Dai Ligang: Being Born of Nothing — The Logical Starting Point of *Capital*
Introduction The historical dialectics within Capital serves as the key theoretical basis for mastering capital. However, Marx did not systematically expound upon historical dialectics, and constructing its "rational form" (Rationellen Gestalt) has always been a fundamental issue in Marxist philosophical research. Traditional perspectives, deeply influenced by Soviet textbooks, regard "historical dialectics" as a kind of essentialist "law." This interpretation clearly overlooks the fact that the subject of dialectical movement lies in human "sensuous activity." Subsequently, the near-phenomenological interpretations of Heideggerian Marxism acknowledged the ontological status of the subject’s sensuous activity; however, these interpretations subsumed dialectics within the horizon of existentialism. Consequently, they either overemphasized the "identity" of various elements within concrete existential situations—making it difficult to escape ideological "illusions"—or they completely abandoned "alienation" to return to an "original Being," thereby violating the historical continuity confirmed by Marx’s "sublationist" dialectics. Therefore, in order to critique the "relatively mechanical" interpretations of Soviet-style Marxism and examine the existentialist interpretations of phenomenological Marxism, we must return to an investigation of the historical dialectics of Capital, paying particular attention to the problem of the "beginning" that determines the quality of historical dialectics.
Marx attached extreme importance to the problem of the beginning in Capital, noting that "every beginning is difficult in all foundations of science," and emphasizing that the dialectic inherent in the problem of the beginning is "very difficult to understand." From the perspective of interpreters, although classical economists such as Schumpeter believed the dialectical implications contained in the beginning could be ignored or dissolved, mainstream Marxist philosophical researchers remain certain of its importance. As the Soviet Marxist Rosenthal emphasized: "The capitalist mode of production begins with simple commodity production. The commodity is not only the starting point historically but also logically." Its inherent contradiction is that commodities are unified in the quantity of money but are opposites in the space of existence. However, this explanation faces challenges: simple commodity production is a standpoint that begins analysis from pre-capitalist society, whereas Marx determined at the very opening of Capital to begin the analysis from the "immense collection of commodities" of capitalist society. Furthermore, differences in existential space do not imply true antagonism; there is a discontinuity between such differences and the contradiction between capital and labor in capitalist society. The difficulties of traditional interpretations demonstrate the complexity of the starting point. This article starts from the academic history of the beginning of Capital, points out the flaws in the Value-Form School's interpretation of the beginning, then reinterprets Marx's method of the critique of political economy, and explains the significance of this interpretation for elucidating Marx's historical dialectics.
I. Being Arising from Nothingness: The New Dialectical Interpretation of the Value-Form School and Its Debates
Regarding the problem of the logical beginning of Capital, Ilyenkov, a student of Rosenthal, provided a realist explanation more detailed than his teacher’s. He argued that Marx’s discourse on the beginning is the result of abstraction from the concrete. The so-called concrete not only possesses "general" objects that do not shift according to human will but is also a "unity in diversity"—that is, viewing capitalist society as a unified whole of universal connections, within which there are differences. This abstraction, starting from the totality, must proceed from the capitalist mode of production to grasp the core categories and their inherent contradictions. However, Ilyenkov's understanding falls into a contradictory position regarding the beginning: on the one hand, he insists on the concrete commodity as the beginning; on the other hand, he believes that "it is not the concept of the commodity, nor the concept of value, that contains within itself all the other rich theoretical determinations of capitalism." The reason is that the "actual commodity form of the connection between producers" represented by value is the "germ from which all 'richness,' including the misery of the wage-earning working class, must necessarily develop." This contradiction raises a question: if the concept of value is richer and more specific, why can value not serve as the beginning?
