Lu Kejian: Systematic Dialectics and the New Reading of Marx: An Inquiry from a Comparative Perspective
The relationship between Marx and Hegel is a major topic in international Marxology. Initially, foreign scholars examined this relationship solely from the perspective of Marx’s philosophy or political thought (including the historical materialist conception of history). In recent decades, however, international academia has tended to emphasize Marx’s appropriation of Hegel’s Science of Logic from the perspective of Marxian political economy. This trend is represented in the German-speaking world by "New Marx Reading" (neue Marx-Lektüre) and in the English-speaking world by "Systematic Dialectics." In recent years, with the rise of a "value-form" research craze in China, certain viewpoints of Systematic Dialectics and the New Marx Reading have been embraced by domestic researchers. However, the history of the academic formation of these two schools and their internal connections remain outside the horizon of Chinese scholars.
This article examines the theoretical connection between Systematic Dialectics and the New Marx Reading from a comparative perspective. Part I clarifies the academic formation history of Systematic Dialectics and the New Marx Reading; Part II discusses their family resemblances in the philosophical interpretation of Capital; Part III explains the academic logic behind the emergence of these family resemblances from the perspective of their problematic; Part IV focuses on the internal theoretical dilemmas and conflicts of Systematic Dialectics and the New Marx Reading; and Part V attempts to provide a new research paradigm for contemporary Marxists’ philosophical study of Capital.
I. The Past and Present of Systematic Dialectics and the New Marx Reading
In recent years, as philosophical research on Capital has advanced, Chinese academia has come into contact with Systematic Dialectics from the English-speaking world and the New Marx Reading from the German-speaking world, developing a strong interest in both. As early as 2009, I included the representative work of Systematic Dialectics, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital (2004), in the publication plan for the "International Marxology Translation Series." In 2010, in the second part of my article "The German Classical Philosophical Sources of Marx’s Thought," I introduced in detail the main views of the New Dialectics school represented by Christopher Arthur. According to the materials I currently possess, this was the first introduction and critique of Systematic Dialectics in Chinese academia. On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Marx's birth, two representative works of the New Dialectics school—Arthur’s The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital and Robert Albritton’s Dialectics and Deconstruction in Political Economy—were published by Beijing Normal University Publishing Group as part of the "International Marxology Translation Series." Meanwhile, relevant works by Moishe Postone and others were translated and introduced into the Chinese-speaking world, and the achievements of the German New Marx Reading also gradually became known to domestic scholars.
Objectively speaking, Chinese academia has gained a preliminary understanding of the basic viewpoints of Systematic Dialectics and the New Marx Reading, but the academic origins, similarities, and differences between these two schools remain unclear. Some researchers even mistakenly categorize the German New Marx Reading school under Systematic Dialectics or incorrectly view Systematic Dialectics as an English-world variant of the New Marx Reading. Therefore, it is necessary to trace the history of the birth of these two schools from their sources.
(1) Systematic Dialectics Originates from the New Dialectic
The predecessor of Systematic Dialectics is the "New Dialectic." In 1993, while reviewing the English monograph Dialectics and Social Theory: The Logic of Capital by the Iranian economist Ali Shamsavari, Arthur used the term "the new dialectic" for the first time. Since then, this concept has been widely accepted. In Arthur’s view, the "newness" of the New Dialectic is relative to the dialectics of "Diamat" [1] (i.e., dialectical materialism), which Arthur regards as the Old Dialectic. According to Arthur, any dialectical proposal that opposes the Soviet dialectical materialism system (particularly those emphasizing the relationship between Marx and Hegel) can be counted as part of the New Dialectic; this naturally includes his own representative work, Dialectics of Labour: Marx and Hegel’s Creative Reconstruction, published in 1986.
The "New Dialectic" (or its variants) was later called Systematic Dialectics by its supporters. Arthur divides Systematic Dialectics into two branches. One branch includes Patrick Murray, Moishe Postone, Tomohiko Sekine, Robert Albritton, and Arthur himself. Some researchers also include Fred Moseley and Shamsavari in this group. These scholars compare Hegel and Marx at the ontological level. (1) Arthur emphasizes Marx's direct borrowing of Hegel’s Logic for his dialectic, believing that Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Logic share a homologous nature. The British scholar Alex Callinicos explicitly opposes Arthur’s approach, rejecting the New Dialectic’s substitution of Hegel’s logical categories for Marx’s own discourse. However, the "borrowing" Arthur emphasizes is limited to the first two parts of Volume I of Capital (up to "The General Formula for Capital") and does not apply to the sections on production. The shift from circulation to production is no longer a borrowing of the Logic, but is analogous to Hegel’s transition from the Logic to the Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Spirit. (2) Sekine’s line of reasoning is similar to Arthur’s, but his reconstruction is not limited to the first two parts of Volume I but covers all three volumes of Capital. Sekine belongs to the Japanese Uno School [2]; he accepted Kozo Uno’s view that Marx’s Capital is a "theory of economic principles." (3) Murray argues that the first chapter of Capital employs the "Doctrine of Essence" from Hegel’s Logic; he also examines the value-form starting from the so-called "Rubin dilemma" [3] (i.e., the contradiction between the private and social nature of individual labor). (4) Postone emphasizes that the object of Marx’s critique in Capital is a social structure of abstract domination rather than a social structure of class domination. (5) Moseley, meanwhile, has criticized Michael Heinrich, the most recent representative figure of the New Marx Reading movement. From this, it is evident that, as Arthur says, while "Marx saw Hegel’s logic merely as a help to his mode of presentation," for this branch of New Dialectic scholars, "Hegel’s logical framework is an introduction in an ontological sense."
