Tang Zhengdong: The Form of Value and Marx's Critique of Capital
Advancing the interpretation of the logic of Marx’s Capital from the perspective of the form of value is a typical manifestation of the theoretical efforts within foreign [1] academic circles to develop historical materialism from the viewpoint of historical specificity. These scholars identify concepts in Capital such as commodities, money, and capital as foundational categories belonging exclusively to the capitalist formation; on this basis, they interpret the logic of Capital as the logic of the self-movement of these aforementioned concepts. This interpretative path, which sets aside the thread of the philosophy of history to focus on the dimension of Hegelian logic, shows a high degree of fit in interpreting phenomena such as what Marx called the self-valorization of capital. However, in its essence, it remains difficult for this approach to accurately grasp the rich connotations that Marx—from the perspective of historical materialism—endowed upon concepts like the commodity and money. Conducting a seek-truth-from-facts analysis of the academic efforts of this "New Dialectics movement" is of great importance for us to deepen the development of Marxist philosophy, especially historical materialism, from a perspective of concretization.
As a leading figure of the "New Dialectics movement," the British scholar Christopher John Arthur (C.J. Arthur) is committed to advancing a contemporary reading of the critique of capital inherent in Marx's Capital. From the perspective of systematic dialectics [2] as opposed to historical dialectics, he has conducted a new analysis of Marx’s thoughts on abstract labor, the exploitation of surplus value, and value determinism. To a certain extent, he demonstrates the theoretical achievements made by contemporary foreign scholars in interpreting Capital from the perspective of the value form, which provides certain insights for us to deepen our understanding of the abstraction of capital. At the same time, however, Arthur relies too heavily on understanding the form of value through the dimension of exchange value, overemphasizing the value form in the dimension of conceptual self-deduction while neglecting the objective content of value and the socio-historical basis of value relations. Consequently, there are many limitations in his interpretation of Marx’s historical materialist theory.
I. The Ahistoricity of Systematic Dialectics and Its Limitations
Arthur’s "New Dialectics" is systematic dialectics—a very unique concept whose intellectual origins are related to Hegel’s Science of Logic. Arthur maintains that what Hegel displays in the Logic is a systematic dialectic opposed to the historical dialectic displayed in his philosophy of history: "In Hegel there are two different dialectic theories. The first is a historical dialectic... Hegel thinks there is a logic of development underlying world history. But in such works as the Logic and the Philosophy of Right there is a second dialectical theory, which may be called systematic dialectics... it is concerned with the problem of the presentation of the categories used to conceptualize an existing concrete whole. The order of the presentation of these categories does not necessarily coincide with the order in which they appear historically." Clearly, this New Dialectics is not an objective dialectic reflecting the development process of objective things, but a conceptual dialectic reflecting the movement of concepts within an expository system. Looking at the textual basis, it is clearly related to what Marx said in the Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: "It would be inexpedient and wrong to take the economic categories in the order in which they were historically decisive. Their order of sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development." Arthur intends to prove that the dialectic Marx employed in Capital is not the historical dialectic we usually speak of, but the systematic dialectic he emphasizes here.
Arthur’s practice of pitting history against system in his interpretation of Marx’s dialectic inevitably pays a heavy price. Although Marx’s historical dialectic targets the historical process in a historiographical sense in terms of its object of study, the horizon upon which this dialectic unfolds is not history in the sense of historiography, but the history of the movement of internal contradictions in a philosophical dimension. That is to say, Marx’s materialist dialectic unfolds along the dimension of the movement of internal contradictions between the productive forces and the relations of production, rather than along the empirical clues of factual history. Arthur first conducts a simplified misreading of Marx’s historical dialectic from a historiographical dimension, then emphasizes that this historical dialectic is inconsistent with the textual structure of Capital, and proceeds to propose that the methodology in Capital must be interpreted from the perspective of systematic dialectics. However, the system of conceptual movement in Marx’s Capital is not a reflection of a process of self-movement of these concepts themselves; rather, it uses the developmental order of concepts to reflect the historical specificity of the capitalist mode of production, under the premise of considering the capitalist mode of production within the historical development of the mode of production based on private property. This is precisely why he used the methodology of rising from the abstract to the concrete to elaborate the logical relationships between these categories. Therefore, when Arthur talks about systematic dialectics under the premise of severing the link between system and history, his so-called system can only be an abstract system of concepts without a background of historical process. In essence, this approach damages both historical dialectics and true systematic dialectics.
