Sun Liang: The "Value-Critique Group" in the Context of Contemporary German Research on *Das Kapital
In the research history of Capital, the "Value Critique Group" (or Crisis Group, Krisis-Gruppe) appears much lonelier compared to the highly scrutinized "New Reading of Marx" (neue Marx-Lektüre) school within the German-speaking world. There are likely three basic reasons for this: (1) The difficulty of categorizing its existence. For instance, Anselm Jappe believes the Value Critique Group cannot be "classed" among the usual forms of critical thought because "it is neither Marxist, nor anarchist, parliamentarian, situationist, nor even ecologist, radical democrat, or Frankfurt School." However, the influence of these critical traditions is deeply rooted in the ideological elaborations of the group’s many scholars; it is simply present in a "hybrid" [1] sense. (2) Among the core members of the Value Critique Group, figures like Robert Kurz, Ernst Lohoff, Roswitha Scholz, and Norbert Trenkle are non-academics. For example, Kurz, born into a German working-class family in 1942, made a living as a delivery driver, which led them to generate more social influence than academic prestige. (3) The limitations of language itself. The literature of the Value Critique Group was written in German and long lacked English translations. Given that English serves as the "universal currency" of the global academic market, it is only natural that the group's theoretical contributions were ignored. However, as soon as the English translation of The Substance of Capital [2] was published, it sparked immense interest in the English-speaking world of Capital studies. Correspondingly, for the Chinese academic community, the group appears even more "unfamiliar." Whether the origins of the Value Critique Group are fixed in West Germany during the 1970s and 80s remains a matter of debate, but 1986 was indeed a landmark year. In that year, the journal Krisis: Contributions to the Critique of Commodity Society was founded in Nuremberg as their primary platform. Following a split in 2004, the journal Exit! appeared, along with the journal Streifzüge [3], first published in Vienna in the spring of 1996. Of course, today the Value Critique Group has overflowed the "classical group of authors" from the 1986 period, bringing together dozens of scholars, including Open Marxists such as John Holloway. From a theoretical genealogy perspective, their primary influences stem from Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness and the theories of "real abstraction" and the social synthesis of value from Frankfurt School figures like Adorno and Alfred Sohn-Rethel. From the perspective of the Value Critique Group’s crisis theory, they have continued to build on the influence of Rosa Luxemburg, Henryk Grossman, and Paul Mattick. Naturally, after the 1970s, any Western scholar seriously discussing value must pay close attention to Isaak Rubin’s Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, and the Value Critique Group is no exception. "Generally speaking, value critique is not about discussing the theories of others, but about analyzing the past and present of capitalism." However, the analysis here will primarily revolve around the constellation of authors associated with the journals Krisis and Exit!, focusing on famous works like the Black Book of Capitalism [4] to discuss their core concept of "Value Critique" (Wertkritik). To this end, we will attempt to answer: What is the central agenda of the Value Critique Group? And what are the central principles of their main discussions?
I. The Traditional Concept of Collapse and "Value Immanence": A Double Critique
More accurately, the "Value Critique Group" is a critique of "value immanence" [5]. What it seeks to dismantle is the treatment of value as an immutable, eternal law; therefore, it must re-establish "the elements of self-destruction in value relations, in both a logical and historical sense, as contained in Marx’s work." Why establish this principle? We must begin with the previous views on the "Theory of Breakdown." In 1913, Luxemburg published The Accumulation of Capital, which discussed capital accumulation—especially in its second section regarding the "three rounds of polemics"—by arguing that capitalism essentially involves two aspects of production: on one hand, material production, and on the other, the production of surplus value. The latter further includes (a) the production of surplus value and (b) the realization of surplus value. For Luxemburg, the realization of surplus value determines the accumulation of capital; thus, the "realization" dimension determines the fate of capitalism. Consequently, she criticized previous understandings of crisis theory, stating they "excluded the deep and fundamental conflict between the productive capacity and the consumptive capacity of capitalist society—a conflict that arises precisely from capital accumulation and explodes in periodic crises." This was, of course, an inversion of the views of bourgeois economists, who emphasized that crises determine accumulation. How, then, is the problem of capital accumulation to be solved? In Luxemburg’s view, "surplus value must shed its form as surplus product before it can take on a form for the purpose of accumulation; through one method or another, it must pass through the money stage." Thus, the problem of capitalist crisis was ultimately