Arthur’s so-called "other branch" of Systematic Dialectics includes Tony Smith, Geert Reuten, Michael Williams, and others. In Arthur’s view, distinguishing them from the former group, these scholars see Marx’s Capital as a "development" of Hegelian logic rather than an "application." They believe that the comparison between Hegel and Marx should be conducted at the level of substantive social theory, particularly by comparing Marx’s Capital with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Smith argues that Capital reconstructs the capitalist mode of production in thought through the systematic progression of socio-economic categories, beginning with the simplest abstract categories and dialectically developing toward a concrete totality. Unlike Arthur, who views "Capital" as the "totality," Smith’s "totality" is the "capitalist mode of production." Furthermore, unlike Arthur and Sekine, Smith not only avoids a one-to-one mapping of logical categories to corresponding capital categories but even opposes the mechanical application practiced by Arthur and others. In Smith’s view, capital as a material system cannot truly become a logical structure; only communism possesses the logical structure found in Hegel’s "Doctrine of the Concept."
(2) The New Marx Reading Originates from the Capital-Logic School
In 1997, Hans-Georg Backhaus explicitly proposed the term "New Marx Reading" (neue Marx-Lektüre). Prior to this, the New Marx Reading was known as the "Capital-Logic School" (Kapitallogik); thus, Backhaus’s interpretation is also called the "Hegelian version of capital-logic." In the late 1960s, with the publication of works by Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt, the Capital-Logic School began to take shape. In 1973, the Hannover Group in Germany published a work titled Logik des Kapitals. This title was a pun, as it could be understood as both the "Logic of Capital" (the object) and the "Logic of Capital" (the book), though the Hannover Group’s interpretation at the time leaned toward the latter. The Danish scholar Hans-Jørgen Schanz, however, moved directly from the "Logic of Capital" to "Capital-Logic." In 1973, in his work The Extensional-Logical Status of the Reconstruction of the Critique of Political Economy, Schanz explicitly used the term "Capital-Logic" (Kapitallogik). The East German scholar Peter Ruben encountered Schanz’s concept of "Capital-Logic" while serving as a visiting professor at Aarhus University in Denmark and introduced it into the German-speaking world in 1977.
Backhaus, Reichelt, and others emphasize a "logical" rather than a "historical" or "logical-historical" interpretation of Marx’s methodology. According to Backhaus, Marx's theory of the capitalist mode of production is a logical model of a certain stage of the human reproduction process; therefore, capital-logic is the objective dialectic of capitalist society (the mode of production), and Marx’s Capital is the dialectical presentation of capital-logic (the objective dialectic). However, Backhaus believes it is necessary to thoroughly reconstruct this objective dialectic because, in his view, Capital did not consistently adhere to the dialectical method but was mixed with research methods of an empiricist character.
It can be seen that the "Capital-Logic School" was the original name for the New Marx Reading. However, members of the New Marx Reading later intentionally avoided the name "Capital-Logic," styling themselves as the "New Reading School," perhaps because Ruben viewed the concept pejoratively when he first introduced it. Therefore, if we understand this "New Reading" in the sense of the Capital-Logic School, it is not difficult to understand why Backhaus, Reichelt, and others paid exceptional attention to the method in Capital. Regarding academic origins, the New Marx Reading grew out of the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory, and its early figures were direct students of Frankfurt School representatives such as Theodor Adorno. Consequently, the critique of Marx’s method naturally became an integral part of the New Marx Reading, and this critique began with the discussion of capital-logic (objective dialectics). In fact, when Arthur first encountered the New Marx Reading (specifically when reviewing two of Backhaus’s papers), he emphasized Backhaus’s criticality. Nevertheless, the New Marx Reading is not the mainstream of the Frankfurt School; it has its own new characteristics, namely an emphasis on "value-form analysis" and "exchange abstraction." From the perspective of academic inheritance and development, although the New Marx Reading deviated from the Frankfurt School’s social critical theory, it developed Adorno’s ideas regarding "exchange abstraction." Adorno’s idea of "exchange abstraction" differs from Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s concept of the same name. Because Adorno emphasized the "universal-particular" non-identity dialectic, he was more accustomed to using the term "conceptualization" rather than "exchange abstraction." In fact, the reason the early representatives of the New Marx Reading movement enthusiastically re-read the "Commodity" chapter of Marx’s Capital (particularly based on the first German edition) according to the logic of "exchange abstraction" was that they sought from the beginning to push their own research forward along the lines of Adorno’s critical interpretation.
