘latent’ in the sphere of production; it can be actualised only by being sold. 54  Value and price, though bound in a causal nexus, are not related as independent to dependent variable, respectively. (iv) Arthur’s position is close to Marx’s in  that,  in  the  end,  he attributes  the  quantitative  determination  of  value – still necessarily actualised by money and exchange – to (socially necessary) abstract labour. Closer to the Eldred position is Arthur’s insistence that the value-form  itself  is  determined  exclusively  in  exchange,  independently  of labour and the sphere of production. For Arthur, value is a pure, contentless form,  which  necessarily  subsumes labour,  whereas,  for  Marx,  we  cannot abstract the value-form from a peculiar social type of labour." (pp. 72-3)

I do not necessarily agree with his explanation of the "heuristic representative-part strategy" (p. 77), elucidated further here:
"In  a  second  objection  to  Marx, Arthur  argues  that  the  provisional  nature of the early stages in a systematic-dialectical presentation keeps Marx from proving,  at  the  conceptual  level  of commodity  circulation,  that  value  must exist  as  distinct  from  exchange-value.  I  believe  that Arthur  wrongly  makes proving something at an earlier stage depend on grounding it at later stage.
Arthur seems to think that, because the reality of value can be grounded only once the concept of capital has been introduced (a point I accept), no proof of  value  can  be  offered  at  the  level  of commodity  circulation. 71 But  we  can accept the early proofs and still grant, in the context of the full presentation, that they are provisional. They may be provisional in the manner discussed above: truths  about  heuristic  representative  parts  are  superseded  by  more differentiated truths (as prices of production supersede values). Or, they may be  provisional  in  the  sense  that  the  earlier  truths incorporate  terms  that function as placeholders – as ’socially necessary’ functions in the definition
of value-producing labour – whose meanings are specified in the course of the presentation. Systematic dialectic builds truth on truth, not on a scaffold of ‘maybes’. 72" (p. 78)

My issue follows Pepperell's suggestive reading of the initial treatment of the commodity in the manner of Hegel's treatment of the first three defining concepts in the Phenomenology of Spirit.  The rationalist, empiricist and objective idealist explanations of value are given, and each is only partially true, and thus to some extent also false.  Part of this falsity is their insufficient determinacy, they are so far too abstract.  They cannot, in fact, at this point in the presentation be sufficiently concrete as other elements have to be developed.  This is why Capital forms a whole in which the starting point is justified in the end.

51 n132

“Marx uses some unfortunate physiological metaphors when describing abstract labour in later editions of Capital. But the majority of his other descriptions counter these clunky metaphors. These descriptions show that abstract labour is not a substance that is produced by the burning of calories, nor is it a purposive mental operation. As Marx states later, ‘not an atom of matter’ enters into this process of abstraction in which ‘value is realized only in exchange, i.e. in a social process.’ (Marx 2009, 105) Later, while discussing the three peculiarities of the equivalent form, Marx further clarifies the specific social character of these categories by stating that the ‘objective character as values is purely social and that this objective character only appears in ‘the social relation between commodity and commodity.’ (Marx 2009, 110) Finally, in the French edition, Marx unequivocally states that ‘[t]he reduction of various concrete private acts of labour to this abstraction of equal human labour is only carried out through exchange, which in fact equates products of different acts of labour with each other.’”

Again, see Pepperell.  Since Marx is presenting the logic of other analyses of value in the first chapter, he must of course present them “warts and all”, including their physiological dimensions.  “Spirit is bone” is very much at play here, as “value is physiological labour”.  The impoverished, unsophisticated, unliterary, scientistic reading of Marx (words one cannot use in relation to Marx’s writing ever, btw) takes postiviely what should be read dialectically, even speculatively.  A major problem of not comprehending this is that Marx’s categories are thought to be adequate at any given moment, when in fact they are necessarily incomplete at any given moment, that is, lacking in some level of concreteness, qua outcome of many determinations, and they may not represent Marx’s actual thoughts.  One has to pay close attention to the footnotes in the work because they often give crucial indicators as to whether or not Marx is having a go at some concept.

This reference to the French edition is not helpful insofar as I don’t know the context of the quote.  Like Adorno, quoting Marx out of context is risky, as it threatens to hypostatize a dynamic thought.