highlighted as "the problem of the realization of surplus value for the purpose of capitalization," only to be—unforutnately—"pushed backstage and rarely discussed by Marx until the end." Regarding this, Kurz believes the Luxemburgian crisis theory suffers from two explanatory defects: I. It remains within the pure sphere of circulation, abstracting away the stage of surplus value production. "This is also what makes her the originator of today’s illusions regarding political intervention in the capitalist reproduction process (strengthening mass purchasing power)," a view promoted by "new harmonists" such as Rudolf Hilferding and Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky; II. The perspective remains fixed on the simple reproduction of total capital as a foundation, failing to recognize the expansion of capital within the relations of production as a historical dimension. That is to say, the former is actually only an "appearance" or a "result"—it is precisely "the basic tendency of value being stagnated within direct production." Although Luxemburg saw the limits of capitalist development, being confined to the view of "under-circulation" caused her to miss a fundamental issue: the realization of surplus value still requires a large amount of living labor to be absorbed into the production of surplus value. Undoubtedly, the emphasis on the sphere of circulation is erroneous because it suggests that the realization of surplus value still depends on compensatory consumption—a misconception shared by many contemporary left-wing scholars who pursue this compensatory mechanism through consumption or the spectacle.
However, for Bernstein and Kautsky, their direct conclusion was no longer to seek the logic of capitalism’s collapse from objective conditions themselves, but rather to rely on the revolutionary action of the proletariat. Thus, in a historical situation where the structure of capital's dominance was increasingly escalating, this took on a somewhat subjective flavor. Nevertheless, this was not a theoretical conception that lacked further development. For instance, in "political readings" of Capital or left-wing discourses advocating subjective resistance, their views continue to be filled in with new names. One needs only to open contemporary works of radical Western leftism to see this. Naturally, Lenin did not provide a complete understanding of crisis, nor was he likely to develop a sufficient theory of crisis. This was because, during that period, views on the demise of capitalism were no longer rooted in economic crisis, but in political conflict—in the sense of the power of capital. Therefore, in Lenin’s focus, "one never encounters absolute material limits; rather than taking this dimension as the objective basis or seeing the collapse of historical accumulation, he focused on the political conflicts of imperialist capital among nations and the resulting potential conscious political action of the working class, which would be able to halt the process of capitalist development worldwide." Starting from non-economic factors inevitably leads to an unsatisfactory explanation of the problem of capital over-accumulation. Politics and economics ultimately became two different directions that unfolded alongside the capitalist crisis. Unfortunately, facing the economic crisis of the late 1920s, Henryk Grossman published The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System in 1929, explicitly asserting: "Luxemburg completely misunderstood the importance of Marx’s methodological procedures. Who can ensure that accumulation proceeds proportionally in the two sectors? No such regulator exists under capitalism." Consequently, he retreated to the sphere of the production of surplus value, repositioning Marx’s crisis theory as the over-accumulation of capital: "Although Marx did not provide a concise description of the law of breakdown, he did specify all the elements required for such a description. On the basis of the law of value, the law of breakdown can be developed as the natural result of the process of capitalist accumulation." Like Luxemburg, he utilized Marx’s distinction in Capital regarding the dual nature of the capitalist production process—the unity of the labor process for producing use-values and the valorization process for surplus value or profit. Valorization is the fundamental driving force of capitalist production. For the entrepreneur, the production of use-value is merely a means to an end, a "necessary evil." Thus, income for expanding production or accumulation is merely a function of the magnitude of profit valorization. If profit expands, output expands; if valorization fails, output decreases. However, a contradiction exists here: "From a purely technical standpoint, as a labor process producing use-values, nothing can hinder the development of productive forces. This development encounters obstacles in the valorization process—namely, the factors of production acting as capital which must be valorized. If profit disappears, the production process is interrupted. The maximum possible valorization forms the concrete goal of the capitalist production process." To put it more plainly, a paradox emerges: the improvement of productive forces leads to an increase in use-value output, which necessarily has a serious impact on the valorization of value. Furthermore, alongside technological development, the organic composition of capital