II. From Materialist Dialectics to Capital Dialectics: The Family Resemblances Between Systematic Dialectics and the New Marx Reading
Although the Capital Logic school (Neue Marx-Lektüre) emerged earlier than the Systematic Dialectics school, the development of Systematic Dialectics in the English-speaking world was independent of NML. Therefore, Systematic Dialectics should not be viewed as an Anglophone variant of the German Neue Marx-Lektüre movement—specifically its value-form research or value-critique—nor should NML be subsumed under Systematic Dialectics. Why, then, do so many conflate the two? The reason lies in their similar themes (value-form analysis), similar approaches (focusing on "exchange abstraction"), and shared intellectual heritage (Isaak Rubin and Alfred Sohn-Rethel). Consequently, these two schools exhibit a certain "family resemblance" in their theory, primarily manifested in the following five aspects.
(1) Approaching the philosophical study of Capital through the reconstruction of the category of "totality" Early researchers of Capital were mostly economists, while Lenin was a pioneer in studying Capital from a philosophical perspective, particularly regarding methodology. Subsequently, scholars (or thinkers) such as György Lukács, Galvano Della-Volpe, E.V. Ilyenkov, Jindrich Zeleny, and Louis Althusser all adopted a philosophical approach, though most focused on the methodological problems of Capital. Lukács was an exception, focusing on the problems of reification and fetishism. Systematic Dialectics and NML also focus on reification and fetishism (especially from the perspective of value-form analysis), but remain more concerned with methodology. Scholars in both schools reject the formalism and positivism of mainstream Western economics, emphasizing a grasp of "totality." However, different scholars define "totality" differently. As previously mentioned, for most scholars (such as Arthur and Backhaus), "totality" is "capital"; whereas Smith and Reichelt emphasize that "totality" is "capitalist society (the mode of production)," i.e., a specific historical stage of human production. Thus, the reconstruction of the category of "totality" is a major feature of the philosophical interpretation of Capital shared by Systematic Dialectics and NML.
(2) Replacing "dialectical materialism" and "materialist dialectics" with "the dialectic of capital" Opposing the dialectical materialism expounded in Soviet textbooks is a common orientation of both Western Marxists and Western Marxologists. The Systematic Dialectics and NML schools similarly critique transhistorical materialist dialectics (and the practice of applying materialist dialectics to all fields). Theoretically, they both only recognize a "dialectic of capital" that corresponds to the specific historical stage of the capitalist mode of production. Albritton even argues that Tomohiko Sekine’s reconstruction of the logic of capital (or capital’s inner logic) as a dialectic of capital constitutes a major theoretical breakthrough in the history of Marxist economics. This "dialectic of capital" contains three possibilities: (1) an objective dialectic regarding the self-movement of capitalist economic categories; (2) a subjective dialectic regarding the grasp of the totality of capitalist society (the method of presentation); and (3) an empirical dialectic for researching the movement of capital (the method of inquiry). Both schools advocate for the "dialectic of capital," yet their definitions vary. For example, Arthur views the dialectic of capital as a purely formal dialectic, a concrete application of Hegel’s Logic to the critique of political economy. Reichelt, meanwhile, explicitly critiques the Frankfurt School—especially Jürgen Habermas—for a formal dialectic divorced from the concrete content of capital. He believes the dialectic of capital is an organic unity of content and form, thus emphasizing a dialectic of capital as a "revocable method" (Methode auf Widerruf). In Reichelt's work, bourgeois subjectivity disappears, replaced by objective social structures (i.e., the process of natural history behind individuals). Undoubtedly, Reichelt’s view is very close to Althusser’s: that "history is a process without a subject." For Backhaus, the dialectic of capital as an objective dialectic is the unity of subject and object. It was precisely for this reason that Ilyenkov criticized Backhaus as a "Fichtean."
In short, both schools approach the study of Capital from the perspective of the "dialectic of capital" and are committed to revealing the method Marx employed. They seek to reconstruct Marx's dialectic because they believe the dialectic presented in Capital contains unresolved problems. Figures like Arthur and Kozo Uno sever the relationship between the empirical and the dialectical, accusing Marx of falling into self-contradiction regarding dialectics and attempting to reconstruct a non-contradictory "dialectic of capital." While Backhaus and Reichelt do not accuse Marx of "self-contradiction," they believe he did not present his dialectic clearly, and thus seek to reconstruct a more lucid "dialectic of capital."
