Hegel's "the rational is real and the real is rational"

Hegel's famous quote from the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, "was vernünftig ist das ist wirklich und was wirklich ist das ist vernünftig", typically translated as "the rational is real and the real is rational" ought to be considered one of the most misunderstood phrases among his generally misunderstood work.

For example, the Wikipedia page on Hegel says the following:

"Hegelianism is the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel which can be summed up by the dictum that "the rational alone is real", which means that all reality is capable of being expressed in rational categories. His goal was to reduce reality to a more synthetic unity within the system of absolute idealism."

What, however, if this is mistaken? On the one hand, for Hegel, following from the Science of Logic, his attempt to begin without presuppositions, to think Being without any presuppositions, from an immediate, unmediated, sheer Being that itself turns out to immediately vanish into Nothing, leads him to the conclusion that the categories of Thought are also the categories of Being, not because we dogmatically assert, that is, assume, this is so, but through a lengthy logical working out. That is, if Thought can think Being without imposing its own presuppositions on it, then, contra the contemporary Pragmatist-influenced reading of Hegel's logic as non-ontological, Hegel's logic is an onto-logic. Following both Slavoj Zizek (Absolute Zero) and Stephen Houlgate (The Opening of Hegel's Logic), both of whom approach Hegel's thought in otherwise quite different ways, I would argue that Hegel proposes a non-dogmatic beginning to philosophy, unlike the modern metaphysics of Leibnitz, Spinoza, and Hegel's own contemporaries, that nonetheless takes seriously the critique of metaphysics pace Kant. To put the matter bluntly, Hegel is making claims about Being in a manner that does not correspond with deflationary notions of truth as argued by Robert Pippin in "Back to Hegel?" in the journal Mediations.

Hegel takes Kant's critique of prior metaphysics seriously insofar as he accepts that metaphysics made assertions about Being that presupposed what had to be proved, but at the same time Kant still presupposes certain things about Being, that is, what could and could not be said about Being, but further Kant simply takes the categories of thought without justification from traditional metaphysics, hence his putting forward of the twelve categories. The result in Hegel's work is the Science of Logic and the attempt to engage the questions metaphysics proposed while keeping Kant's own critique of pure reason in mind.

The end result, and one I would suggest is maintained by Marx, is that the categories of Thought are the categories of Being because the categories of Being can be thought adequately without importation of unjustified concepts by working through Being itself. The dilemmas of philosophical realism, which take for granted and defend the dualistic separation of Thought and Being whether in a (neo-)Kantian mode or an empirical-positivist mode (Trent Schroyer's book The Critique of Domination lays out the distinction between the two reasonably clearly), are fundamentally non-problems from the Hegelian and Marxian perspective. In the case of the latter, this is of course frequently not grasped and so you see nonsense like the split between Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism or Subjective Dialectic versus Objective Dialectic and various other dualisms which uncritically reproduce the aporias of dogmatic thought.

Simultaneously, the categories of thought are also not simply imported by Hegel wholesale from prior philosophy, but themselves come into being and disappear and then reappear in different ways. Not all social formations of humanity have access to the same categories of thought and they don't even necessarily think those categories in the same way. This does not mean that all categories of thought are social constructions as if they had no objectivity of their own, since if they are also categories of being they cannot be simply subjective. Nor do "older" categories necessarily have the same character as if they were immutable. This is fairly clear in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, which takes us through many shapes of consciousness, in which many categories appear repeatedly in different shapes of consciousness with differing degrees of determination and concretion.

However, there is a more important sense in which the reading of the original quote from Hegel is horribly mistaken, and that has to do with what Hegel means by "real" or "actual". Most commentators confuse the real with what exists. Of course if this was the case, then Hegel's point would be conservative at best, and really simply a wholesale justification of "things as they are".

Something is real in Hegel in a speculative sense, that is, not because it is materially there or because it is coherent, but because it has possibility. The real and what exists for Hegel are by no means the same thing at all.

Here I just want to end with a practical example of the speculative dimension of Hegel's statement.

Two people are in a long-term intimate relationship and they are nominally committed to spending the rest of their lives together. However, one of them then finds out that the other person has been having sex with their best friend for years. As it turns out, though the relationship existed, it was not real. Of course, the relationship is also then not rational exactly because an intimate relationship between two people involves honesty, trust, and so on between the two people and instead the foundation of the relationship was dishonesty and distrust; essentially a lie. Thus the relationship, which fully existed, turned out not to be real or rational.

We might then say that Hegel's statement is, at its heart, how we ought to read Marx's oft-quoted, always misunderstood:

"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."

Communism is the real that is rational within capital. Marx does not praise capital in The Communist Manifesto because it is itself great or rational, but because it's potential is communism, which is the rational outcome and inner dynamic of capital (all inner dynamics, if I may use that phrase, for Hegel are those of negation and so a rational outcome is also a self-negation), and therefore the real movement.

Reflections On "REFLECTIONS ON MARX'S CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY"

http://faridabadmajdoorsamachar.blogspot.in/2013/06/reflections-pdf.html?m=1

It's taking a bit of time to look through this, but I have not seen it before.

I do have some initial reflections:

The basis of their criticism of Marx is the confusion over the historical precedence of exchange and circulating capital to productive capital versus the logical precedence of productive capital over them.  As Capital is not a historicist work, there is no reason to believe that the historical order is the same as the logical order, especially as come into a world of generalized commodity production.  As such, capital did not subvert its own rules (p. 4) since merchant and usurious capital existed on the fringes of non-capitalist society, and thus money, commodity, value, etc. as constitutive social forms were at best nascent in them, but not yet wholly socially determinate.  Once productive capital subsumes the whole of society, non-productive capital only then truly becomes capital.