In the "New Dialectics" advocated by Arthur, the so-called "newness" actually consists in shifting from Hegel’s historical dialectic of the negation of the negation to the formal dialectic of the concept itself, represented by Hegel’s Logic. Disliking the historical-genetic [3] approach brought about by Hegel’s philosophy of history, he turned toward a formal-dialectical study of Capital. Arthur’s practice actually represents a trend in contemporary Western academia: seizing upon the issue of the value form to make grand arguments. Behind the form of value is the abstraction of exchange value—the so-called philosophical interpretation of the logic of capital. The theoretical background of this interpretation is that the division of disciplines in contemporary Western academia is too fine; in the interpretation of the logic of capital, economics is defined as merely studying the trend charts of capital valorization, while philosophy is defined as not needing to study the development of capital itself, but only the cultural effects brought about by the expansion of the logic of capital. In concrete terms, these cultural effects manifest as ideological enslavement and the abstraction of social relations. Consequently, many scholars believe that the intervention of philosophers in the critique of the logic of capital should seemingly focus on interpreting the abstraction of social relations.
In reality, in interpreting Marx’s theory of the critique of capital, if one severs the logic of economics from the logic of philosophy, it is impossible to understand Marx’s historical materialist methodology in any way. The price of this severance is that the understanding of the thread of productive forces remains forever in the dimension of economics, while the understanding of the relations of production remains forever at the level of an empirical social structure. This kind of social relation is not the social relation that truly exists in real life, because truly existing social relations coexist with the development of productive forces within the economic formation. Therefore, if Arthur’s line of interpretation continues to advance, it will face a major problem: what is the driving force of this line? Although on the surface it appears that Marx also discusses the "method of presentation" in Capital—especially when discussing the "concrete totality" where Marx says this refers to the concrete in thought, grasped in thought—his "concrete" cannot be said to be constructed by thought. Rather, it is the reflection in thought of the complex content already possessed by the objective world. Marx’s presentation does not deduce the logic of development between concepts from his own head; if it were so, it would be Hegelianism, severing the correlation between conceptual deduction and the development of real life. Capital summarizes the content of the total process of capitalist production in real capitalist society, not content deduced from Marx’s head.
Arthur is correct in seeing Hegel’s methodological influence on Marx, as well as the difference between Marx’s understanding of concepts like capital and that of the classical bourgeois economist David Ricardo. However, he interprets Marx’s transcendence of Ricardo as a total break from Ricardian economics, thereby moving Marx’s dialectic entirely toward Hegelian logic—this practice is incorrect. As an economist, Ricardo focused on the analysis of the magnitude of value; thus, his labor theory of value was positivist. Marx’s transcendence of Ricardo consisted in adding the analysis of the form of value onto the basis of the analysis of the magnitude of value, truly achieving the unity of content and form on the question of value—rather than being concerned only with the analysis of the form of value under the premise of abandoning the analysis of the magnitude of value. Arthur crudely severs Marx’s dialectical thought on the question of value and interprets Capital from the singular perspective of the form of value; this is the most important reason for the problems that arise in his interpretation of this issue.