51

The whole paragraph here overlooks that the as-yet-unrealised value and thus the commodity and the labor power that went into it has to already have the form of value in order to be in the position to be realized.  The entire dynamic of potential and actual is lost, and thus the realization of value makes the value-form magically appear where it had not previously been.  That what we have is a capital circuit which is a circuit of valorization in toto, not merely at M’.

52-3

O'Kane does not make the same mistake almost everyone makes regarding the 3 peculiarities of the value-form.  His translation is much better.  Here he grasps that private labor is the form of social labor, as opposed to the normal English translations which treat social labor as the social form of private labor in capitalism.

‘private labour becomes the form of its opposite, namely labour in its immediately social form.’

55

“Instead, the wage form only pays proletarians enough to reproduce themselves at the bare minimal[italics mine – CDW] social average.”

Really?  Does anyone believe this is actually the case since at least the end of WWII?

55-56

So if I understand his approach, O’Kane is arguing that Marx's analysis has two separate elements: one comprehends valorization qua money theory of value (the “analysis of the socially specific manner in which capital allocates labour”), which explains the capital circuit and exploitation and the other comprehends “the way in which the collectively constituted forms of value function as the autonomous entities of personified things that invert, compel and dominate individual actions.”

However, the fetish-characteristic forms are already interior to this part and not a second, separate element.  The class relation, here poorly explicated as the relation between the capitalist class and the working class, when in fact it is the relation of labor to capital.  As always, the contingent personification of capital vis-à-vis a capitalist class is missed, so that the asymmetry of the class relation is missed.  Labor’s personification is necessary, but capital’s personification is contingent.  The class relation and the specific manner in which capitall allocates labor is already autonomous and impersonal.

For O’Kane, I assume following Heinrich, Marx is a dualist.  Or it is a side-effect of the method of presentation. According to the last para on 56, the Trinity Formula brings the two modes together.

56

I do agree, and this is the most important part of this thesis, that “these fetish-characteristic forms are not aspects of a mode of false consciousness but rather of the social character of capitalist labour. They pertain to the sense in which the manifestations of abstract social labour, as bearers of value, function as personified autonomous entities that dominate and compel the actions of the individuals who collectively constitute them.”

57

Marx Capital Vol. 1, 209 “Immanent in the commodity…”

58

Fetish character of the commodity is the beginning, not the final, form of the fetish.

59

“It is important to stress here that this fetish-characteristic form of the commodity is described as ‘the personification of things’ or as relations between personified things. This is because the personification of the fetish-character of commodities refers not to how labour is transformed into things but to Marx’s discussion of value and the value relation, which takes place in exchange in the relations between things. The fetish-character of the commodities – like the peculiarities of the equivalent form – therefore refers to properties that stick to

commodities by virtue of the process of atomised production and exchange, and through the value form, which make commodities the bearers of value.”

Something about this bothers me.  It is the part I have italicized.  It is the pushing of the value-form again into the exchange relation: "value and the value relation, which takes place in exchange in the relations between things."

60

Doesn't the sentence quoted and then the other version in fn 165 not indicate that the fetish character is found in the social character of labor, specifically “the special social character of labour which produces commodities and the corresponding peculiar social relation of the commodity producers.”  This would seem to undermine the idea of the value-form being in exchange.

61

According to p 61, not so, and yet what it would seem to indicate is that the “special social characteristics of private labour appear only within this exchange.”  That is, the special social characteristic is already there as potential to be realized, to be made actual.  Essence must appear, but this does not entail a flattening of essence to appearance, and it this latter which O’Kane, following Heinrich, does.  Therefore I disagree with assessment that “the practical activity of atomised production’s realisation in exchange is constitutive of the practical abstraction of value.”

Find that quote on page 169.  The […] always worries me.  Besides, is the emphasis on their becoming values or on acquiring a uniform social objectivity?  It is that acquisition of uniform social objectivity that is at work here.  Prior to exchange, that is, the completion or not of the capital circuit, that their value is made actual.  This is not the same as saying that they do not have the form of value.

62

I feel like the use of the term "producers" here is not really grasped by O’Kane.  Marx’s producers in the first couple of chapters are not per se workers, but capital.  Capitalist producer sells to valorize value, laborer sells labor as a means to consumption.

I also disagree with fn 175 that mystification qua naturalization only applies to political economists.