The confusion brought about by this is immediately evident because they argue that profits were made by the "different socially necessary labor times for the production of a thing".  However, socially necessary labor time and exchange-value only have bearing in generalized commodity production, in already capitalist society.  As such, the wealth that came from merchant and usury capital does not take the form of value.  Petty commodity production was not a mode of production, there was no exchange-value or use-value for that matter, since there was no value.  There was no abstract labor or concrete labor.  All of those categories only have bearing in relation to capital, that is, in the situation in which M-C-M' will actually work itself out to be M-C...P...C'-M'.

However, it is necessary to begin with M-C-M' because that is how capital appears.  This appearance is not false, so much as incomplete.  Marx will spend the first 6 chapters moving through different ideas of commodity, money, value, etc. and each chapter is driven to the next by its own inadequacy in grasping capital.  The first 6 chapters are about showing why value and surplus-value in generalized commodity society cannot come from exchange, which necessitates beginning with M-C-M', since C-M-C clearly doesn't lead with any necessity to an infinite cycle.

This is also why even if M-C-M' is only how capital appears, it is nonetheless not therefore simply an illusion.

Then there is the common misconception that "capital is a social relation".  I would say that Capital is closer to Hegel's notion of Concept in the Science of Logic

"The understanding determines, and holds the determination fixed. Reason is negative and dialectical, since it dissolves the determinations of the understanding into nothing; it is positive, since it generates the universal, and comprehends the particular therein. Just as the understanding is usually taken as something separate from reason in general, so also dialectical reason is taken as something separate from positive reason. In its truth reason is however spirit, which is higher than both reason bound to the understanding and understanding bound to reason. It is the negative, that which constitutes the quality of both the dialectical reason and the understanding: it negates the simple, thereby posits the determinate difference of the understanding; but it equally dissolves this difference, and so it is dialectical. But spirit does not stay at the nothing of this result but is in it rather equally positive, and thereby restores the first simplicity, but as universal, such as it is concrete in itself; a given particular is not subsumed under this universal but, on the contrary, it has already been determined together with the determining of the difference and the dissolution of this determining. This spiritual [obviously for Marx 'spiritual' is not the right word - me] movement, which in its simplicity gives itself its determinateness, and in this determinateness gives itself its self-equality – this movement, which is thus the immanent development of the concept, is the absolute method of the concept, the absolute method of cognition and at the same time the immanent soul of the content."

They further go on to talk as if there were such a thing as "simple commodity production" as something distinct from, as a kind of mode of production independent of, capital.  Aside from Engels' complete misunderstanding of the matter, I don't see a point in Marx's text that would allow for this reading.

Reading on through, I think there continue to be significant problems with how they comprehend Marx's actual work.  It is a bit like reading Marx's critique of Hegel, in that one really feels like Hegel is the name ascribed to the Young Hegelians, and therefore much of the criticism of Hegel as more aptly a criticism of the Young Hegelian reading of Hegel.  In the same manner, this essay is wrangling with post-Marx Marxism, and particularly the versions of it that one might call Orthodox Marxism, the Marxism of the 2nd and Third Internationals.

The reason this matters is simply that a lot of what Marx is actually engaged in cannot be read since they see a work like Capital through the lenses of Engels, Lenin, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Pannekoek, et al, and most of this stuff is nearly worthless for us today.  Marx, however, retains a freshness that speaks to the moment.

Allow me to give examples. 

The first mistake is evident in the idea that Marx's Capital is a critique of capitalist society, and thus Capital is an empirical, historicist text that must project an ideal in order to be coherent.  I would argue that that text is nothing of the sort.  Marx's work is, firstly, a critique of political economy.  Marx is rather explicit about this, as that is the subtitle.  Very few people, however, think about that very seriously and so they assume that Marx is simply presenting a better political economy, not a critique of political economy as such, as an attempt to rationally comprehend capitalism as a rational object.  This obscure the irrationality that Marx identifies both within capital and political economy. 

Instead, we should see Capital differently.  It remains immanent to political economy's categories and is a critique of those categories and their insufficiency, and insofar as political economy is capital thinking about itself in a rigorous way, about its being-for-itself if one wanted to borrow a Hegel-ism, Marx considers it scientific, which in his Hegelian sense would mean both ontological and systematic, wissenschraft, not scientific in the natural-sciences sense which takes the object of its investigation for granted.  Actually, beginning with J.S. Mill in particular, Marx excoriates as vulgar economics or vulgar political economy the shift from wissenschaft to natural scientific approaches to a decidedly non-natural object.

Capital thus moves like a Hegelian phenomenology of categories taken from within political economy, not proposed from outside of it, developing a "science of logic" of capital through the limitedness of those categories from their abstractness to greater and greater degrees of concretion.  As such, the complaint that Marx does not take into account states and cannot explain wars misses that Marx never actually arrives at The State or International Money/Finance because those were supposed to be a part of the 4th volume of Capital, and could only be dealt with at a degree of concretion that was beyond what Marx was able to complete in his lifetime and which was largely never taken up afterwards, with only a few exceptions, prior to the last quarter of the 20th century and even then, as a completely heterodox strand of Marxian thought.  One of the more engaging recent pieces on exactly this is Werner Bonefeld's excellent book

Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason.