Regarding the aforementioned contradiction, some scholars have proposed a compromise: the "dialectical beginning of Capital contains two dimensions: the (concrete) dimension of immediacy and the dimension of universality (though this universality manifests as an abstract form)." Since one starts by analyzing the commodity, the commodity is the analytical or immediate beginning. Value, as the mediation of capital's society, is the synthetic beginning of Capital. However, the Value-Form School holds a more radical position, taking value—this synthetic category—as the logical beginning, and attempting to break through the traditional definition of the commodity as the starting point. Backhaus, the school's founder, treated the question of how value-form is possible as the "third thing" [1] of commodity exchange as a core problem, giving this "third thing" a dialectical explanation. He focused closely on Marx’s important statement that "the internal opposition between use-value and value latent in the commodity is manifested by an external opposition, i.e., by the relation of two commodities." He interpreted the "internally opposed" commodity not as "a motionless substance in an undifferentiated deadness, but as something unfolding itself in difference: a subject." That is to say, the contradictory relationship between value and use-value is the relationship in which the production of use-value is potentially oriented toward value exchange. His textual basis lies in Marx's argument in Volume I, Chapter 1, Section 3 of Capital regarding value-form as the "third thing" of commodity exchange. This Hegelian dialectical reading of the "third thing argument" led Backhaus to firmly believe that the beginning of Capital "starts from the 'empirical' fact of the manifestation of exchange value."
Backhaus's emphasis on value and its forms of manifestation influenced Christopher Arthur, a representative scholar of the "New Dialectics." Arthur provided an interpretation of the beginning that is even more colored by Hegel's Science of Logic. He first opposed the traditional Soviet Marxist practice of taking the commodity as the beginning. Taking the commodity as the starting point not only presupposes a type of simple labor that never existed historically, but also "fails to satisfy the two major criteria proposed below, namely simplicity and historical specificity; based on this, the commodity is disqualified from being the starting point." Since the criteria established in Hegel's Science of Logic for a starting point are immediacy and universality, Arthur's interpretation completely mimicked the method of the beginning in Hegel's Logic, establishing value and its exchange form as the logical beginning. This interpretation places the relationship between Hegel and Marx within the horizon of the critique of political economy to seek inherent commonalities.
Drawing on Bhaskar’s interpretation of Hegel, Arthur unfolded the dialectical implications of the beginning of Capital. Bhaskar interpreted Hegelian negation as "absence" [2], endowing it with the power to drive the movement of things. Bhaskar believed that "real negation or absence drives Hegel's dialectic forward." This "absence," as a non-being ("Nothingness"), holds significant ontological importance. Bhaskar further explained "absence" (non-being): "Undoubtedly, compared to zero-level being which lacks a negative dimension, non-existential being has ontological priority."
Using Bhaskar's interpretation, Arthur produced a deep dialectical exposition of the "Value-Form" section in Chapter 1, Section 3 of Capital (see Table 1). In this, Row A represents the "simple form of value" in accidental commodity exchange, where production and consumption are "real existence," while value in the space of exchange is "posited as the absence (of use-value)," becoming "complete non-being." Row B represents the "general form of value" or money form developed from the "simple form of value." Non-being in Row A is the first negation of real existence, but the lack of continuity in the exchange of goods for goods leads to the emergence of money; in Row B, the real form of exchange gradually becomes fixed, and non-being is negated once more. The result of this negation is that "value manifests itself to us as being by displacing the real existence of the commodity." Here, Arthur noted Marx’s important term "displacement" (Verrückung) [3]. This word shows the substitutive relationship where private labor is appropriated by social labor, vividly expressing that the productive labor of use-value must lean toward the "potentiality and actuality" relationship of value production; this is a relationship of "realizing itself in internal development." In this process of appropriation and orientation, production and consumption instead become non-being, and their own substantial attributes are "absent." The real existence of production and consumption in Row A becomes non-being in Row B, while exchange—which was non-being in Row A—becomes Being. The flip from Row A to Row B can explain the process of how production and exchange are inverted in the world of capital.
It is worth affirming that the Value-Form School’s interpretation, from Backhaus to Arthur, delves into the "Being/Non-being" problem at the core of Marx's historical dialectics. Methodologically, Arthur’s approach is a systematic method of "retroactive validation," which is not entirely identical to the method of historical materialism. In Hegel’s Science of Logic, Being (Sein) is the beginning of philosophy; Being is a pure thought of immediacy and universality. "Only insofar as 'Being' is pure indeterminacy is it 'Nothingness'"; thus "Nothingness" is the "absence" of the concrete determination of "Being." Simultaneously, the transition from "Being" to "Nothingness" also involves a reflective relationship; "Nothingness" predicated on "Being" is the result of reflection. Similar to Hegel, Arthur also set Being as the beginning and asserted its legitimacy: "When the 'Being' of value—carried by the commodity—is conceived as an element of the capitalist totality, it is determined as legitimate in a retroactive sense."