Therefore, when Arthur says, "Personally, I believe that the capitalist system does to some extent contain logical relations. This is because I especially emphasize the mode of exchange—abstracting from the heterogeneity of commodities—and regard commodities as instances of universality, i.e., value. This mode of exchange is identical to the way the power of conceptual abstraction operates; it produces the same structure as logical forms, namely the value form," I do not find it surprising at all, because he in fact identifies the use-value of commodities as being subordinated to the form of value. Yet we know that neither the Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858 [4] nor the first volume of Capital can provide textual support for this view. Regarding the former, many foreign scholars who approach from the perspective of the form of value cite the relevant discourse on exchange value in the second chapter, the "Chapter on Money," which appears at the beginning of the manuscript: "The universal exchange of activities and products, which has become a vital condition for each individual—their mutual interconnection—here appears as something alien to them, autonomous, as a thing. In exchange value, the social connection between persons is transformed into a social relation between things; personal capacity into objective capacity." Furthermore, in this "Chapter on Money," Marx mentions several times that there should have been a "Chapter on Exchange Value" before this chapter: "The circumstances under which the exchange value of a commodity, and thus its price, rises or falls above or below its average value... should be developed in a section on exchange value... these circumstances exist prior to the process in which price is actually realized as money, and are thus at first completely independent of it." But we must see that in the chapter Marx added at the end of this manuscript, he did not use the title "Exchange Value," but the title "Value." Moreover, at the very beginning of this chapter, Marx clearly states: "The first category in which bourgeois wealth presents itself is that of the commodity. The commodity itself appears as a unity of two aspects... Use-value as soon as it is modified by the modern relations of production, or as it itself intervenes to modify them, falls within the sphere of political economy." I believe this is not a pure accident, but a theoretical necessity of development.
Although Marx focused on the interpretation of exchange value or money relations in the early part of this manuscript, as his research deepened—especially as he entered...
When he arrived at the "Chapter on Capital," he soon discovered that pure abstraction exists only within the simple determinacy of exchange-value or money, whereas value relations in real life are mediated by the most profound contradictions. "All the wisdom of [bourgeois apologists] consists in over-emphasizing the simplest economic relations, which, if taken by themselves, are pure abstractions; but which in reality are mediated by the deepest contradictions, and only represent one side, in which the expression of these contradictions is disappeared." Marx even explicitly proposed that use-value must be taken into account when studying the problem of value: "Must value be understood as the unity of use-value and exchange-value? ... At any rate, when studying value, this must be investigated in detail, and one cannot simply abstract it away like Ricardo, nor, like the vulgar Say, solemnly take the word 'utility' as a premise. In the exposition of various chapters, it will first and necessarily be shown to what extent use-value lies outside of political economy and its formal determinacy as a material premise, and to what extent it enters into political economy." Therefore, when Marx emphasized the dual properties of the commodity in his supplementary final chapter—the "Chapter on Value"—rather than focusing solely on its exchange-value dimension, it embodied the results of his serious reflection and reflected the continuous deepening of his theoretical research. This is precisely why, in the later Volume I of Capital, Marx also employed this approach of beginning his theoretical exposition with the dual properties of the commodity. It is a great pity that contemporary Western leftist scholars such as Christopher J. Arthur [5] have failed to see this.
Regarding the latter—the text of Volume I of Capital—it also does not support the interpretative approach of prioritizing exchange-value alone. As we know, the first chapter of Volume I of Capital consists of four sections: the first two deal with the content of value (i.e., use-value and value) and the corresponding dual character of labor; the third section deals with the form of value; and the fourth section deals with the fetishism of commodities and its secret. In interpreting this text, Arthur and other Western leftist scholars focus only on the third section (the content of the form of value) while ignoring the existence of the first two sections; this is clearly an attempt to sever the connection between content and form in Marx's theory of value. In the first German edition of Volume I of Capital, the content of the third section was placed at the end of the book as an appendix under the title "The Form of Value," and was only moved into the main text of the first chapter in the second German edition. In traditional interpretations of Capital, whether in the field of political economy or Marxist philosophy, this section was not accorded much importance. In a certain sense, the importance of this section was "constructed" by scholars within the so-called "New Dialectics" movement in Western academia. On the basis of severing the dialectical relationship between the content and form of Marx’s concept of value, they deliberately downplayed the fetishistic character of commodities discussed in the fourth section, equating it with the abstraction of the value-form they emphasize. In reality, Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism both reveals the abstraction of exchange-value and highlights the external manifestations of this abstraction at the level of concrete phenomena. Therefore, severing the content of section three from section four undoubtedly severely damages the integrity and scientificity of Marx’s theory of value.