A second mistake is to think that Marx is not concerned with realization of value or that he held to a disproportionality theory of crisis.  He is explicitly concerned with the realization of value and issues arising from it and all crisis in Marx is logically a crisis of valorization.  However, the problems that arise from the failure of realization, from what we might call a part of a crisis of accumulation, could only be partially developed in his incomplete work.  It is already implicit, however, in his discussion of value and price and the implication that value and price are never the same in actuality.  That is, insofar as the validation of the expenditure of labor, raw materials and means of production into potential values only is realized in exchange, there is always the situation that no individual capital can ever gauge socially-necessary labor time accurately.  This is part of the reason that command capitalist economies, rather than market capitalist economies, are so much more rigid and stagnant.  Competition between capitals through freely floating prices really is the only way that winners and losers can be sorted out in a way that is not directly distorting (it is indirectly distorting, but that comes back to the problem of the necessity of the critique of value to grasp the social form and nature of crisis, and why competition models fail.)


The third mistake is the attribution to Marx that the overthrow of capitalism is the overthrow of relations of distribution (private ownership of the means of production.)  They are quite clearly wrong that "Exproprition of capitalists or the dissolution of the private power of the individual capitalists would thus obviously be the negation of capital", not simply as a statement, but as attributing this view to Marx.  Marx's critique is not a critique of distribution, but of the very mode of production itself, and thus of labor, of value, of money, etc.  Postone's work has been critical to recovering this dimension of Marx's work (see the recent “The Current Crisis and the Anachronism of Value”) 


Of course, they are quite right to reject the idea that overcoming private ownership of the means of production is the end of capital, even if they got there by throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  However, they would get much more out of Marx if they gave up reading him through their Leninist-tinted lenses, a tint that they have not because they are Leninists, but because they end up reading Marx through lenses they purport to want to stop wearing.  It would make the work of a more adequate critical theory against capital less difficult.


I also fully concur in their statement that Monopoly Capitalist analyses take us away from the critique of capital, that they "blatantly subvert the analyses of value relations i.e. they render impossible the comprehension of the social distribution of labour in commodity economy."  This is fully evident not only in obvious ways with writers like Robert Brenner fetishize intra-capitalist competition as the locus of capitalist crisis, and therefore the competition between states as central to crisis, but very much also in what would seem to be quite otherwise critical Marxists, such as Endnotes, which in their last issue largely adopted the stupidity of Brenner, and the British SWP trotskyists who always understood their state capitalism as provable through the competition between states.

The further conclusion that theories of imperialism, oppressed and oppressor nations, etc. is reactionary rubbish is on very solid ground.  My complaint would simply be that I sense a tendency (and let me be clear, it is a sense of a tendency, not a claim that this is quite made explicit) in the text to want to shrug aside gender, nationality, sexuality, race, etc as kind of fake and class struggle as real.  As I see it, this would be radically false, insofar as it confuses the critique of political economy with a reification of class.  Race, gender, sexuality, etc are very much categories of capitalist society and are as connected to the logic of capital as class.  I would argue that part of the crisis of communist ideas today is the end of the working class as a third estate, as a social group with its own culture, ideas, and separation from society a a whole.  It is also the foundation of the possibility of returning to Marx's work as the critique of labor rather than as the critique of capitalism from the point of view of labor.

I haven't gone though all of their notes, and I probably won't because it is a rehearsal of a lot of things I have read over the years.


That said, I appreciate their attempt to grapple with the present and to abandon orthodox Marxism and I am very sympathetic to their political conclusions, but they need to go rather further with their critique and oddly enough they will not get there without recovering Marx.

Christian Thorne • Commonplace Book

Very interesting site recently brought to my attention.  Between articles and the new translation work on Adorno'sNegative Dialectics, very worthwhile.

Christian Thorne • Commonplace Book

I do not exactly agree with his points about Marx's relation to ontology, as I do not think Marx is a deflationary thinker and hence we cannot replace the word "materialism" with "pragmatism" without accepting the Kantian transcendental move.

His point that Marx is close to Pyrrhonic skepticism is spot on, but Hegel was also an admirer and supporter of the same Pyrrhonic skepticism, as is evident from his reading of it in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy.  However, this is important in part because that skepticism does not throw out truth in the post-Kantian manner or in a way similar to the skepticism of the Scottish Enlightenment.

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,

Some notes on “Schrödinger’s Capital”: The neoclassical core of the value-form argument

The original article is here.

Marx only works through the concept of labour power when he does because, like a proper student of Hegel, he knows you cannot fully develop a concept without it being worked up to or it functions as an ungrounded assumption, therefore he can't have a completed concept of labour power in chapter 1.  He also knows that you have to work from within the categories of political economy itself, that is, you have to follow the immanent logic of the arguments, not introduce your own "first principles" ex nihilo.

He has to work through the notions of value presented by rationalism, empiricism, and Absolute Idealism, so that he can lay out the limits of each concept.  Abstract labor is thus not the same as labor power, though he refers to it as labor abstracted from any actual labor, that is, as potential.  By the time we have gone through the critique of earlier conceptions of value (binaries of use-value vs. value, concrete labor vs. abstract labor, and then the form of value or exchange-value leading to the money form as value), all of which are partial truths, but therefore also untrue because partial, he lays out the ground of value in the fetish characteristic of the commodity.

He then has to talk about the role of exchange in the REALIZATION of potential value.  Commodities are not bartered, they are an exchange of equivalents.  Money is the necessary social form of exchange-value because it is only through a commodity that is the (empty) universal, the pure, immediate concept of value.  Money allows exchange to take place without any direct consideration of the use-value of the commodity by the producer, and it retains value, that is, despite the change of form of value, it retains it's substance as a quant of wealth.  Money is also one kind of materialization of value in exchange (just as we started with the commodity as the first materialization of value) and it is essential in a system of indirectly related values that the validity of the common substance (labor), and its magnitude (value)  magnitude, and that magnitude of the substance is measured by the socially-necessary labor time.