Although Arthur's interpretation was influenced by the critical realist Bhaskar, it was also criticized by other critical realists. They argued that "dialectical critical realism is more suitable for interpreting Marx's texts than Hegelian philosophy." The method used by these critical realists is to "move from the domain of experience and facts, and the corresponding patterns of observed (or hypothesized) events, to the deep domains and mechanisms that govern these events"—that is, asking how historical facts or actual behaviors are possible. Critical realist interpretation uses this Kantian-style questioning to examine Marx's important words at the beginning of Capital, namely that the wealth created by the "capitalist mode of production" appears as an "immense collection of commodities." The result of asking "how it is possible" is the belief that the capitalist mode of production contains two levels: the production sphere as the core and the market sphere as the surface. Sections 1 and 2 of Chapter 1 of Capital represent a line of inquiry from the surface (commodity exchange) to the core (production), whereas Section 3 on value-form is a line of inquiry regarding how the core is transmitted to the surface. The critical realist explanation stands in contrast to the aforementioned Neo-Hegelian interpretation: in the Neo-Hegelian reading, the exchange form "appropriates" productive labor, while the critical realists establish the core status of productive labor. However, the critical realist interpretation emphasizes the analysis of hierarchical structures, causing the dialectical color of the "Commodity" chapter to fade; Bhaskar’s (the founder of critical realism) dialectical interpretation centered on "absence" was not consistently applied in his reading of Capital.
While the Neo-Hegelian interpretation of the Value-Form School has some textual basis, it must face the methodological counterattack of critical realism. The counterattack from critical realism moves the beginning from the methodological level to a layered structure but fails to provide a reconstruction at the dialectical level. How, then, should we respond to the theoretical construction of the Value-Form School and elucidate a new historical dialectic?
II. Method: The Critical Method and the Unconcealment of the Problem of the Beginning
To respond to the above debates and examine the Value-Form School’s construction of the problem of the "beginning," we must return to the critique of political economy. This is necessary for two reasons. First, regarding the object of examination: since the Value-Form School interprets the problem of the beginning through Marx’s method of the critique of political economy, any critique of their position must also start from this method. In his famous work Dialectics of the Value-Form, Hans-Georg Backhaus explicitly opposes Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s purely economistic reading of Capital. Instead, he explains Marx’s critical method from an intermediate position "between the poles of philosophy and science," asserting that "Marx’s Critique of Political Economy is primarily a critique of the existing system of categories"—that is, a critique of classical economists like Ricardo. Of course, Backhaus simultaneously asserts that the positive construction of Marx’s critique of political economy lies in establishing a unique theory of the beginning, in which value and its form take precedence over the material substance of value. Regarding this, he argues: "If categories are not only a form but also a reality, then there may exist a form existing in the value-form that drives the generation of individuals and capital, a form that confronts and appropriates the individual."
Second, from the perspective of academic history, the motivation for establishing the problem of the beginning was a direct result of Marx's critique of political economy progressing from critique to construction. On February 22, 1858, during the later stages of composing the Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858 (hereafter referred to as the Grundrisse), Marx described his ongoing work in a letter to Lassalle: "The work I am presently concerned with is a critique of the economic categories or, if you like, a critique of the system of the bourgeois economy." It is evident that Marx not only confirmed the critique of political economy as an essential prerequisite for the creation of Capital, but also explained this method as consisting of two parts: a critique of capitalist economics and a critique of fundamental economic categories. This explanation necessarily reflects on the problem of the beginning. On April 2 of the same year, in a letter to Engels, Marx critiqued Ricardo’s theory of value for having the "point of departure in less developed relations of production." This effectively meant opposing Ricardo’s view of value as the cost of labor; Marx's critical basis was that the value-form is the mediation of mature capitalist relations of production. Based on this, he proposed that the critique would unfold in six volumes, the first being "Capital," which was further divided into four parts: the first being "Capital in General" and the second "Competition." The first category of the "Capital in General" section is "Value."