increases, which means a decrease in variable capital. Given a certain level of production technology and total capital, the rate of profit subsequently falls. "From the perspective of use-value, productive forces develop without absolute limit. This accumulation of use-value (which is simultaneously the accumulation of value) leads to a fall in the rate of profit, which in turn means the valorization of advanced capital is no longer possible at a given rate—this means crisis and the devaluation of existing capital." Therefore, the theory of breakdown and crisis should be determined according to the falling trend of the rate of profit in the process of capital accumulation. Although crisis can often help restore the purpose of capital's valorization, the ultimate trend toward collapse is inevitable and irreversible. This is why he noted that "Bauer’s harmonious conclusion regarding the possibility of infinite development represents a mediocre delusion." The root of this error lies in the necessity of viewing the collapse problem over a longer period, which Otto Bauer failed to do. He limited his calculations to four production cycles. That is to say, "if Bauer had completed the development of his system over a sufficiently long period, he would have quickly discovered that the system must inevitably collapse." Because "with the absolute growth of capital accumulation, the valorization of this expanding capital becomes increasingly difficult. Once these 'counter-tendencies' are eliminated or simply cease to function, the tendency toward collapse prevails as the absolute form of the final crisis." Subsequently, Paul Mattick reinforced this failure of "counter-tendencies," leading capitalism ultimately toward its "death crisis."
Grossman’s emphasis on the falling rate of profit—a necessary trend in the process of capitalist production—attempted to restore the dimension of the critique of political economy at a certain level. One could argue it represented the conception of crisis most proximate to Das Kapital in that era. However, Kurz’s evaluation of him matches his treatment of Luxemburg: he believes their theories are both founded upon a "value-intrinsicism" [6] that "failed to return to the contradiction between the development of productive forces and the value-objectivity of production." Consequently, they "could not identify the contradictions within the concept of productive labor itself. Thus, the breakdown theory held by Grossman relied excessively on a highly dubious mathematical example, which ontologized value. It (like earlier crisis debates) did not take the concept of value and productive labor as the starting point for reasoning, but rather the 'reproduction schemas' in Volume II of Das Kapital. Therefore, from the very beginning, it remained stuck in an understanding of the surface mediation of the market."
This critique is not without merit. For Grossman, the breakdown theory indeed possessed a "mathematical foundation." Thus, whether for underconsumption or the falling rate of profit, the calculation of capitalist crisis is, for Kurz, "understood only within the scope of quantitative value relations and their analysis; disproportion is understood only within the quantitative logic of value, rather than being examined as a qualitative disproportion in the relationship between matter and value. In other words, what becomes obsolete in a crisis is not the value-relation itself, but the blind regulatory mechanism of the market; what breaks down is not the value-relation, but the relative equilibrium of exchange value." This is because the breakdown of the value-relation remains far off; the thinkers of that era were destined to discuss crisis only within value-relations, as value was already internally embedded in the premises of capitalist analysis.
Precisely because of this, the capitalist breakdown theory in its subsequent development was clearly viewed as "chicken ribs" [7] by scholars who understood capitalism empirically; value-intrinsicism maintained a death grip on the modern mind. For Marx, this is exactly why people have lost any imagination of what a de-valued society might look like. Consequently, value—as a "second nature" and a form of "abstract domination" that humans created but which now rules them—has ironically been used fluently in research, even to the point of discussing future civilizational forms within the relational dimension of value. This is the case because the "Value Critique Group" (Wertkritik) does not only target past theories of breakdown and crisis; they also caution people on a practical level. Facing the arguments of certain scholars regarding the twists and turns encountered in the development of socialism, Kurz claimed: "The decline of the Eastern Bloc countries is far from a signal of the final victory of Western capitalism; rather, it is a stage in the gradual collapse of a world economy based on commodities, value, abstract labor, and money." When, then, can one stand at the point of the breakdown of value-relations to think? It must be the arrival of new "socializing technologies" in which applied natural sciences and the science of labor merge. Thus, "today, capitalism can be historically interpreted as the same as the crude, clumsy, immature, and in many ways filthy precursor form of a truly, directly social industry; only today has it grown out of the spores of capitalism, and it has therefore irreversibly exploded."