This is why Marx spends chapter 3 discussing what money is, at this point and insofar as it has been developed.  Commodities cannot circulate as commodities, and generalized commodity production therefore cannot be the general form of human social relations, if commodities are not exchanged for money, if their value is not realized in a universally recognized form independently of their use-value and of concrete labor.  This is why Marx moves from money as measure of value to medium of circulation, to money proper (hoarding, means of payment, and universal money.)  It is with universal money that we see money achieve it's perfected form: "it strips off the local garbs... It is only in the markets of the world that money acquires to the full extent the character of the commodity whose bodily form is also the immediate social incarnation of human labour in the abstract. Its real mode of existence in this sphere adequately corresponds to its ideal concept."  It is necessary to keep in mind that there is no way for this to be Marx's completed concept of money in his work because it would have to deal with states and the world market, which we know Marx never got around to completing, but the first working up of money that allows us to conceptualize capital.

Note that when Marx gets to The General Formula for Capital, we now have a circuit, a movement of valorization in which value moves through different forms (commodity, money) which are intended to preserve (and in fact increase, but we are not there yet) the magnitude of value through the entire cycle.  Capital is not the means of production or money or commodities, it is really the entire circuit in which money, labor, means of production, commodity are all nothing more than moments of capital in its extended self-reproduction.

The Value-Form people get stuck in thinking that because exchange via money is a necessary condition for the realization of a measurable magnitude of value (substance), the substance is created in the act of exchange.  They conflate value as potential versus actual.  Exchange does not create the value-form of social wealth, rather it validates how much of the magnitude of that substance COUNTS.  If none of the commodity is sold, the commodity does not COUNT, is not validated, as value, but this has direct and dire cnsequences for the producers because the result is bankruptcy and unemployment.  The substance of the commodity, abstract human labor, is already a commodity, and since it is already valued, we do not enter capitalist production until we already have spent money on labor and means of production.  This becomes the ground of the bare minimum required to reproduce the conditions of production, that is, the amount of value that must be validated or realized in exchange for the process to happen again is already the potential value, independently of and prior to the exchange of the commodities produced.

Money does not equal value-form.  Exchange-value is the mode of appearance of value, that is, value only becomes visible in exchange because in an indirect system of social reproduction there is no direct measure of the validity of the labor-time of this commodity versus that commodity; there is a dynamic, indirect validation of labor-time based on its social necessity (that is, based on its labor-time in relation to other labor-times.)  Money is the universal, meaningless, empty, but necessary form of appearance of exchange-value expressed as price, and the price at which the commodity sells is the validation of the amount of socially necesssary time in its production.  This price may be above or below what would allow for the reproduction of the amount originally spent in the first place, and we only learn out of the exchange the validity of the value, how much of it counts.

The Value-Form milieu in effect ignores the fact that the first commodity for Marx is labor-power, which as he says in chapter 6, having sold its hide, heads off for a tanning (and since now labor-power is going from the realm of exchange, where it too was a commodity exchanged for money, for the universal equivalent, it must now go into the hidden abode of production for a good tanning.  To put it another way, the current value-form milieu seems to want value without labor or production, which I would suggest is a side-effect of the transformation of capitalist society in the late-20th and 21st centuries as noted in different, potentially complementary ways, by Krisis, Exit!, and Postone on one side, and Robert Meister and Randy Martin on the other.  Norbert Trenkle's "Labour in the Era of Fictitious Capital" is succinct on this point, and if we consider the value-form milieu as succumbing to the financialization of capitalism and the mass expulsion of labor from the production process, we can see the root of their hypostatization of money.

What’s the deal with Marx’s Capital?

What’s the deal with Marx’s Capital? That's the question I was asked to try and answer.

I think this is a very important starting point for the discussions we have been having, and it sums up neatly a point made repeatedly:

Brown (2003) argues that what is distinctive about the political rationality of neoliberalism as opposed to classic liberalism is the extension of the "entrepreneurial logic" to all human activities. "Whereas classic liberalism articulated a distinction, and at times even a tension, among the criteria for individual moral, associational, and economic actions (hence the striking differences in tone subject matter and even prescription between Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and his Theory of Moral Sentiments), neo-liberalism normatively constructs and interpolates individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life." (footnote 5, p. 292, "The Genetic Reinscription of Race", Nadia Abu El-Haj, Annual Review of Anthropology vol. 36, 2007.

That is, this is a look at the way in which capitalist in the present "constructs and interpolates individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life."

This however is a moment a very long way down the road of categorial development from what capital is in its most fundamental sense, as the generalization of the commodity-form (the particular social form of the products of production), the labor-form (the particular social form of wealth-producing human activity), the value-form (the particular social form of wealth), the money-form (the particular social form of value), until we reach the total circuit in the capital-form, as self-valorizing, self-expanding, self-reproducing value.  The exploitation of living labor in order to produce a surplus in the form of value is not the social form as such, but its content.

To attempt to conceptualize this in terms of Marx’s Capital, it helps to have some sense of what Marx is and isn’t doing, especially in the first volume, since there is a great deal of confusion.  I just want to note here that I owe a great deal of my reading of Volume 1 to Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor and Social Domination, Werner Bonefeld’s work on primitive accumulation as succinctly expressed in Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy, and Nicole Pepperell’s as-yet unpublished PhD dissertation.