Since the Value-Form School examines the problem of the beginning from the perspective of the critique of political economy, we can examine its theoretical validity starting from that school’s own definition of the method of the critique of political economy, then verify it against Marx’s relevant texts. In this way, we can establish a methodological horizon for critiquing the Value-Form School’s approach to the beginning. The origins of the Value-Form School can be traced back to the "New Reading of Marx" (Neue Marx-Lektüre) movement. Backhaus, the standard-bearer of this movement, was a student of the Frankfurt School. In his essay "On Truth," Horkheimer—an inheritor of Marx’s critical method and dialectics—provided a two-dimensional definition of "critique." First, the basic concepts of British classical political economy should be transformed within the context of actual life practice, imparting a kinetic and dynamic function to static, isolated categories. Second, the establishment of concepts themselves must be based on reality itself; to avoid the ossification of concepts, it is necessary to establish an open dialectic oriented toward reality. Horkheimer argued that "critique includes not only the dimensions of negation and doubt, but also an inner independence that does not miss the truth [N1]"; this is the posture of truth when facing reality. Thus, Horkheimer believed that critiquing classical political economy required the construction of an open dialectic based on reality, noting that "the aspects of a system of knowledge abstracted from past eras... can by no means be equated with reality."
Adorno, Horkheimer’s primary collaborator, more directly applied this reality-oriented dialectic to the critique of ideology. The critique of ideology points toward the falsity of reification [N2] and critiques the positivist methods and the sociology of knowledge that defend "reification." The problem with such positivist methods is that the method always remains external to the object. However, "theory (including Marx’s theory), as something dialectical, must be immanent." That is, a dialectic that penetrates into the interior of things is the true critical method. Following this path, Adorno believed that Marx’s critique of political economy has two important dimensions. The first dimension is clarifying how capitalist society is generated into a new form of objectivity (Critique I). That is to say, the self-consciousness of individual action, through mediation, self-constructs a fetishistic world, namely "second nature." Although constructed by acting subjects, this world exhibits an objectivity that does not change according to human will. The original individualized subject-object dichotomy is transformed into a dichotomy between the "second nature" as object and the individual subject. The second dimension of critique is the determination that "second nature" as an object is a false ideology (Critique II). Adorno critiqued the idealism of Hegel and Fichte for overemphasizing self-consciousness and "subjectivism," which led to the uncritical acceptance of the reified "appearance" of fetishism. The core tenet of Marx’s critique of political economy lies in critically exposing this falsity to achieve social liberation. Adorno asserted: "In Marx, the difference is already expressed between the priority of the objective as a product of critique and the mask of real things distorted through the character of the commodity."
It must be noted that Adorno’s "Critique II" is based on reality’s penetration of the false object. Academia generally defines Marx’s critique of political economy as "revealing the essence and limits of capital as a relationship of dispossession," yet Adorno’s Critique II more deeply reveals that the critique of "dispossession" must be completed through the penetration of the false object. The ideological critique of Critique II does not merely reduce people’s subjective consciousness to "false consciousness"; rather, it demonstrates the objective reality of the false object by showing how commodity fetishism is "objectively deduced from the process of exchange." Adorno argued that what Marx wanted to explain was that "reification" possesses a "false objectivity" in the face of reality that cannot be eliminated at will. Adorno further used the term "metaphysical experience" to speak of the "false objectivity" of the object. Metaphysical experience is "an antinomical structure: the thesis is that the subject directly accepts metaphysical experience; the antithesis is that the subject must see the 'fallibility' of metaphysical experience." That is, the "falsity" of experience presented by the object is a transcendental illusion in the Kantian sense; the subject needs to acknowledge the priority of the object itself within the "fallibility" of experience. This is an expression of "near-materialism." Zhang Liang has pointed out that the "foundation and root of negative dialectics is Marxist philosophical materialism." From the above discussion, it can be seen that Adorno’s profound interpretation of Marx’s critique of political economy echoes, to a certain extent, Horkheimer’s open dialectic that is open toward reality.