II. Prying Capitalism Apart via the Ontology of Labor: A Perspective
Naturally, the next question is: How does the "Value Critique Group" implement its critique of value-intrinsicism? This can be summarized as a logical progression: "Critique of Labor" → "Critique of Fetishism" → "Critique of Capitalism." Specifically, the work of the Value Critique Group involves radicalizing crisis theory because clichés suggesting that capitalism can eternally renew itself are prevalent not only among capitalist elites but also among Western Leftist scholars. However, the Group argues clearly that modernization is merely the form of implementation and further development of this capitalist system; whether the mechanism is private capitalism or state capitalism is irrelevant. As long as the fetishism of "value-intrinsicism" persists, a critique of capitalism will struggle to grasp the substance. For a commodity-producing society, its basic categories—labor, value, commodities, and money—have always been fetishized as "natural" facts of life and "objective" necessities.
Take "labor," for example. Some scholars attempt to transpose the anthropological concept of labor from the early Marx directly into the perspective of Das Kapital, using labor—defined as a constant found in all social epochs—as the foundation for critique: "Labor, then, as a creator of use-values, as useful labor, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal nature-imposed necessity, without which there can be no material exchanges between man and Nature, and therefore no life." [8] But according to Trenkle, this common approach—using anthropological labor to critique alienated labor—is difficult to sustain. On one hand, looking at the texts, the early Marx already spoke of the abolition of labor as a prerequisite for liberation in his critique of Friedrich List. On the other hand, an important question must be considered: "Is labor an anthropological constant?" Here, Trenkle’s attempt to move beyond anthropological thinking reflects a degree of profundity; whether this thinking can reach the level of Marx’s later analysis of labor in Das Kapital and its manuscripts is a question that requires caution.
The Value Critique Group’s position is to negate the basic judgment that "labor is an anthropological constant." In their view, if a socialist revolutionary movement cannot deeply question commodity value as the dominant principle of production and social life, and remains within a social life dominated by capitalist value, it will still follow the operating logic of the world market. Value critique must focus on the historical specificity of value production as something existing only within capitalist commodity society. The labor pointed to by value production does not actually possess the so-called distinction between anthropological labor and abstract labor; the operating principles of value production can only be grounded in abstract labor. Labor here is an oppressive activity under the domination of value, labor under the rule of ownership; its abolition is the fundamental condition for abolishing the rule of value. This is the true entry point for value critique.
Clearly, they direct their critique toward the cancellation of labor itself, rather than merely critiquing abstract labor like scholars of "value-form" or abstract domination. For instance, Michael Heinrich, when discussing communist society, explicitly points out that it should be a liberation from social relations that stand opposed to individuals as anonymous compulsions. Why does the Value Critique Group shift completely from the critique of abstract labor to the critique of labor itself? At first glance, this somewhat contradicts certain long-held habits in our interpretation of Das Kapital.
Among Western Leftist scholars and general Marxist interpreters, there is a preference for using a construction of non-alienated labor versus alienated labor as a critical framework. For Marx, labor can indeed be divided into abstract labor and concrete labor; the secret of how value dominates and becomes the governing principle of modern society occurs in the process where concrete labor is abstracted. This abstraction is different from a general conceptual abstraction (such as "flower" or "fruit"); it is "a historically established, actually existing social power, a violent abstraction that places people under its thumb." Analyzing labor by no means implies research into labor in an anthropological sense; the importance lies in focusing on labor under a specific social form.
In Trenkle’s view, "by excluding all non-labor elements from the sphere of labor, the historical establishment of labor is accompanied by the formation of further independent spheres of society to which all those irrelevant elements are exiled, spheres which are themselves exclusive: leisure, privacy, culture, politics, religion, and so on." Thus, we see that leisure, love, and the pursuit of the self can only exist outside of labor. Within labor, it is destined to be an "independent" sphere, withdrawn from the rest of social life; labor within this capitalist social form has no purpose other than valorization. To emphasize: this is a critique of labor itself. Humans enter this independent, separated sphere of labor because, in the process of social history, they have been detached from the most basic means of production and survival; they can now only survive by temporarily selling themselves. Therefore, "for them, labor mainly means the fundamental extraction of life force, and thus in this respect is an extremely real, actually existing abstract concept." Consequently, if the labor that serves as the premise for creating value is not abolished, it is naturally impossible to abolish abstract labor and, by extension, value.