II. The Self-Deduction of Concepts and Its Idealist Character
Arthur’s emphasis on systematic dialectics [6] inevitably causes him to face significant problems in understanding the deduction of concepts within such a dialectic. For Marx, the scientific methodology of "ascending from the abstract to the concrete" employed in Capital was not a simple imitation of Hegel’s idealist dialectics of the concept. Rather, it was a process of taking the commodity relation—the most fundamental relation in private-property-based society—as the starting point and gradually ascending to a profound study of the concrete object of capitalist commodity relations, all under the premise of understanding the capitalist mode of production as a stage in the developmental process of private property. Therefore, the starting concept of Marx’s Capital must be the commodity; it cannot be any other element of the capital system. This is because none of those other elements possesses, as the concept of commodity does, both the characteristics suitable for all private-property societies and the function of embodying the uniqueness of capitalist commodity relations. In Capital, Marx analyzes the developmental process from commodity, money, and capital to surplus value, the rising organic composition of capital, the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and capitalist crises. In fact, he begins from the perspective of the entire developmental process of private property, moving deeper into the essential level of capital relations, and then proceeds from this scientific essence to explain the various manifestations of capital at the level of empirical phenomena.
Arthur is unable to understand this. Thus, he believes that Marx’s choice of the commodity as the starting concept in Capital was merely a choice of necessity, because in his view, all elements—including the commodity—are linked to the totality of capital relations and cannot be used in isolation. Yet, the expository system of Capital had to take some element as its starting concept; this, for Arthur, is the reason Marx designated the commodity as the starting point. "If the meaning of each element is determined by its position in the whole, and the exposition of the whole must begin with some isolated (and thus to some extent falsified) relation, then this original element can only be described in a provisional way; as the systematic exposition proceeds to more complex and concrete relations, the original definition of the concept is correspondingly and normatively transformed into higher determinacies." Arthur’s understanding of the commodity starting point in Capital as a "falsified" and "provisional" mode of exposition shows that he fundamentally misunderstands the true meaning of the methodology of "ascending from the abstract to the concrete" as applied by Marx in his interpretation of capital. He interprets the "abstract" in Marx’s methodology as something empirically abstracted from a structural whole. For instance, he understands the commodity—Marx’s starting point in Capital—as an empirical element abstracted from the total relations of capital. To Arthur, the reason Marx chose the commodity instead of capital or money is simply that the latter two are not "simple" enough: "Let us now reconstruct Marx's sequence of thought. He is faced with capital, but he cannot begin with capital, because even if the concept of capital is stripped down to its pure essence, it still possesses the complexity of self-valorization; its immediate manifestation is the increment in the reflux of money. So, he abstracts money from this complex relation. But what is money? Clearly, money is essentially an incomplete idea; it has no meaning outside its various relations with commodities (such as mediating commodity circulation). It is not a suitably simple starting point." Following this line of thought, Arthur eventually suggests that even the concept of the commodity is unsuitable as a starting point, because "commodity" in a general sense is a vague concept that fails to reflect the historical determinacy of capitalist commodities—namely, exchange-value. Therefore, in his view, the most appropriate starting concept should be exchange-value.
Arthur is entirely unaware that when he identifies the concept of exchange-value as the starting point of Capital based on the dimension of simplicity, this "exchange-value" is actually only an element at the empirical level. Starting from such an element, it is logically difficult to deduce an analysis of capital as a complex element unless one employs a mystical mode of inference. In fact, Arthur uses a mystical logic to explain the process of conceptual deduction in Capital. For him, "contradiction" in Marx’s interpretive context is not a theoretical reflection of contradictions in objective reality, but rather a manifestation of the incompleteness of the concepts themselves. For example: value should exist within the commodity, yet it must be embodied in money as the mediator of exchange; the essence of money should be embodied in money itself, yet self-valorizing money can only be embodied in capital. Arthur explains this lack of exact correspondence presented in the concepts of commodity and money as the "contradictions" in Marx’s conceptual system. "The method of movement in systematic dialectics should be established on the following basis: noting whether a provisionally identified character (here, value as the universality of the commodity) can be objectively established at the stage of development under consideration (here, exchange). It is well demonstrated as follows: the (value) determinacy of these relations produces a contradiction. This in turn leads to the internal necessity of transcending the contradiction and thus producing a more complex set of relations—into which a fuller realization of value can be subsumed." For Arthur, Marx advances the interpretive logic to the next element simply by questioning the theoretical status of the preceding one: "Insofar as this abstract element has no meaning outside the structure to which it belongs, the exposition can proceed rigorously by questioning the status of this element. The same dialectic applies to the intermediate stages of the derived parts. The day the reconstruction of the totality ends is precisely when the truth of the totality appears." In this way, the deduction of concepts in Marx’s Capital truly becomes a Hegelian dialectic of the concept.