Capital is, as its subtitle says, a critique of political economy and this has several implications.  Firstly, Marx is not trying to explain capital or capitalist society as a rational, coherent, consistent system.  Secondly, he is not abstracting from capital’s actual functioning in order to produce a model.  Finally, he is not trying to provide a more accurate theory that fixes the limitations of classical political economy associated with Smith, Ricardo, Petty, Quesnay, etc.  As a critique of political economy, Marx produced a book that treats even classical political economy as a necessarily failed attempt to provide a rational, consistent, coherent account of a system and a society that in his view is fundamentally irrational, inconsistent and incoherent.  Marxists, generally a confused lot more interested in the workers’ movement than in the critique of political economy, take Marx’s work to be a proof of the necessary collapse of capital and a critique of capital by labor.  In that story, capital and the capitalist class are evil and labor and the working class are good.  Capital ends up being a book about the good guys and the bad guys in the class struggle.  However, this point of view has a lot of problems, not the least of which is that Marx’s own notion of life beyond capital, beyond class society, is a life not determined by labor, but determined by freely disposable time.  Marx’s critique of political economy is therefore a critique of all of its elements, of capital and labor, of money and the means of production.

This does not mean that Marx does not engage with political economy on its own terms.  Marx is not offering a criticism of capital or of political economy, that is, an attack from an external, superior standpoint, from better first principles.  Such a criticism would have to justify its first principles, a move that inevitably leads to either vicious circularity (a rose is a rose because it is a rose) or infinite regress (the first principle has to be justified by another preceding principle, which has to be justified by another even more prior first principle and so on.)  The problem of such criticism was recognized as far back as Aristotle in his Metaphysics and Sextus Empiricus in his Outline of Pyrrhonism and Outlines of Skepticism.  Marx therefore takes political economy at it’s word and accepts its categories as the terms of the discussion.  He then proceeds, much as Hegel does in his Phenomenology of Spirit, by allowing those categories to express their own failure, and by watching where each failure leads, takes us on a journey from the categories of capital and capitalist society as underdetermined and abstract to their more complete, complexly determined, and therefore concrete, expression.  This is not a historical trip, however, as the logical development of these categories does not follow their historical path.  In fact, commodity, labor, value, etc. as Marx first posits them in Chapter 1, are only able to be seen in their genesis at the very end of the book, where the historical production of the categories comes in only after their logical development.  This is why constituted classes do not appear in Capital until the third book and why the phrase “class struggle” cannot be found in volume 1.

Since this is an presentation of the movement of the first volume, I am not going to try and reproduce the movement of the work as such.  Rather than a phenomenological development, such as Marx uses, this is a more severe style of presentation.  If you want the full working up and a more step-by-step analysis, you will have to read Capital and the commentaries I have mentioned.  There is no way around that.  This presentation is meant as a clarification and a statement of how I understand Capital and therefore is closer to Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy than the Phenomenology or the Logic.

The most succinct expression of capital as a movement is M-C-M', that is, money which makes itself into more money through the transformation of money into commodities that are then exchanged for a greater sum of money.  In this movement, the material forms change repeatedly, and different activities produce different changes, time is even transformed into space and space back into time, but all of this destruction and creation preserves the social form of wealth (value) and even expands it.  Each form is necessarily a vanishing moment, but a moment which must be passed through each time in order to reproduce and preserve capital as such, and this reproduction and preservation requires its self-expansion with each cycle.

How the cycle goes from M-M’ is a point of much debate.  In classical political economy and traditional Marxist Political Economy, M is spent on C, where C is means of production, raw materials and labor power.  C is then transformed in the production process ...p… and the outcome of which is C’, that is, a set of commodities with more value than what was purchased with M.  Thus when C’ is sold (we are assuming that it sells at its value, not above or below as it would in actuality), we now have M’, the original M+S, our surplus value.  

From this perspective, new value, surplus-value, has to originate in production.  Many people believe that Marx makes an argument for living labor as the only source of new value in the first chapters of Capital, but he does not.  The one point Marx makes about the production of value is that it cannot originate in exchange, in the idea that one buys low and sells high (chapter 2).  Robbing Peter to pay Paul on the total scale of the economy would not result in the production of value, but a zero-sum game.  I pay x+1 for a, but now I have to sell b for x+1 as well, passing on the cost all along the way.  Marx thus makes the point that new wealth in the form of increased value, has to come from outside of exchange.  

However, the idea that only living labor power produces new value, as opposed to machinery and raw materials, that is, dead or already expended labor turned into things, or even living labor in the forms of animals, causes a great deal of confusion. After all, machines and raw materials produce material wealth all the time.  Why don’t they produce value?  After all, value in Marx is objective.  It isn’t a produced in exchange nor is it determined by what people are willing to pay.  What makes human labor so special?  And if it is a question of living labor, why not the labor of animals? Marx is even skeptical of the value-producing capability of non-wage labor.

The first few chapters are thus hard to comprehend if you are looking for an argument there that Marx is not making.

The most common mistake is to think that Marx is in fact trying to put forward a coherent concept of value in Chapter 1.  What Marx is actually doing is akin to what Hegel does in the first three chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit.  Marx is taking the most common conceptions of the basic forms and production of wealth in capitalist society and working them out in their self-contradiction.  Marx’s work, like Hegel’s, is concerned with the aporias of social forms and their concepts.  First comes the commodity which is a use-value and an exchange-value, the empiricist understanding of the form of wealth that a commodity is a thing that is a use-value to the buyer and an exchange-value to the owner.  The first use-value that is an exchange-value that concerns Marx is, albeit in a passing joke about tanning and hides, labor power itself, whose use-value is always first and foremost its capacity to produce exchange-values.  