Generally, labor has become a self-evident fact, and people believe that labor liberates humanity from nature. Frithjof Bergmann once conducted an etymological investigation of the word "work" (arbeiten): in Ancient Greek, ponein comes from ponos (toil, burden); the French and Spanish words for labor, travail/trabajo, come from the Vulgar Latin tripaliare, which essentially means "to torture"; in Russian, it is rabota, derived from rab, meaning "slave," while the Germanic arba simply meant "servant." Thus, the contemporary notion of labor as an ideal is not a fact at all. However, those within the "value-intrinsicist" vision of labor cannot see the history of violence behind the idea that "labor creates freedom." Trenkle believes that people have not yet reached the level of disintegrating or questioning the fetishism of labor—otherwise, why would German trade unions still believe that Engels’ The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man is one of the few pamphlets still worth using in their member training courses?
Of course, his point is not to deny any activity aimed at creating the means of survival. The question is simply: Why, in bourgeois society, are all these different activities subsumed under a single abstract concept, namely, labor? Here, abstraction can only be understood as a social environment: "The only decisive factor is whether an activity is realized in the abstract social environment of commodity production and whether some wage is provided for it. This is why a specific activity depends on the environment, sometimes being considered labor and sometimes not." In the sense of "marketability," meaningful activity (Tätigkeit) becomes labor (Arbeit). In this social environment, the laborer and the capitalist alike are indifferent to the content of their own labor; labor is simply labor. Both the worker and the bourgeois are marionettes wearing value-masks; which "type" one is does not matter. Thus, the discourse on the freedom of choice in labor is actually just an "incentive discourse" within the boundaries of the capital-labor relationship, or rather, within the limits of "value-intrinsicism." Consequently, people have little awareness of this; as a "real abstraction," it has been internalized. People find it difficult to imagine other forms of wealth creation; or rather, all life activities have been "labor-ized"—even our academic exchanges and emotional dialogues. Real abstraction, as Lukács said, is embedded in our consciousness as truly as the crushing of a wheel. Based on this judgment, Trenkle believes that the true obstacle to breaking through this real abstraction comes from us as ordinary individuals under the capitalist form. One only needs to see two questions clearly: Where does the surplus of production go, and where did the time go? "In commodity production, abstract/..."
Under the tyranny of this trinity of alienated labor, capital accumulation as an end in itself, and the level of productive forces achieved thus far, the inevitable result will be that more people are excluded from the production process, thereby cutting off their basic means of subsistence. Within such a framework, it is destined to be impossible for "justice" to truly become justice, or for the distribution of surplus to be redirected toward human needs. Today, labor has been further intensified; under biopolitics, the various forms of new social reproduction have reshaped the "prison problem." That is to say, similar to the original "problem of the prison, its role, and its possible disappearance, [it] can only be posed in economic and political terms, from the perspective of a political economy of illegalist acts." [9] However, a pervasive condition has emerged: resistance to the maintenance of this system has ultimately transformed into people standing up for the sake of labor, rather than rising up against labor itself. To this end, "if we cannot manage to destroy this fatal mindset and make humanity realize that the potential for wealth creation achieved in the past must be liberated from the fetishistic forms of capital and labor, the crisis of the labor society will ultimately destroy the social and natural foundations of human existence." This is precisely what we observe among certain Western Left scholars who consistently interpret concrete reality abstractly as a process of abstraction within commodity circulation in the market—meaning that the critique of the commodity production system itself is excluded. An example is Alfred Sohn-Rethel, who interprets "real abstraction" solely as "exchange abstraction." Consequently, the problem of capitalist negativity is entirely compressed into the sphere of circulation and the related sphere of distribution. This allows for an understanding of capitalist "real abstraction" only from this superficial perspective; starting the analysis from productive labor, by contrast, would be like pulling the firewood from under the cauldron [10].
