Critiques of the Neue Marx-Lektüre

[Zanthorus]

I'll start off this post by saying I don't really have much insight into what exactly the Neue Marx-Lektüre is since I don't happen to speak German and the best I've managed to get so far is a summary of their results by Endnotes. That said, what I have managed to gather leads me to believe that they are if not totally in accord with Marx at least on the right track with regards value theory in emphasising the way in which, in the exchange of the products of varying concrete labour processes against money a real abstraction from the bodily form of the commodity takes place which reduces the various concrete labours to human labour in the abstract.

On the other hand I have seen Paul Cockshott post a couple of times that he thinks the value-form schools interpretation of Marx is fundamentally mistaken but without ever elaborating. The only critique I have managed to get of the NML so far is one by Mattick jabbering some rubbish about class relations (As if the fundamental class relation was not precisely that between the productive forces of social labour and the labourers themselves with the latter coming to dominate the former). I would be interested in what critiques of value-form theory there are from what I would regard as the empiricist/Left Ricardian crowd who from what I've seen usually treat the question of how exactly the products of labour become values to be irrelevant and rely on (Questionable) statistics.

[Kadir Ateş]

My reply won't be too helpful, but have you looked into Postone's Time, Labour and Social Domination? I think he has a pretty good summation of what he considers to be "bad Marxism".

Mac Intosh of the Internationalist Perspective is fairly adept at value-form theory, and has a good critique of even Postone and others: http://internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-archive/ip_54_value-form.html

[Paul Cockshott]

i have not read the German theorists on this as my German is very slow, but the English language value form theorists come close to saying that value arises in and through exchange rather than in production.

[Android]

i have not read the German theorists on this as my German is very slow, but the English language value form theorists come close to saying that value arises in and through exchange rather than in production.

Do not have time to check my notes to be sure. But I think this maybe missing there point, in that, is their argument not that value is realised through production for exchange on the market. Thus, posing a dichotomy between it arising in either production or in exchange misses the point.

I maybe wrong here, but I am sure others will correct me if I am.

Regarding the OP Zan. I can send you a critique of Michael Heinrich's work by Alan Freeman if you want?

[Paul Cockshott]

Do not have time to check my notes to be sure. But I think this maybe missing there point, in that, is their argument not that value is realised through production for exchange on the market. Thus, posing a dichotomy between it arising in either production or in exchange misses the point.



Well if you say that realisation is a stage in the constitution of value, then you can make no sense of commodities selling above or below their values. My view is that they confuse value with exchange value, or at the very least fail to make a clear enough distinction between them.

[Kadir Ateş]

Well if you say that realisation is a stage in the constitution of value, then you can make no sense of commodities selling above or below their values. My view is that they confuse value with exchange value, or at the very least fail to make a clear enough distinction between them.

I would be cautious to use the word "realisation" in describing the constitution of value, because--assuming you have been working off of the Nicolaus translation of the Grundrisse--because the actual word is valorization. Why does this matter? Well I was talking to a comrade yesterday who pointed out that "realisation" denotes a moment, whereas "valorization" offers more of a process, which capital is in addition to a social relation.

I know that isn't the substance of your statement, but I thought it might be helpful to consider.

[Paul Cockshott]

I would be cautious to use the word "realisation" in describing the constitution of value, because--assuming you have been working off of the Nicolaus translation of the Grundrisse--because the actual word is valorization. Why does this matter? Well I was talking to a comrade yesterday who pointed out that "realisation" denotes a moment, whereas "valorization" offers more of a process, which capital is in addition to a social relation.

I know that isn't the substance of your statement, but I thought it might be helpful to consider.
That is a useful clarification but I think that I came accross the word realisation in Marx well before the Nicolaus edition came out.
For instance:
Suppose, as is assumed in this part, the amount of profit in any particular sphere of production
equals the sum of the surplus-value produced by the total capital invested in that sphere. Even
then the bourgeois will not consider his profit as identical with surplus-value, i. e., with unpaid
surplus-labour, and, to be sure, for the following reasons:
1) In the process of circulation he forgets the process of production. He thinks that surplus-value
is made when he realises the value of commodities, which includes realisation of their surplusvalue.Captial 3 Chap 7

Is this translation wrong as well?

My objection to the value form people with whom I have debated in English is that they deny that value pre-exists the sale, holding that the sale is necessary for value to exist. An implication of this is that they deny that abstract labour and value exist in non capitalist economies, which strikes me as just historical ignorance.