(3) Emphasis on value-form analysis Value-form analysis is a shared interest. Investigations into the value-form can be traced back to the research of the Soviet scholar Rubin in the 1920s, and more recently to the work of the German scholar Sohn-Rethel. Intellectually, Rubin and Sohn-Rethel jointly inspired both the New Dialectics and NML schools. The concept of "real abstraction" (Realabstraktion) proposed by Sohn-Rethel in Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology has had a profound influence on Western scholars. He broke with the tradition in Western philosophy of viewing "abstraction" merely as an epistemological category, emphasizing abstraction as a reality. Specific to "value," Marx’s "substance of value" is a real abstraction. Of course, Marx’s substance of value is a product of both exchange abstraction and historical abstraction. However, since Sohn-Rethel focused solely on the sphere of exchange, he only noticed the relationship between the substance of value and exchange abstraction, neglecting the sphere of production and thus failing to see the relationship between the substance of value and historical abstraction. Neither school identified this error in Sohn-Rethel, instead accepting this biased interpretation wholesale. Simultaneously, because the Rubin texts accessible to Western scholars at the time were incomplete, they mistakenly assumed Rubin would also support Sohn-Rethel’s neglect of the production sphere. Consequently, some Systematic Dialectics scholars like Reuten and Williams further employed the concept of "actual abstraction" (or "an abstraction in practice"), a term Arthur and others strongly supported.
Arthur explicitly uses the phrase "dialectic of the value-form" to describe his reconstruction of the method of presentation in Capital. As is well known, Backhaus also speaks of the "dialectic of the value-form" (i.e., the development from the commodity to its doubling into commodity and money), viewing it as the conceptual presentation of the commodity's own inner logic. However, while the terms are the same, the meanings differ. Although both focus on the dialectic of the value-form, the center of gravity in Arthur's Systematic Dialectics lies in the value-form itself, whereas the focus of Backhaus's analysis lies in money (i.e., the monetary theory of value), emphasizing the inseparability of money and value as two sides of the same thing. As a contemporary representative of the NML movement, Michael Heinrich has inherited and developed Backhaus’s claims, emphasizing that "without money, the substance of value and abstract labor cannot be manifested at all." Thus, while both schools emphasize the dialectic of the value-form, their theoretical aims differ.
(4) Critique of Engels's "unity of logic and history" methodology and the "simple commodity production" concept Both Systematic Dialectics and NML refuse to acknowledge that Marx employed a "unity of logic and history" [4] method, thereby severing the identity between historical dialectics and systematic dialectics. Systematic dialectics is a logical method that opposes Engels’s concept of "simple commodity production" [5] and his "unity of logic and history" methodology, emphasizing only Marx's "logical" method. The Systematic Dialectics school believes Engels misunderstood the first three chapters of Volume I of Capital, mistakenly viewing pre-capitalist commodity production (i.e., "simple commodity production") as the historical prerequisite for the capitalist mode of production and the logic of capital. Similarly, Backhaus opposes the "unity of logic and history" methodology; his monetary theory of the commodity is a theoretical product of his opposition to the "simple commodity production interpretation."
It is worth noting that while Alfred Schmidt was a Frankfurt School scholar of the same generation as Backhaus and Reichelt, he opposed the severance of history from logic (or structure), emphasizing in History and Structure that "the method of structural analysis and the method of historical genesis are employed simultaneously by Marx in Capital." Interestingly, it is precisely this anti-historical-dialectical, "logico-genetic" method of NML and Systematic Dialectics that Althusserians criticized as "historicism." Unlike Backhaus and Schmidt, Wolfgang Fritz Haug emphasized that Marx required an acknowledgment of the limits of dialectics and sought a third position between the logical and historical interpretations of capital—viewing Engels's "simple commodity production" as a "genetic reconstruction."
(5) Anti-positivism In Arthur’s view, Marx reconstructed the core categories of the capitalist mode of production and presented them in a systematic form. Of course, Marx's systematic presentation differs from British classical economics because he employed the dialectic of Hegel's Logic. For Arthur, systematic dialectics is not scientific induction, nor is it the hypothetico-deductive method, nor a transcendental argument for the conditions of possibility of given empirical forms. Rather, it is the logical development of a system of categories or forms of existence from the most basic and indeterminate to the most rich and concrete. Thus, Arthur transposed the transitions between categories in Hegel’s Logic into the study of Capital, arguing that a category transitions into another because of a deficiency (or defect) in the current stage—namely, its inability to prove its own necessity or to prevail against contingency. Only when the entire system of categories is complete does the process of narrating (or presenting) the self-sufficient (or self-sustaining) "totality" conclude.
Anti-positivism is a consistent stance of Frankfurt School critical theory. In the 1950s, the publication of the Grundrisse in Germany triggered a surge in Marxian political economy studies in the German-speaking world. Influenced by the academic atmosphere of the time, Adorno also delved into Marxian economics in his later years. His research influenced disciples like Backhaus in at least two ways: (1) a new reflection on exchange abstraction; and (2) a critique of positivist social science methods. Building on the research of Adorno and others, Backhaus incorporated Lukács’s ideas to grasp Marx’s social science methodology from the perspective of the subject-object dialectic, criticizing the Soviet textbook-style analysis of economic base and superstructure.