How, then, does the "Value-Critique Group" see the possibility of the critique of labor ontology moving toward reality? From the perspective of practical experience, "we have reached the historical limit of the market economy's misery, and its economic totalitarianism has begun to be unbearable." However, with technological innovation, "this unexpected crisis looks very different from what was previously imagined, because the previous frame of reference itself has disintegrated." It is noteworthy that Robert Kurz's judgment on the arrival of the crisis itself is grounded in a new era: the "Third Industrial Revolution." This differs from the first and second industrial revolutions because the latter two still sought the self-valorization of capital within the expansive logic of modernity. The third revolution, unfolding as a "vision of automation" (Visionen der Automatisierung), initiates the process of modernity's disintegration. When Henry Ford caused a sensation during the Second Industrial Revolution, one thing was self-evident: despite the rationalization of "labor science" by assembly lines and Taylorists, it was absolutely impossible for human labor power to truly disappear from the production process on a large scale. Indeed, the mass unemployment of the Great Depression was related to new industrial technologies. However, the idea that the capitalist crisis was a fundamental "crisis of the laboring society," and thus a crisis of "abstract labor" itself, clearly exceeded the imagination of contemporaries.
So, within the "vision of automation" of the third revolution, can labor truly exit the logic of valorization? We know that in modern technological production, the primary way to extract relative surplus value for capitalist accumulation is through the "scientification" of the production process. The production of relative surplus value concerns "the relationship between the capitalist's appropriation of new value and the reproduction cost of each worker's labor power, but it does not refer to the absolute number of employed workers, and thus not to the absolute mass of surplus value. As the absolute creation of value decreases, surplus value itself must necessarily decrease." The rate of relative surplus value continuously increases, yet the total mass of surplus value decreases. Therefore, capital reproduction must be further expanded, which in turn is conditional upon productive living labor. When there is an imbalance between the labor absorbed and the labor shed (unemployment), capitalist production inevitably tends toward stagnation. "With the development of productive forces, capital increases the degree of exploitation, but in doing so, it destroys the basis and object of exploitation—namely, the production of value itself. Because the production of relative surplus value is inseparable from the gradual integration of modern science and the material production process, it includes the tendency to eliminate living, direct, productive labor, which is the sole source of all social value." For instance, in today's intelligent society, it appears on the surface that living labor in factories is being gradually eliminated. As productive forces develop rapidly with the aid of technology, the view that the absolute number of workers is decreasing is naturally justified. However, "capitalist production is by no means an absolute form for the development of productive forces and the creation of wealth." Thus, "the limit of capitalist production is the surplus time of the worker. The absolute surplus time won by society is irrelevant to capitalist production. The development of productive forces is only important to capitalist production insofar as it increases the surplus labor time of the working class, not when it reduces the general labor time of material production; therefore, capitalist production moves in contradictions."
III. Classless Struggle and the Concept of Liberation in the Era of Fictitious Capital
Today, then, according to the Value-Critique school's view that technology precipitates the collapse of labor ontology, how should we understand struggle? Or rather, is there still a need for class struggle? Norbert Trenkle argues that "the category of class antagonism does not provide a foundation for any concept regarding the extreme growth of social inequality, nor can it simply repeat the antagonisms and conflicts between social interest groups caused by such inequality." The reason for opposing this form of class-antagonistic struggle is that the thinking behind this struggle is built upon the conflict between labor (the proletarian) and capital (the bourgeois)—that is, the "antagonism between the representatives of capital, who direct and organize the production process for the purpose of price stability, and the wage laborers, whose labor 'creates' the surplus value necessary for this process." The narrative of traditional Marxism is precisely constructed around this contradiction to shape the mode of class struggle.
As we clarified earlier in the critique of "value-immanentism," the Value-Critique school maintains that the contradiction between labor and capital is merely an internal conflict under the mask of value. Both parties are like those inside a besieged city based on the premise of modern commodity production, struggling over a series of issues: how to produce, how to distribute, how to exchange, and how to consume. The key issue, however, is that we must think outside the besieged city, examining the possibility of a non-value human life once the mask of value is removed. Therefore, neither Trenkle nor other members of the Value-Critique group are quite like those scholars of the German Value-Form Analysis (Neue Marx-Lektüre), because for the latter, "value" is the "entrance" for gazing at the external world. Conversely, the Value-Critique school believes that as long as one does not leap out of the perspective of value-immanentism, social conflict is destined to be eternalized. In the discourse of some Western Left scholars today, is the attempt to infinitely delay the revolution not an effort to add bricks and mortar to this picture of eternity? Capital does not care about the revolution itself; it only cares whether it can continuously maintain the goal of valorization. Or rather, if revolution can bring about valorization, capital would be more proactive than the proletarian revolution.