Hegel could rely on the self-developmental logic of his "Absolute Spirit" to deduce his conceptual system without its rationality being questioned, because his philosophy was, from the start, an idealist one. But if Marx were to do this, would people not question the rationality of such a theoretical system? Specifically, the following questions would certainly arise: On what basis does Marx question the theoretical status of concepts like the commodity and money? That is, on what basis does Marx suspect these concepts are insufficiently determined? Why must these concepts necessarily develop into the concept of capital? If this line of questioning is pursued, the conclusion reached is terrifying: Marx could only have deliberately designed the conceptual development from commodity and money to capital in order to "prove" the self-valorization of capital. If so, would this not fall into the "trap" set for Marx’s philosophy by certain foreign theorists? For they always claim that Marx's methodological approach is a mystical, teleological one. Consequently, the theory of historical materialism would be interpreted merely as an ideological doctrine based on Marx’s subjective judgment, rather than possessing scientificity. Furthermore, because Arthur’s interpretation does not involve real-world contradictions, he is unable to explain Marx’s analysis of the contradictions within capital relations. The only conclusion he can draw from this dialectic of the concept is that the logic of capital's self-valorization is an objective existence, rather than a crisis-prone existence based on the movement of internal contradictions.
III. Another Concept of Abstract Labor
Regarding the...
For Arthur, who approaches Marx’s critique of capital through the lens of "systematic dialectics," merely remaining at the level of commodity exchange relations is clearly insufficient. This is because the title of the first volume of Marx’s Capital is "The Production Process of Capital," not the "Exchange Process of Commodities or Capital." Consequently, within his explanatory framework, Arthur must push beyond the abstraction of commodity exchange relations to the level of the capital production process to explore the theoretical fulcrum of his critique. In Arthur’s work, this is first manifested in his definition of two types of abstract labor. His first type refers to abstract labor as the value-substance of commodity relations. This understanding, derived from the labor theory of value in classical political economy, offers little novelty, except that he applies this concept to the interpretation of the formal determinacy of social relations. While Smith and Ricardo used this concept from the perspective of the magnitude of value to construct an essential commensurability between different commodities, Arthur uses it to highlight how the specific determinacy of various commodities is flattened by abstract labor. For Arthur, whose interpretation centers on exchange value, this dimension of abstract labor is not difficult to understand. In fact, what he intends to emphasize is the second concept of abstract labor: the formal determinacy of wage labor within the relations of capital production. He finds textual support for this in the section "Exchange of Capital and Labor" within the "Chapter on Capital" of Marx’s 1857–1858 Economic Manuscripts (Grundrisse). In this section, Marx indeed discusses the problem of the abstraction of wage labor: "As regards labor as opposed to capital, one last point should be noted: labor as use value as opposed to money appearing as capital is not this or that labor, but labor itself, abstract labor; absolutely indifferent to its own particular determinacy, but capable of any determinacy. Of course, for the particular substance that constitutes a specific capital, there must correspond labor as specific labor; but since capital itself is indifferent to every particularity of its substance, and is both the totality of all these particularities and the abstraction of all these particularities, labor as opposed to capital also subjectively contains the same totality and abstraction in itself." Arthur uses this passage to prove that, in Marx’s eyes, abstract labor is manifested not only in commodity exchange relations but also in the interpretation of the characteristics of wage labor within the capital relation. For him, labor in the capitalist production process increasingly loses its unique craftsmanship and becomes an indifferent, purely abstract activity. To him, this point not only demonstrates that Marx’s critique of abstraction has reached deep into the realm of the capital production process but also marks Marx’s discovery of a more fundamental theoretical terrain for the critique of capital, because "in any case, the abstraction of labor in the capital relation is more fundamental than the abstraction of labor in exchange."