III. The Problem-Orientations of Systematic Dialectics and the Neue Marx-Lektüre
Although Systematic Dialectics and NML emerged in different historical periods, they share a similar contemporary background and corresponding problem-orientations [6]. The broad background is a reaction against dialectical materialism, which can be said to be a common orientation of Western Marxism. However, the problem-orientations of these two schools do not end there; they exhibit the following three more specific problem-orientations when conducting philosophical research on Capital.
(1) The problem of the measure of labor-value in post-capitalism
Heinrich argues that traditional Marxism focused solely on the connection between value and labor, whereas Backhaus noticed the correlation between value and money in the 1970s, a realization that directly catalyzed the New Reading of Marx movement. However, as the Finnish scholar Paula Rauhala has pointed out, this narrative is problematic because East German economists had already conducted in-depth explorations of the relationship between labor value and money in the 1960s, and Backhaus benefited directly from those contemporary discussions. In fact, the question of the measure of labor value in post-capitalist society can be traced even further back to Lenin and the subsequent debates over market socialism. Before the October Revolution, the version of socialism (i.e., the first stage of communism) envisioned by Lenin in The State and Revolution, based on the theories of the classical authors, was a society that had abolished private property, commodity exchange, and money; the New Economic Policy (NEP) implemented after War Communism was merely a temporary retreat of expediency. As socialism became a reality in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s—and particularly with the formation of the Eastern European socialist bloc after World War II—the problems existing in "real socialism" (including practical economic issues) became a subject that socialist theorists had to confront. The characteristic of the Soviet economic system was a planned economy based on public ownership. Under this system, "commodities" still existed because they remained products of labor intended for exchange, but the "commodity economy" (that is, commodity exchange mediated by the market) no longer existed, as central planning replaced the spontaneous mechanism of the market. Consequently, Soviet-model socialism still possessed commodities and money, but lacked a market (including markets for both means of production and means of consumption). Thus, the question of the measure of commodity value in a post-capitalist society came to the fore. Although Engels did not speak to the problem of commodity value in a socialist society, his claim that Marxian political economy was applicable to pre-capitalist societies—specifically his formulation of "simple commodity production" [7]—was sufficient to inspire socialist theorists. Relatedly, although both Marx and Engels had criticized the "labor vouchers" of Utopian Socialism, this did not prevent "money" in real socialism from functioning as a labor voucher. Therefore, in Soviet-model socialist societies, the State Planning Commission determined the value (i.e., the price) of a commodity by estimating the socially necessary labor time required for its production. This was equivalent to an indirect admission that Marxian political economy (particularly the labor theory of value) was also applicable to post-capitalist society. However, a technical problem arose: how could the State Planning Commission accurately determine the value of a commodity (the socially necessary labor time for its production)? Under market economy conditions, prices are determined through the anarchic market mechanism; was it then possible for a State Planning Commission to simulate the market mechanism to determine commodity prices (i.e., the "correct equilibrium price")? This triggered the "Great Socialist Calculation Debate" [8] of the 1920s–1940s, the famous polemic between scholars represented by Ludwig von Mises and those represented by Oskar Lange regarding "market socialism."
If we set aside the introduction of the market as a resource allocation mechanism, Lange and Maurice Dobb had no fundamental disagreement on the necessity of adhering to a planned economy, and their views aligned relatively closely with the economic practice of real socialism. Both upheld Marx’s labor theory of value and were left-wing economists in the Western world; thus, their debate with Mises had a profound impact on Western left-wing academic circles.
Backhaus, studying Marx’s Capital in West Germany, naturally turned his gaze toward the real socialism of East Germany. He consciously reflected on the practice of the Soviet model in East Germany and scrutinized this practice through the academic posture of "returning to Marx’s texts." In doing so, Engels’s problematic regarding the scope of application of Marxian economics became prominent. Backhaus explicitly opposed Engels’s notion of "simple commodity economy," instead strictly delimiting the "analysis of the value-form" in Capital to the specific historical stage of capitalist society. Reichelt, as a representative of the New Reading of Marx, held the same position.
The Systematic Dialectics school in the English-speaking world also opposes Engels’s thesis on "simple commodity production," a point Arthur elaborated upon in a specialized article. However, Backhaus’s critique of "simple commodity production" and its methodology of the "unity of the logical and the historical" has its own characteristics: namely, an emphasis on the so-called "monetary theory of value." This is what distinguishes Backhaus from other scholars keen on "value-form analysis" (including Rubin), and the reason lies in the influence of the aforementioned historical background (the debates over market socialism) and his specific problematic. Specifically, Backhaus believes that the dialectic of Marx’s "value-form analysis" eventually develops into the category of money. In the stage of "simple commodity production," one could adopt the form of barter or develop to the stage of the universal equivalent characterized by commodity fetishism. However, Backhaus did not stop at the theory of fetishism. He wanted to reconstruct Marx’s dialectic, the core of which lies in emphasizing that the "value-form" in the capitalist stage necessarily takes the form of money and the subsequent form of monetary capital (i.e., M-C-M′). Therefore, Backhaus does not emphasize a general "value-form analysis," but rather a value-form analysis of the monetary theory of value. The latter implies that value and money are two sides of the same coin, inextricably linked—a phenomenon unique to the capitalist stage. This judgment of Backhaus implies an explicit denial of the validity of the labor theory of value (i.e., the dialectic of capital in Capital) in the post-capitalist stage. This view found theoretical resonance in Reichelt and others. The reason Reichelt and his peers criticized transhistorical dialectical materialism was that they recognized the historicity of the labor theory of value.