This leads us to the second way of considering wealth, the rationalist analysis of the inner content of the commodity as embodied labor, of the split between concrete and abstract labor, that is, labor as the substance of value.  What becomes clear however is that the substance of exchange-value is not labor embodied in the commodity, as if labor were a chemical property of the commodity (and as if commodities could only be things), but the socially necessary labor-time.  Thus, the value of the commodity, a spatial object at this point, is temporal.  (In his unpublished manuscripts published posthumously as Theories of Surplus-Value, Marx makes it clear that commodities need not be things, even, as the labor of a clown is value-producing if the clown has sold his capacity for labor, his capacity for clowning in this case, to a capitalist who sells his services to someone, and who presumably also provides the clown suits, and other materials, thus investing in variable and constant capital.)  This is also the point in chapter 1 where Marx’s engages with measure and magnitude of value and where people believe Marx makes an argument for embodied labor as the substance of value.  

The final way of considering the form of wealth is its absolute idealist (one might say Hegelian) form, as the form of value, or as exchange-value qua money, which includes a logical-genetic account of the value-form.  Marx begins with the relative form of value where two commodities face each other, one as the commodity and the other as the measure of the value of the commodity.  He moves on to the equivalent form of value where one commodity, still some manner of use-value, stands as the measure of all other values, much like cigarettes in a prison.  Marx then develops the account of the general equivalent, a commodity that largely has no other use-value than being the equivalent measure of value for all other commodities, and this is where Marx introduces the use of malleable precious metals such as copper, silver, and gold.  Marx ends with the final form, the money-form as the most perfect, empty and meaningless form of value.  With money, it is no longer necessary that money be present as a commodity as such, but stands in for value.  There is much discussion even today as to whether or not money has to be backed by a commodity of some sort, that is whether you need a gold backing or whether fiat money is actual money.  However, that is a question that requires the full development of interest and finance, which does not happen until Volume 3.  It would be a mistake to think Marx is in a position to answer that question at this very low level of development of money.  Here socially-necessary labor time as the substance and magnitude of value either exists as money, that is, is expressed in an other that everyone recognizes as its universally valid other, or it doesn't exist at all.  After all, a commodity that cannot be expressed as, exchanged for, money, isn’t valid as value, it is just a thing or an activity.  Marx thus works through all of the various conceptions of value and wealth in classical political economy, without so far presenting his own.  This is the second source of confusion.

Only with the fetishistic character of the commodity do we begin to get to Marx's notion of wealth in capitalist society, and this is because only here do we begin to get to the various moments of the commodity form not merely as a variety of binary distinctions that allow shape, measure, and transformation, but as the self-reproduction of the social forms themselves as forms of social domination.  Reification is a moment of this, but fetishism is more than that, it is our self-alienated activity, in the form of labor, as an objective form of domination that appears as freedom.  So while reification captures one aspect of fetishism, reification by itself does not automatically entail domination.  The full concept of fetishism requires that the reified product of our labor and that the labor itself constitutes that which dominates us.

It is very important to note at this point that if Marx has laid out contradictory, inadequate concepts of wealth and the form of wealth in the first chapter, this does not mean that the categories he develops there are simply false.  Much like sense-certainty, perception and understanding in the Phenomenology of Spirit, these categories as deployed by classical political economy are too abstract and underdetermined; they are not yet concrete in the sense of the outcome of many determinations.  After all, we know nothing of production, the labor process, circulation, or even profit, interest, and rent.  We only know value, labor, commodity, and money, but they will remain essential for Marx's entire work, but as these more and more actualized, determined forms.

As I have noted above, chapter 2 is really where Marx makes the point that value is not produced in the act of exchange.  He also spends a fair amount of time showing that the commodity, to truly be a commodity, must be produced for someone else, as an exchange-value, that it must be exchanged for money, for its other.  Something produced to be consumed, rather than exchanged for money, is not a commodity.  Something produced as a commodity is valueless if it is not sold, that is, value is only value as long as it is valorized, that is, value is only potential in production, but it must be actualized, realized, in exchange.

In chapter 3 Marx begins his deeper analysis of money's forms or modes of existence.  Key to this is the way in which money both represents and preserves value so that in the metamorphosis of the capital cycle, even when a commodity loses its body, its spirit is retained in the form of money and may go and seek a new body.

Only at this point do we come across capital proper, in Part II, "The Transformation of Money into Capital".  Now we see that capital is the self-valorization of value, as self-expanding wealth.   The end of capital, its telos, is not new commodities, but the endless expansion of abstract, infinite value qua money.  M' is ever the goal of capital proper.  Since money is pure quantity, this is a bad infinity, an infinite seeking for “one dollar more”.  Any and all C (raw materials, machinery, labor, finished goods) are merely means to an ever-expanding M'.  As such, the goal of production is not reproducing individuals (the reproduction of individuals in fact falls outside of the capital cycle and has its own, unwaged labor), but the reproduction of surplus-value qua money that can be reinvested to effect the expanded reproduction of capital on a continuously higher plain.  The dream of a perpetual motion machine is the dream of the perfect production of surplus-value without a breakdown.  And just as the perpetual motion machine is a fantasy, so too is capital as a perpetual motion machine, but that is a discussion for another time.

Nowhere up to this point does Marx really make an argument for why only living labor, and specifically wage-labor, produces new value.  Nor could he because that is a question that requires a degree of concrete development of the concept of labor that we had not yet reached.  However, now we can venture some ideas on this, beginning with Chapter 7 and this will take up a large portion of the middle section of Capital, as Marx concerns himself with the absolute and relative surplus-value for 11 chapters.  Only in this discussion, of the first real mention of surplus-value and constant and variable capital can we start understanding the importance of human labor, and waged-labor in particular.