In Trenkle’s view, because both labor and capital are constrained by value, they often "no longer take the irreconcilability of the interests of the seller of labor power and the seller of capital as a premise" regarding the valorization and preservation of value in production. "On the contrary: the emphasis is always placed on their compatibility, whether in the name of productivity, regional competitiveness, or the purchasing power of domestic demand." That is to say, in this sense, people do not say that capital is bad, but only speak of "evil" in the sense that capital "excessively pursues high profits." The "evil" of the essence of capital is often obscured; thus, the whole of society still leaves sufficient room in its thinking for the existence of capital. It is generally believed that "it is natural and self-evident that profit must be created, capital must be valorized, productivity must be increased, and growth must be ensured at all costs," because all of this is the source of our happiness. People totally fail to recognize that it is only under the capitalist mode of production that productive forces appear as something driven by capital, and that capital is not the only form for driving productive forces. In this way, "the struggle between labor and capital develops into something increasingly resembling their effective identity on the subjective level, which can be attributed to the systemic establishment of a completely generalized commodity society—one that successfully imposes the functional logic of capital on society and makes society view this logic as an irreversible law of nature."
After the Third Industrial Revolution, the development of capital gradually reached a stage where it took itself as its own frame of reference. For example, although the capitalization and future expectations of capital accumulation value are inherent in the logic and form of commodity production, they are realized through the sale of a commodity: namely, property titles proving a claim to a specific sum of money and its increase. The sellers of these property titles are not workers promising to provide labor ten or twenty years hence, but the operators of capital itself (primarily banks and other financial institutions) selling these certified claims on future value to one another, thereby generating and accumulating fictitious capital. Fictitious capital has become the actual driver of capital accumulation. For this reason, the form of capitalist crisis has changed accordingly.
In the sense described above, capital attempts to discard labor as the basic mode of accumulation. Although commodity production via labor still exists, it is no longer the primary mode of capital accumulation. Therefore, liberation from the exploitation of modern labor and the sellers of labor power implies that class discourse becomes invalid in the era of fictitious capital. To understand Trenkle’s view, one must realize he consistently maintains that the connotation of traditional class discourse is that capitalism is still established on the basis of exploiting wage labor and the appropriation of surplus value—thus, another class, the proletariat, must necessarily be produced. In response, Trenkle distinguishes between "wage workers who produce surplus value" and "workers dependent on wage labor." The number of people these two groups point to is inconsistent; however, now the boundary between the two types of workers has become blurred following the breakdown of the divide between production and life. Correspondingly, the concept of class has transformed from a force with a specific original referent into a broad group that has lost its specific connotation. Regarding the concept of "workers dependent on wage labor," it merely reflects the existence and lifestyle of capitalist society, a society regulated solely through labor and commodity production. "For the vast majority of people, commodity production manifests as the compulsion to sell labor power in order to survive. While this universal coerciveness is a fundamental feature of capitalist society, it is by no means suitable for the definition of a working class, because all people—regardless of their social identity or where their living conditions rank in the social hierarchy—are in principle subject to this coercion."
Why emphasize the coerciveness of labor, or labor as the synthesizing principle (Integrationsprinzip) of bourgeois society? Because from the perspective of the "Value-Critique school," this is precisely what the original class discourse cannot understand or analyze. Class discourse is either too narrow or has become somewhat distant from life, being limited only to the production of a minority. Labor coercion, by contrast, is diffused into every corner of life. "Traditional Marxism always regarded the regulation of society by labor as a transhistorical constant of all societies, failing to recognize that this is a historically specific essential feature of the formation of capitalism." In other words, the reason class discourse is unacceptable to the "Value-Critique school" is that more and more phenomena of alienation in daily life have transcended class rule; they can only be discussed in the sense that labor power is hired.