Arthur’s problem lies in his simplistic reading of Marx’s text, which leads to an overly reductive grasp of Marx’s thought on the relationship between labor and capital. The passage he cites is actually only the content of the first of two dimensions regarding the exchange relation between labor and capital. At the very beginning of the section "Exchange of Capital and Labor," Marx explicitly points out that the exchange relation between labor and capital, in addition to containing the content of general commodity exchange mediated by money, also possesses the connotation of a specific process in which capital appropriates labor. The content of this second dimension is explicitly included within the labor-capital relation, but it cannot be defined by general exchange relations: "The first act in the exchange between capital and labor is an exchange, which belongs entirely to the ordinary category of circulation; the second act is a process qualitatively different from exchange, and it is only by a misuse of words that it could be called any kind of exchange at all. This process is directly opposed to exchange; it is essentially another category." The passage Arthur cites refers to the first aspect of the exchange between labor and capital—that is, the exchange as an ordinary exchange relation. Yet immediately following that passage, Marx explicitly states: "Now let us look at the second aspect of the process. If it were the exchange process in general, the exchange between capital or the capitalist and the worker would now be finished. What now follows is the relation of capital to labor as the use value of capital. Labor is not only the use value that stands opposed to capital, but it is the use value of capital itself." At this level, what Marx sees is clearly not the abstraction of the worker’s labor, but its specific use-value nature. In fact, as the capitalist industrial process advances, the worker’s labor indeed increasingly loses its specific artisanal skill (such as the professional expertise found in feudal guilds) and is replaced by standardized labor modes. However, calling it "abstract labor" does not mean that on an empirical level it is truly just an abstract, purely formal labor; rather, it is because if one views this labor-capital relation from the level of general exchange relations, then at this point labor appears to capital only as the abstract labor embodied in exchange value. But once we enter the second dimension of the labor-capital relation—the dimension of capital’s appropriation of the specific use value of labor—then the worker’s labor not only lacks abstraction, but even on the level of concreteness, it is a specific kind of concreteness: the concrete use-value nature capable of creating surplus value. Therefore, Arthur’s inference from the aforementioned citation—that Marx saw the importance of abstract labor at the level of the capitalist labor process—is inaccurate. What he sees is actually still labor and capital at the level of general commodity exchange relations, rather than wage labor within the actual capitalist labor process.
Confusing the two dimensions of the labor-capital relation—that is, conflating the general exchange relation between labor and capital with the relation of capital’s appropriation and exploitation of living labor in the production process—is not a problem unique to Arthur, nor is it exclusive to the academic school of the contemporary Euro-American "New Dialectics" movement [7]; rather, it is a major problem prevalent throughout Western academia. In fact, even in his own time, Marx criticized bourgeois classical economists for the errors they committed on this issue. When discussing the defects of classical political economy, Marx explicitly pointed out: "They directly conflate the exchange of a certain quantity of objectified labor for labor capacity in the circulation process with the absorption of living labor by objectified labor existing in the form of means of production, which occurs in the production process. They conflate the exchange process between variable capital and labor capacity with the process of the absorption of living labor by constant capital. This defect also arises from their 'capitalist' limitations, because for the capitalist himself, who pays for labor only after it has been realized, the exchange of a smaller amount of objectified labor for a larger amount of living labor appears as a unique, unmediated process." Western scholars like Arthur have not actually surpassed classical political economy in their economic cognition; they first adopt the methods and viewpoints of classical political economy and then, through the mediation of a critique of the abstraction of social relations, construct so-called capital critique theories. If the capitalist production process is not understood on the level of the historical materialist [8] outlook, and if this production process is interpreted only from an economic perspective, then its theoretical importance will be greatly diminished. In such an interpretive horizon, the production process is merely a technological process rather than a socio-historical process. Even if one approaches it from a perspective of social relations such as the division of labor, at most the division of labor can only be understood as a social division of labor between a shoemaker making boots and a baker making bread; it will never see that the essence of the capitalist division of labor is the division between the capitalist who owns the means of production and the wage laborer who is left with nothing but the commodity of labor power—and this is precisely determined by capitalist relations of production. "This is a viewpoint fundamentally different from those bourgeois economists who are fettered by capitalist concepts themselves; although bourgeois economists see how production is carried out within the capital relation, they do not see how this relation itself is produced, nor do they see how the material conditions for the dissolution of this relation are produced simultaneously within it, and thus they cannot see how the historical basis of this relation as a necessary form for economic development and the production of social wealth is eliminated." This is exactly where the problem lies for Arthur and others. Fundamentally, it is because they lack the theoretical horizon of the historical materialist outlook in their interpretation of the capital labor process. This leads them, like bourgeois classical economists, to downplay the study of the production process itself and instead focus specifically on the level of the labor-capital relation as a general commodity exchange relation.