By this point in Capital, we know that when a capitalist buys a machine and raw materials, they are paid for in advance (the issue of buying on credit is irrelevant here because credit does not change that the capitalist must pay the full value of the machine; what it does introduce is a complication that we can’t approach adequately yet, the problem of interest), and once paid for lose value whether they are used or not.  In order to use them up for maximum valorization, capital thus must operate the machinery and use the raw materials as efficiently as possible, as close to 24 hours a day as possible in many cases, so that the value “stored” (embodied in the money spent in their purchase) in those machines is consumed and transferred as close to completely as possible in the commodities produced for exchange in order to make M'.  Also, a machine can only do what it is told to do, what it is designed for.  It's wear and tear can be delayed and mitigated by efficient operations and repairs (whether fixing a worn cog wheel or a bug in the program), but used up it will be.  Further, the competition between capitals to capture market share leads to a constant improvement in the productivity of labor and the need to surpass the efficiency of the existing machine or program.  This pressure to develop better machines and better programs makes the older machine or older program lose value (depreciate) even more quickly.  The ways in which additional surplus-value are squeezed out of labor forms the thread that runs through the distinction between absolute and relative surplus-value that Marx will develop in the middle section of the book.

Human labor power within the capital cycle, however, is novel.  As waged-labor, it is only paid for the time it is active.  Workers may also be thrown into and out of production.  The employer does not lose money if they lay people off, but they do if machines and raw materials lie idle.  The former is the problem of the free worker, the latter is the problem of the capitalist.  An interesting take on how this differs from slave labor is presented in the movie Burn.  Within the paid time of production, there is also variability as a worker produces more or less in a given time, but their wage does not generally change in that time.  Even in piece work, the form merely disguises the wage so that the surplus-value is already built into every piece.  Let’s stop and compare an hourly wage to a piece-wage in an 8 hours day.  In an hourly wage, a worker appears to be paid for every hour of labor, and this is true.  However, the wage is not the equivalent of the total value produced.  If it was, there would be no surplus-value.  And what is more important, it is not like the first 6 hours of labor produce the wage and the last two the surplus.  This is an illusion of the wage, however.  If the worker only works six hours, assuming the ratio of wages to surplus being the same (¾ to ¼), then in 6 hours, 4.5 hours would go to wages and 1.5 to surplus.  This is because every commodity is a unit of value and when it is sold, it will, as a unit, realize both value spent on wages and surplus.  So too with the piece wage, where a worker is paid per piece, the individual piece completed is also sold as a whole value.  The variability of the worker is also evident in changes in the pace of production.  Faster rates of production will use up the machinery and raw materials more quickly, but they don’t change the wage of the worker: the hourly wage or the piece rate remain what they are.  Increasing the rate of the worker is an increase in productivity of the labor, but it doesn’t increase the productivity of the machine or raw materials.  To do that, you have invest in different, more advanced machinery or discover and make use of more cheaply produced raw materials.  Finally, unlike a machine, a waged worker is both a seller of a commodity, and a buyer of commodities, that is, they are not merely object, but subjects of the capital cycle.

These appear, deceptively, as technical reasons, but there is a significant theoretical point to be made.  What wage-labor does, as being also the seller and buyer of commodities, is reproduce the capital relation itself.  In selling their labor and in buying commodities as their only means of acquiring their existence, the waged laborer reproduces capital as a self-produced form of domination.  Machines and raw materials are a means to an end in this process, but they cannot of themselves reproduce a social relation.  They don't have a "social relation".  The beginning of this point is certainly in the earlier chapters, but it really begins to come to light starting in chapter 7.  This is how I take Marx  when he says:

"We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. 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." (italics mine- CDW)

From first to last, this paragraph not only distinguishes human from animal labor, but also implicitly from machines.  This is especially evident in the last sentence, where the implication is that the more labor is performed for an end that is not our own, the more close his attention is forced to be.  That is, where the will and intellect belongs to another, so too the force applied to our attention belongs to another.  None of this applies to a machine or raw materials, but only to human labor.

Thus waged-labor is also different from unwaged labor in several key respects.

Waged-labor is itself a commodity, which is purchased by a capital for the purpose of the production of other commodities whose first use-value is that they are exchange-values (the doubled nature of use-value, as its use for the producer of the commodity as an exchange-value and the use of the commodity for the buyer which makes is exchange-worthy, is generally ignored in the Marxist literature as much as in classical political economy), to be sold in order to make more money that will be reinvested as expanded capital.  Waged-labor is performed exactly for a wage, that is, in return for money.  If waged-labor sees its activity as C-M-C, from the point of view of capital waged-labor is either a part of valorization of value or it is a cost of production.

Waged labor is also free in the doubled, capitalist sense: free to be sold to any buyer, for a specific duration, for which it is paid an equivalent (hence a relation of equality as an exchange of equivalents between equally contracting parties, therefore a relation not merely of law, but constituting law); free from any property, any commodity, that might be used to reproduce its owner, except the commodity labor power, i.e. the capacity for labor.  The wage-laborer is thus also a buyer of commodities.  Unwaged laborers have to get means of subsistence in some other manner, generally a relation of some kind of dependence on someone who has money (wage-laborer, land owner, capitalist.)