[Kadir Ateş]

Is this translation wrong as well?

There is a necessary tension at least in the Nicolaus trans., of "realisation" when he uses that to mean process, as Marx continually states how capital is both a social relation and a process. Not sure of Volume III or that translation.




My objection to the value form people with whom I have debated in English is that they deny that value pre-exists the sale, holding that the sale is necessary for value to exist. An implication of this is that they deny that abstract labour and value exist in non capitalist economies, which strikes me as just historical ignorance.

I agree with you, value does pre-date capital. Which of the value-form theorists deny this?

[Paul Cockshott]

i would have to do a back search through the ope-l archive to be precise, but I am pretty sure this was Williams view.

[Zanthorus]

Regarding the OP Zan. I can send you a critique of Michael Heinrich's work by Alan Freeman if you want?

That would be much appreciated.


An implication of this is that they deny that abstract labour and value exist in non capitalist economies, which strikes me as just historical ignorance.

I don't think it has anything to do with historical ignorance. 'Abstract Labour' and 'Value' are theoretical categories and as such whether they apply to any specific epoch in economic history is not just an empirical question but also a question of theory. We cannot simply pull up statistics from another economic epoch and say 'see, abstract labour and value exist, therefore value-form theory is gibberish!', because that involves a number of theoretical assumptions about the categories 'abstract labour' and 'value' which still remain to be argued. For my own part, I would agree with the 'historically ignoran[t]' theorists who deny that abstract labour exists prior to capitalism, since the coincidence of abstract labour and capitalism is a definitional (i.e. not empirical) one.

[Paul Cockshott]

That would be much appreciated.



I don't think it has anything to do with historical ignorance. 'Abstract Labour' and 'Value' are theoretical categories and as such whether they apply to any specific epoch in economic history is not just an empirical question but also a question of theory. We cannot simply pull up statistics from another economic epoch and say 'see, abstract labour and value exist, therefore value-form theory is gibberish!', because that involves a number of theoretical assumptions about the categories 'abstract labour' and 'value' which still remain to be argued. For my own part, I would agree with the 'historically ignoran[t]' theorists who deny that abstract labour exists prior to capitalism, since the coincidence of abstract labour and capitalism is a definitional (i.e. not empirical) one.

Clearly abstract labour and value are theoretical categories, but any scientific theory has to have a close relationship to empirical data and is only as good as its ability to account for the empirical data.
The category of abstract labour is explicitly introduced by Marx,( though arguably it is already operational in the writings of Adam Smith) in order to contrast the labour that counts towards value from the labours that create different use values. As such he introduces it in the context of commodity productiion, asserting that it is abstract labour time that is the substance of value. Since commodity production predates capitalism, we have a theoretical problem in explaining what regulated exchange value in say the Roman Empire, if abstract labour only came into existence with capitalism.

We have two alternatives:


We assert along with Rostovtzeff and Momsen that Rome was capitalist
Alternatively we argue that in pre-capitalist society some other causal mechanism entirely regulated exchange value.

If you chose the first alternative, you throw out the whole periodisation of modes of production in historical materialism as a result of a definition you have made.
If you chose the second, you have to provide an alternative theory of value for pre-capitalist modes of production. Whilst this is not in principle impossible, as far as I know none of the value form school have done it.
That is why I tend to think it is ignorance, just a result of them not having made much of a study of pre-capitalist economies, so that the problems of explaining them do not appear as serious questions to them.

[Zanthorus]

Since commodity production predates capitalism,

You have brought this up before but I think it is a highly debatable point. Marx did say that commodity production as such predates capitalism, but on the other hand remarks that it is only on the basis of capitalist production that the commodity-form becomes the general social form of wealth and that the logic of commodities permeates all spheres of social production. There is in Marx, in other words, a differentiation between simple commodity modes of production in which the production of commodities was restricted by various local and regional pecularities, and generalised commodity production in which exchange-value removes itself from all narrow and patriarchal basis' and becomes an autonomous and world-enveloping power. Marx notes in the section on the value-form in Volume I that the development of the form of value into the money-form which is the unique form of value which is fully adequate to it's content is characterised by a continued seperation and autonomisation of value from use-value. Roman society may have had commmodity production on a limited scale, but was it ever anywhere near the world-enveloping character which commodity production takes on in capitalist society? I think not.

[Paul Cockshott]

I am unaware of there being dispute among historians about the existence of Roman commodity production. It was not as general as now admitedly, but so long as it existed at all the problem I outlined still exists for the value form theorists.