Arthur’s simplistic interpretation of Marx’s concept of abstract labor inevitably affects his understanding of Marx’s following view: that the production process of capital is both a general labor process and a process of the valorization of capital. This academic perspective, which possesses a profound dialectical foundation, can only be understood from the perspective of materialist historical dialectics; for Arthur, who focuses on "systematic dialectics," this is indeed too difficult. Arthur first poses it as a conundrum: "A real puzzle arises here: whose productive power is it, anyway? Are not the productive power attributed to labor and the productive power attributed to capital the same productive power? Indeed they are! But this cannot be attributed to the ambiguity of the theorist; this situation stems from the contradictory interpenetration of the poles of the capital relation, in which 'labor is productive labor only when it produces its own opposite'." Second, he defines these two understandings of productive forces as both essentially correct viewpoints, because there were originally two different interpretive frameworks in Marx’s reading, and capitalism itself is inherently contradictory. "In short, the second view is an inversion of the first. In fact, both views are correct, even though they contradict each other. This actually means that capitalism is essentially contradictory. This does not contain a formal logical contradiction, because the concept of 'inversion' is carefully positioned so that the validity of each 'essence'—whether independent or in interaction—can be separately confirmed." Arthur’s questioning of the concept of exploitation in the Marxist tradition also stems from this; in his view, if the subject of production is no longer labor but has been transformed into capital, then the traditional concept of exploitation based on the dimension of surplus value loses its raison d'être and should therefore be replaced by the concept of "inversion." This is what he calls a "new interpretation" of the concept of exploitation.
Arthur’s aforementioned views on the relationship between the general labor process and the valorization process may look very "dialectical" on the surface, but in reality, they are merely a dualistic interpretive approach and therefore suffer from significant problems. For Marx, the labor process under capitalist conditions is...
This process "appears as" a process of valorization or the self-movement of capital, rather than being, as Arthur claims, essentially both the labor process of the worker and the self-valorization process of capital simultaneously. Marx points out that the labor process appearing as a valorization process is precisely the result and product of the capitalist production process, rather than some non-historical empirical reality. Although this labor process appears as capital’s valorization process, this does not thereby change its own general characteristics. That is to say, it does not actually turn the capitalist labor process into a process where capital can mysteriously accomplish self-valorization. "If we consider the production process from two different points of view—(1) as a labor process, (2) as a valorization process—this means that the production process is only a single, indivisible labor process. Labor is not performed twice: once to create a purposeful product, to create a use-value, and transform means of production into products; and a second time to create value and surplus value, to valorize value. ... The reason the labor process appears as a valorization process is that: the concrete labor added during the labor process is socially necessary labor (according to its intensity), which is equal to a certain average amount of social labor; and because: this amount of labor, in addition to the amount of labor contained in wages, represents an additional amount of labor." Marx clearly saw that the valorization process is actually only the form of appearance of the labor process under the conditions of capitalist relations of production, rather than some given, empirical objective process. Capital cannot valorize itself based solely on its attributes as a thing; it only exhibits the characteristic of self-valorization under the combined action of its physical attributes and social relation attributes. But even so, the actual labor remains the labor of the wage-worker, the expenditure of the worker's life-force and the realization of their productive capacity. This ensures that within this labor process—or the valorization process as its form of appearance—there always exists an opposition and contradiction between capital as the objective condition of labor and the worker as the subjective condition of labor. Moreover, this contradiction does not fall from the sky; it is determined by capitalist relations of production and caused by the capitalist production process.