(2) The Distinction Between Marx’s Labor Theory of Value and the Classical Labor Theory of Value
As early as the 1920s, Rubin reflected on the differences between Marx’s labor theory of value and that of the classical economists. In Rubin’s view, David Ricardo and others researched the substance of value but neglected the value-form, whereas Marx not only studied the substance (abstract human labor) but also placed particular importance on the value-form. Through a close reading of the "Commodities" chapter in Volume I of Capital, Rubin examined Marx’s value-form analysis in detail. It is worth noting that if we carefully study the fourth Russian edition of Rubin’s Essays on Marx's Theory of Value and his replies to critics, we find that his examination of the value-form was not confined to the sphere of exchange but maintained a balance between "production" and "exchange." Unfortunately, because the translations read by Western scholars at the time were incomplete, they mistakenly believed Rubin’s interpretation was valid only within the sphere of exchange. This led them to an extreme: the total negation of the role of production in the value-form. The "Rubin School" in Western academia exaggerated the role of exchange and circulation, erroneously emphasizing that "exchange creates value." When reading Rubin’s texts, both the New Reading of Marx school in the German-speaking world and the Systematic Dialectics school in the English-speaking world paid attention to Rubin’s problematic and further discussed the distinction between Marx’s labor theory of value and that of Ricardo and others. However, they similarly misread Rubin, casting the sphere of production aside and inflating the role of circulation and exchange. To some extent, Sohn-Rethel’s interpretation further misled the Systematic Dialectics and New Reading schools, causing them to exclude production entirely. For instance, Arthur explicitly rejects production, emphasizing that "socially necessary labor" related to the substance of value only appears after the value-form analysis is complete. Regarding the sequence in which the concept of socially necessary labor appears, Arthur and others coincided in moving it to a later stage, though they diverged on the specific node. Arthur places it in the production process, while the "Konstanz-Sydney" group places it within the examination of the production of relative surplus value.
Evidently, influenced by Rubin and Sohn-Rethel, the Systematic Dialectics and New Reading schools conduct value-form analysis solely from the sphere of exchange. However, dissenting voices have emerged within the Systematic Dialectics school. As a representative of the New Dialectics, Moseley has sharply criticized Heinrich, the representative of the German New Reading of Marx, on this very issue.
If some members of the Systematic Dialectics and New Reading schools exaggerated the difference between Marx’s and Ricardo’s labor theories of value, others went to the opposite extreme: emphasizing a "rupture" between the two. For them, the "transformation problem" from value to price is entirely redundant, and Marx’s analysis of the magnitude of value falls outside their horizon. A related issue is that many scholars in these two schools emphasize only Marx’s qualitative analysis of value (i.e., value-form analysis), leading them to become enamored with dialectics (even to the point of copy-pasting Hegelian dialectics) while completely ignoring Marx’s quantitative investigation of value, or even criticizing quantitative research as "positivism."
(3) Transcending the Direct Opposition Between the Subjective Utility School and Orthodox Marxist Economists
How one understands and grasps Marx’s concept of the "substance of value" is an important parameter for measuring the attitude of various schools toward Marx. Anti-Marxist bourgeois economists, based on positivist methodology, completely deny the existence of a substance of value, and even deny the necessity of the concept of "value" as distinct from price. This is particularly evident among economists of the subjective utility school [9], such as Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. When orthodox Marxist economists like Rudolf Hilferding counter-criticized the subjective utility economists, they all emphasized the existence of objective value. Emphasizing objective value was an important theoretical contribution of the Ricardian labor theory of value, a theoretical core that Neo-Ricardians like Piero Sraffa still uphold. However, due to overcorrection, while emphasizing objective value, orthodox Marxist economists forgot the essential difference between Marx’s and Ricardo’s labor theories of value (the latter failed to distinguish between the private and social nature of labor and lacked dialectical thinking regarding their relationship).