Nothing precludes reproduction in the broad sense from being commodified.  The distinction is not per se between reproductive labor and productive labor, but between unwaged, private labor and waged, public labor.  That reproductive labor was once primarily household labor that was private and unwaged does not mean that it has to remain primarily so.  Reproductive labor can certainly be commodified and thus waged, public labor with its product produced as a commodity.  This was the case from fairly early on, as food stuffs, clothing, housing, etc. were bought and rented, but their maintenance and preparation, as well as a whole host of other aspects like childcare and entertainment, were not.  The only restriction on the commodification of most elements of reproduction is that at some point, the cheapness of goods and services depends on the relatively low wages of those producing those goods and services.  The specific situation in the U.S. in the present depends on the Wal-Martization of commodities, that is, the production of extremely cheap goods that drive primary producers to extremely small rates of profit.  This does not tend to make the laborers in these enterprises into consumers, and it hurts the accumulation of capital by the producing capital.  For example, if I am a Chinese manufacturing company making dog food to Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart is able to control the access to the market so tightly that it can dictate acceptable costs of production.  The company is forced to maximize both the squeezing of the workers’ wages and their other costs of production, and even then their rates of profit can be terribly low (Cornered by Barry C. Lynn has an excellent discussion of this.)  Now, while the workers are making a wage that may expand buying power marginally, between the low wage and low profit, this kind of production tends to make the development of an internal market that allows for economic expansion rather limited.  This creates its own tensions between the various capitals and in term of development.  It has also gone hand-in-hand with a general extension of debt, which allows consumption to continue through the perpetual promise to pay Tuesday for a hamburger purchased today.  Thus the tendency for reproductive labor to be private, unwaged labor doesn't simply go away.  Nor does unwaged, private labor magically become commodity-producing labor that is part of the cycle of capital's self-valorization of value.

Oddly enough, the aspect of reproduction that is least easily commodifiable, at least in a general sense, is reproduction itself, that is, having children.  Is it any wonder then that the most brutal struggle being fought over the control of women’s bodies today would be reproductive rights and sexual control?  Here I think it is the moment that appears the most biologically-restricted that is the most highly socially mediated.  The control of women’s bodies in reference to having children is about the control of future labor power in the most embodied sense, that is, literally over the supply of future labor on the one side, and over the future inheritors of wealth on the other.  The case of Purvi Patel is instructive, if terrifying, in the lengths to which the state will go to assert that as not merely the bearer of a child, but as the possible bearer of a child, a woman has no rights that cannot be sacrificed to future capital.

My argument is two-fold: that waged, public labor cannot exist without unwaged, private labor, and that unwaged, private labor was predominantly the labor of reproduction and is the key to the gendering of human beings in capitalist society.  As reproductive labor is increasingly commodified and wage-labor is increasingly reproductive and personal service-providing labor in Department 2, due to the extensive increase in the organic composition of capital in Department 1 in particular and thus the shrinking number of workers in the production of means of production and raw materials, labor is increasingly feminized, that is, the very values of affective, emotive, interpersonal engagement that were previously disparaged against masculine values, are now prized.  We are living through a crisis of gender that on the one hand has a politics of liberation of woman as a positive, particular identity and a politics of ressentiment at its limitations, and on the other hand, a politics of the revelation of masculinity as merely an identity, as particular and not universal, and thus a politics of ressentiment at the increasing loss of its value and worth.  Neither is grasped as a crisis of capitalist social forms tied to a crisis of accumulation and of value itself.

This crisis does not entail that value is no longer produced.  Waged-labor has not ceased to exist.  Money is more, not less, essential to the procurement of the means of life, the goal of economic activity is more than ever profit.  In fact, to return to the paragraph with which I opened this letter, the present moment of capitalist society, which many call neo-liberalism, "normatively constructs and interpolates individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life."

The problem is that while this interpolation may turn everyone into a little capitalist in outlook, but it doesn't resolve the crisis of the valorization of value, which has translated into a shrinking number of workers in value-producing labor.  What happens when more of the population is engaged in labor that is purchased as a service rather than as value-producing labor?  Keeping in mind that as more and more labor is not value-producing, but is itself service labor that provides surrogate private labor functions, the purchasers of that commodified reproductive labor have to make enough money so that it is cheaper to buy the service as a commodity than to perform the labor oneself.  This is a dilemma, as the more people perform service jobs, the less value labor produces, the less likely the mass of laborers are to have the money to buy waged reproductive services.  The state provides a certain relief, but in the U.S. this is also maintained by debt and the Wal-Mart-ization of the economy, predicated on the dramatic lowering of global wages thanks to the entry of India and China’s massive populations into the global market as producers of commodities for Department Two.  It seems unlikely that the commodification of private, non-value producing labor can be maintained alongside stagnant or decreasing rates of wages and a decreasing mass of wages in value-producing industries.  Between high-value labor in production areas with a very high organic composition of capital, where the mass of value produced is increasingly more important than the rate of value, and service production that is nonetheless value-producing, but with low-value labor, a lower organic composition of capital, low value per unit, and relatively low productivity, the rate of surplus value is relatively high, but the mass of surplus value is considerably smaller.  In short, wages and income not generated from value-producing spheres of production are a deduction from the total social value produced.  If the income and wages from value-producing spheres decreases, this puts a limit on the amount of services that can be monetized.  In fact, the present period is exactly like this, but under conditions in which all of life is monetized.

The question of unfree, unwaged labor in relation to capital is certainly not easy either.  This is labor that is in many respects treated like means of production, that is, is bought and paid for in full.  And yet, the unfree, unwaged laborer is still human.  They can still reproduce themselves, they can perform a surplus and a variety of activities that allow a difference between the price paid for their labor and what they produce.  Also, whether or not the means of subsistence are bought by the owner of the laborer or is a relative pittance of a wage whose options of expenditure are significantly curtailed by the threat of violence, the means of subsistence are nonetheless purchased as commodities.  Thus even unfree, unwaged labor that produces commodities finds itself in the general cycle of capital.  This is what I hope to develop later.

If we consider the relationship of free to unfree labor in commodity production, we can think of it as a relation of contingency and necessity.