In Marx's view, understanding the valorization process based on capital’s appropriation of the labor process as another kind of labor process identical to the general labor process is, in reality, a manifestation of the concept of capitalist fetishism, as well as an illusion arising from the capitalist production process.
"This illusion of the economists—confusing capital's appropriation of the labor process with the labor process itself, thereby transforming the material elements of the simple labor process into capital because capital within it is also transformed into the material elements of the labor process—arises from the very nature of the capitalist production process... this illusion is a very convenient method for proving the eternity of the capitalist mode of production or for proving that capital is an immortal natural element of human production itself." In this sense, Arthur is also trapped in fetishistic concepts and unable to extricate himself. Although he emphasizes that he speaks of capital’s autonomous movement from the perspective of social validity, because he truly believes that the value-form possesses autonomy—rather than understanding this valorization process as the form of appearance of the wage-worker’s labor process under capitalist conditions—he is not only unable to correctly understand the essential connotation of capital’s self-valorization process, but also inevitably fails, as Marx did, to find the theoretical basis for the workers' revolutionary resistance movement from the perspective of the internal contradictions of the capitalist production process.
In Arthur’s view, the workers' resistance to the logic of capital stems from the dualistic opposition or contradictory relationship between the labor process and the valorization process. He points out that no matter how powerful capital's self-valorization process is, it cannot completely suppress the subjectivity that workers possess within the labor process.
"Previous subjects of production become manipulable objects, but it is a question of manipulating their activities, not of depriving them of all subjectivity. They work for capital, or more precisely they work as capital, but in a sense they still act. ... Therefore, even if Marx's point about the productive forces of labor being actually absorbed into capital is correct, we still need to believe that capital remains dependent on labor. Moreover, the suppressed subjectivity of the workers remains a threat to capital's purposes." Arthur thereby proposes a new theory of value determination. He believes that the reason capital can create value or cause value to valorize does not lie in capital's exploitation of workers, but in the capitalists' victory in the class struggle against the workers. And the wage labor of the workers is not so much a productive labor as it is an anti-productive labor, because its main mission is to reject capital’s attempt to force them to work.
Arthur does not answer where this worker subjectivity he speaks of comes from, nor does he answer whether the anti-productive labor of workers based on this subjectivity resonates with the deep connotations of Marx's scientific socialism [9]. In fact, he merely uses a theory of class struggle from a political dimension—one that has not elucidated its historical necessity—to interpret the worker's combativeness in Marxist doctrine. Although this seems on the surface to echo the surface characteristics of the Left-wing political movements that have become increasingly popular in the Euro-American world since the 1990s—namely, the emphasis on immediate politicality rather than historical necessity—it is clear that this view not only cannot be mentioned in the same breath as the theory of class struggle within the horizon of Marx's historical materialism in terms of theoretical depth, but also fails in practical effect to reach the point of constituting a shock to the Western capitalist system. Arthur and others want to confront the newly emerged modes of abstract domination under the conditions of the financial crisis in contemporary capitalism and attempt to find a path of resistance to break through this abstract domination. However, their problem lies in abandoning the social-historical interpretive approach of the Marxist scholarly tradition and the methodological perspective of historical materialism. This leads them to leap directly toward the abstraction manifested by exchange value on the surface of capital relations and launch an external critique based on abstract humanism [10]. They do not answer what causes this abstraction of exchange value, and thus naturally cannot answer whether a realistic path for the critique of capitalism can be explored from the perspective of the contradictions of actual relations of production. In this sense, I believe that the "New Dialectics" movement of Arthur and others is essentially nothing more than applying the humanist critique approach to the interpretation of Marx's economic categories and capitalist economic relations. They have not touched upon the issue of applying the scientific methodology of Marx’s critique of political economy to the interpretation of the latest contemporary forms of capital.
(Notes omitted) (Author's Unit: Center for Thai-Marxist Social Theory and Department of Philosophy, Nanjing University) Web Editor: Zhang Jian Source: Teaching and Research of Marxist Theory, Issue 3, 2021