The Systematic Dialectics and New Reading schools, in interpreting Capital, attempt to transcend the direct opposition between the subjective utility school and orthodox Marxist economists. Therefore, they must confront the substance of value from a position distinct from both, yet their final interpretation is an incomplete compromise. Similar to orthodox Marxist economists, they generally acknowledge the existence of the substance of value; however, they fail to correctly reveal how the substance of value exists, thereby sliding toward subjective utility economics. Specifically, in explaining the emergence of the substance of value, they overemphasize exchange (social form) and thus move toward neglecting production (private labor). Consequently, their interpretation violates Marx’s dialectical method—particularly the method of the unity of history and logic—and easily regresses into a subjective utility economics that emphasizes equilibrium prices and denies the determination of value by socially necessary labor.
IV. Critiques Levelled Against Systematic Dialectics and the New Reading of Marx
Within the New Dialectics and New Reading of Marx schools, there is no lack of criticism directed at their own representative figures, and mutual criticism exists between the two schools. At the same time, both schools have been subject to numerous external critiques.
The "Konstanz-Sydney Group" represented the initial manifestation of the New Reading of Marx movement spilling over from the German-speaking world into the Anglosphere. While it cannot be said that this group was the source of Christopher Arthur’s New Dialectics, its appearance in the English-speaking world (particularly in the remote corner of Australia) is indeed noteworthy. The "Konstanz-Sydney Group" was a collaborative project within the German New Reading of Marx movement that facilitated exchanges between Australian scholars such as Michael Eldred and Marnie Hanion, and German scholars like Volkbert Roth and Lucia Kleiber. It carved out an ambitious interpretative path within the Anglosphere. Although the group emerged under the inspiration of the German New Reading of Marx, its members opposed the tendency of the New Reading to emphasize qualitative analysis while neglecting quantitative analysis; thus, they can be viewed as an oppositional faction developed from within the New Reading of Marx movement.
The philosophical research on Capital conducted by the New Reading of Marx school early on attracted attention and criticism from Marxist scholars in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In 1977, after returning to Berlin from Denmark, the East German philosopher Peter Ruben wrote an article criticizing "capital-logic." This critique was directed not only at Hans-Jørgen Schanz in Denmark but also at the capital-logic school in West Germany (namely, members of the New Reading of Marx school such as Backhaus and Reichelt). As an expert on Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, Ruben’s criticism—that the study of value-form ignores the materialist dimension of use-value—was quite insightful. It could be said to have struck the Achilles' heel of the New Reading: the risk that the capital-logic school might slide into the abyss of idealism. In reality, a tension exists within Marx’s analysis of the value-form, one that emphasizes the dimensions of matter, nature, and use-value. In the first chapter of Capital, Marx reminds the reader: "Labour is not the only source of material wealth, i.e., of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother." If labor, as a social form and the essence of man, lacks nature as its balancing force, it easily slides into the idealistic bourgeois ideology. In fact, after Ruben treated the concept of "capital-logic" as a pejorative term, Marxist scholars in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe generally questioned the interpretative path of Backhaus, Reichelt, and others. Similar to scholars in the socialist camp like Ruben, the Czech philosopher Jindřich Zelený argued that Reichelt distorted Marx’s (and Engels’s) concept of materialist dialectics into a "scientific" method of thinking.
The "logic" in "capital-logic" is a concept on the same level as "syntax" in linguistics, "laws" in the natural sciences, and "structure" in the social sciences. The concept of "capital-logic" naturally possesses a structuralist Althusserian hue, lacking a dimension of subjectivity (a historical process without a subject), whereas "subjectivity" is precisely what Backhaus emphasized. Unless one takes the logic of capitalist collapse (crisis theory) as a premise, the revolutionary subject (whether the proletariat or another revolutionary subject) is the necessary agent to break the capitalist structure. In other words, the capital-logic school must inevitably face the question of the logic of capitalist collapse. Regarding the logic of capitalist collapse, Michael Heinrich of the New Reading of Marx school engaged in a debate with Robert Kurz of the Nuremberg-based Value Critique (Wertkritik) school. Heinrich explicitly denied the existence of a so-called theory of capitalist collapse. As Riccardo Bellofiore [10] has noted, there are also two factions within the New Reading of Marx movement: one is close to Hegelian dialectics, and the other promotes Althusserian structuralism. The former mainly includes early representative figures of the New Reading of Marx movement such as Hans-Jürgen Krahl, Backhaus, and Reichelt, whose work is characterized by humanist critique; the latter is represented by Ingo Elbe, Frieder Otto Wolf, and Heinrich, who are deeply influenced by Althusser and attempt to maintain a distance from Critical Theory.
Evald Ilyenkov is an important scholar in the development of both the New Dialectics and the New Reading of Marx schools. Arthur directly opposes Ilyenkov; while Reichelt does not mention Ilyenkov, he likely shares Arthur's opposition to Ilyenkov’s materialist dialectics. Backhaus initially opposed Ilyenkov but later changed his stance, and the two began to admire one another. Rising stars in the New Dialectics and New Reading of Marx schools are committed to utilizing Ilyenkov’s reconstruction of Marx’s "dialectic of the abstract and the concrete." In particular, Ilyenkov’s original views on Marx’s "the ideal" (观念的东西) have further deepened value-form studies. That the value-form is something "ideal" is both an explicit conclusion Ilyenkov drew directly from Isaak Rubin’s value-form theory and an original perspective that has resonated in the Western world.