Since valorization under the accumulation of fictitious capital is different from the valorization of capital realized through the use of labor in commodity production, labor in commodity production is no longer a constant; valorization driven by fictitious capital is now the most fundamental driver. So, where is our way out?
The answer of the Value-Critique School is to oppose labor. This is because "labor-power expenditure" as pure human activity has already been elevated to an abstract principle capable of dominating the entirety of social relations, demanding that people submit unconditionally to this principle. Time is no longer the time of life; one might say that life no longer exists in the real world. At this level, the Value-Critique School thoroughly negates the following line of leftist critical thought: conceiving a principle of opposition to capital based on labor in an anthropological sense [11]. For them, the implicit prerequisite of such a line remains a discussion of the conflict and opposition between capital and labor from within the interior of capitalism. Labor itself is actually fetishistic—as they state in the Manifesto Against Labor (Manifest gegen die Arbeit), after centuries of domestication, modern people cannot even imagine a life without labor. Labor dominates the economic sphere not only in a narrow sense but, as a totality, permeates the whole of social existence, saturates everyday life, and gets under everyone’s skin.
Of course, for the Value-Critique School, the focus is more on discussing the establishment of a new society completely detached from labor from the perspective of "negation." They believe the only prospect for social emancipation is the abolition of this form of mediation, and that the first step toward this goal can and must be taken today. Faced with crisis management and the frantic ravages of capital, the established achievements of society must be protected, but the production of material wealth must break free from its dependence on capital accumulation. The goal must be to establish a broad new sector of social self-organization, utilizing all available potential productive forces (meaning technology) to build decentralized global network structures. Most importantly, new forms of social mediation must be developed, allowing freely associated individuals to consciously decide their own affairs. Thus, the end of labor is the end of politics.
IV. Conclusion
As a critical theory of contemporary capitalism, the Value-Critique School recognizes the flaws in the empiricist perspective of understanding contemporary capitalism through value. It repeatedly reminds people that when facing capitalism, theoretical reflection must break free from "value-immanentism" [12], which possesses its own rationality. We know that Marx’s intention in the critique of fetishism in Capital was precisely to warn people that value is a historical phenomenon; once it is treated as a natural phenomenon, one inevitably falls into the ideology of political economy. Viewed this way, the Value-Critique School's assertion that value and labor in capitalist society are by no means constant parameters can be seen as an approximation of the methodology of historical materialism, which grasps and determines their qualitative nature by returning to historical specificity.
Unfortunately, however, the Value-Critique School failed to push further—that is, they did not continue to deeply analyze the fundamental reason why value, as a relation detached from human beings, in turn rules society. Or, to put it another way: why must labor manifest as value? Consequently, they failed to see that "value-immanentism" is merely the conscious result of the internal contradictions of capitalist relations of production based on the division of labor and private property. Therefore, the Value-Critique School’s critique of "labor ontology" [13] and "class discourse," based on their critique of "value-immanentism," happens to discard the very link of internal contradiction between labor and capital caused by capitalist relations of production. Although they recognize that value originates from labor and that capital is the congealing of dead labor, this is insufficient.
Generally speaking, the problem of the rule of labor arises from two different levels: on the one hand, labor is embedded in capitalist relations of production based on private property; on the other hand, labor is embedded in value relations. The Value-Critique School only perceives the latter aspect without touching upon the former aspect of the mode of production. Regarding the former, one must not only see the empirical fact of "labor ontology"—that labor is valorized—but also analyze the social reasons and historical roots of why it manifests as this fact. To answer these questions, one must, like Marx, advance further to the twofold character of labor [14], thereby analyzing the social form that causes the abstraction of labor. By starting from the internal self-contradiction of this specific social form, one can advance and reshape labor, thus opening up new possibilities for historical unfolding.
It is a pity, however, that the Value-Critique School’s demand to abolish labor in order to dissolve existing political modes is merely an aesthetic illusion. Although they perceive the roots of labor behind value—which is more sophisticated than other leftist critical theories that only see the dominant role of value—they commit the same error as these Western leftists: they can only seek the opposition between capital and labor on the surface of the specific social form of capitalism. From the perspective of historical materialism, this opposition can only be understood and resolved when placed within the process of socio-historical movement.