V. Concluding Remarks: From "Value-Form" to "Products of Labor and the Commodity-Form"
In the field of contemporary philosophical research on Capital, the New Dialectics school in the Anglosphere and the New Reading of Marx school in the German-speaking world undoubtedly lead the way. Both focus on the analysis and study of the "value-form." However, the above analysis indicates that their excessive emphasis on the value-form and exchange/circulation inevitably leads to a neglect of the content within the sphere of production, thereby sliding into the mire of idealism. Therefore, while absorbing and drawing on the most advanced academic achievements of the international community, contemporary Chinese Marxist philosophical research must open up an interpretative path more consistent with Marx’s texts, returning to the original context of Marx’s Capital and moving toward a philosophy of labor and commodity-form analysis.
A product of labor is the objectification and concretion of labor, a formal change of matter. Labor includes two aspects: the quality of labor (the form of labor, i.e., concrete labor) and the quantity of labor (the productive expenditure of the human brain, muscles, nerves, hands, etc., which is human labor as distinct from that of animals). A commodity is a product of labor intended for exchange; the commodity-form includes both the natural form and the value-form of the commodity. The natural form of the commodity is use-value, while the value-form is exchange-value. Therefore, value possesses a duality: use-value and exchange-value. Use-value is determined by useful labor (concrete labor), while exchange-value (value) is determined by abstract human labor. The exchange-value form can be examined from two dimensions: first, from the dimension of value (the relationship between man and nature, i.e., private labor), which includes both the substance of value and the magnitude of value; second, from the dimension of exchange (the relationship between things, which masks the relationship between people), manifested as the social expression of value (social labor), i.e., the social value-form. Through a general equivalent, the value-form is transformed into the money-form; through the process of valorization (M-C-M'), the money-form is further transformed into the capital-form (including merchant capital and industrial capital). Capital examines the logic of industrial capital, including the dialectical process of its self-affirmation (the structuring of simple and expanded reproduction) and its self-negation (deconstruction). The logical starting point of Marx’s historical materialism is labor (material life), whereas the logical starting point of Capital is the commodity (not value). Marx mentions several kinds of "form," including the form of the product's matter (in the Aristotelian sense), the form of labor, the shaping of labor (i.e., the objectification and concretion of labor), and the natural and value-forms of the commodity. The value-form, in turn, includes the "value-form" of the commodity as a product and the "value-form" as an equivalent in the exchange process.
The fundamental difference between a product of labor and a commodity is that a commodity is both private and social; this is the root of the commodity's duality (or contradiction) and the driving force that moves the commodity toward money and capital. Simple commodity production (selling in order to buy) nurtures merchant capital (buying in order to sell, i.e., valorization). The transformation from merchant capital to industrial capital (the capitalist mode of production) requires a historical premise: the separation of the direct producer from the means of production ("the separation of the objective conditions of labor from labor itself," "the separation of the ownership of the laborer from his conditions of labor," "the separation of objective labor conditions from subjective labor power," "the separation of free labor from the objective conditions for its realization"). Of course, this does not mean that the first three chapters of Capital only examine the historical stage of pre-capitalist simple commodity production. It can be said that the first three chapters of Capital use simple commodity production as a model and manifest Marx’s narrative method of "moving from the abstract to the concrete." It is the opening gambit of Marx’s narrative (the so-called systematic dialectics) regarding the "totality" of the developed capitalist society (mode of production) typified by Britain. The separation of the direct producer from the means of production is the implicit premise of the first three chapters of Capital.
If we return further to the text of Marx’s Capital, we find that the "commodity," as the logical starting point of Capital, contains a premise of historical materialism: the trans-historical "product of labor." The product of labor is wealth—that is, use-value. Only after this does Marx turn to the specific historical stage of capitalist (or commodity-producing) society, where the product of labor becomes a commodity. At this point, contradiction arises, duality appears, and the commodity possesses two forms: the natural form (use-value) and the value-form (exchange-value). Therefore, the commodity-form precedes the value-form. Rubin’s emphasis on the study of the value-form in Capital undoubtedly opened up a new paradigm for philosophical research on the work. However, if one only emphasizes the value-form of the commodity, its natural form is obliterated.
Therefore, when examining the philosophical thought of Capital, contemporary scholars should draw on the merits of systematic dialectics and the New Reading of Marx while remaining alert to the deficiencies of both. One must not forget the "natural form" of the commodity while studying the "value-form." Thus, we should not focus solely on value-form analysis but should instead turn to the new paradigm of "products of labor and the commodity-form." Emphasizing the "product of labor" leads to Marx’s "philosophy of labor," which is integrated with his communist political philosophy; emphasizing the "commodity-form" highlights the natural (i.e., material) form of the commodity, thereby leading to the ecological dimension within the thought of Marx’s Capital.