Does the division between Critique I and Critique II made by the Frankfurt School align with the basic spirit of Marx’s texts? Our verification shows that the two types of critique coincide with Marx’s research method in terms of both the objects of critique and its direction. It is generally believed that, from the perspective of research methodology, the purpose of Marx’s study of political economy was to critique capitalist society. In fact, a more accurate statement is that Marx’s political economy is a profound diagnosis of the crisis of capitalism to predict the trends in the evolution of social formations. In July 1857, during the early stages of writing the Grundrisse, Marx mentioned in a letter to Engels: "I am working like mad all night and every night on a synthesis of my economic studies so that, before the deluge, I shall at least have the main outlines clear." The "deluge" here refers to the financial crisis occurring at that time. To this end, in the first half of the Grundrisse, Marx opposed Frédéric Bastiat’s theory of economic harmonies. Bastiat believed that "establishing a harmonious cooperation between city and country, industry and agriculture" could solve the problems. Then, at the beginning of the first chapter of Notebook "M" of the Grundrisse, Marx pointed the root of the problem toward Ricardo’s "hunter and fisherman" setting regarding the beginning of economics, attempting to destroy the foundation of capitalist ideology and reconstructing it with the value of commodities at the center.
Therefore, the direction of Marx’s research was that the "second nature" derived from Critique I would inevitably "collapse." "Second nature" is not as "harmonious" as its appearance suggests; its crises and anti-"harmony" both prove that the Frankfurt School’s Critique II was the objective Marx’s research intended to achieve. Reflecting on the problem of the beginning in Capital, similar to the views of Horkheimer and Adorno, Marx attempted through Critique II to prove the non-permanence of the "value-form," which is the foundation of the "second nature" in Critique I. This is evidenced in a footnote in the "Commodity Fetishism" section of Capital. There, Marx argues that classical economics, starting from the magnitude of value, treats capitalism as an eternal social form and fails to analyze the historicity of the value-form of commodities. In this context, "If the bourgeois mode of production is mistaken for an eternal natural form of social production, one will necessarily overlook the specificity of the value-form, and thus the specificity of the commodity-form and its further developments—the money-form, the capital-form, and so on."
The problem lies in the fact that Backhaus—Adorno’s student—insisted on Adorno’s Critique I while ignoring Critique II in his interpretation of the dialectics of Capital. Backhaus starts from the Hegelian categories in the Grundrisse (such as "in-and-for-itself" [N3]) to explain the process of constructing the "second nature" as an object in Capital. Regarding the problem of the beginning, Backhaus found a rupture between the substance and form of value between Sections 1 and 2 (analysis of the commodity and the twofold character of labor) and Section 3 (the value-form) of Chapter 1 of Capital, which "created problems in the methodological structure of the theory." The "being" of the commodity analysis in the first two sections cannot lead to the analysis of the "essence" of the value-form through deduction; rather, one should backtrack from "being" to the value-form as "essence" in a Hegelian manner, establishing value and its form as the prerequisite for commodity analysis (especially use-value). Therefore, the "universal existence" of the value-form becomes the beginning, and "second nature" is established upon the foundation of the value-form. Christopher Arthur later followed this path, vehemently critiquing Engels’s interpretation of "simple labor" [N4] as the beginning of Capital and further explicating the problem of the beginning using "being" and "nothingness." However, Backhaus, Arthur, and others forgot Adorno’s Critique II of political economy. Their critical method aimed to critique the object of "second nature" as "false consciousness." Therefore, the problem with the Value-Form School is that they treated the relationship between value-substance and value-form as one of potentiality and realization, leaving no room for Critique II.
The Value-Form School surreptitiously replaced Marx’s labor theory of value with a value-form determinism, highlighting the subjective motivation behind the rule of the value-form. Consequently, they transformed Marx’s most central concept—socially necessary labor time—into "socially critical exploitation time." Thus, the scientific labor theory of value was distorted into "the necessary time for capital to extract labor from those it exploits... exploitation time is constituted by the entire working day." Furthermore, because the theory of the beginning as the self-realization of the value-form maintains capitalist ideology, it cannot fulfill the task of the critique of political economy against classical economics. Therefore, only by returning to Critique II and re-examining Marx’s method of piercing through "false consciousness" regarding the problem of the beginning can we profoundly understand the beginning of Capital.
III. Being Arising from Nothingness: The Dialectical Implications of Verschwindet and Verrücktheit
Critique II, as the fundamental method of Marx’s political economy, aims to reveal the "falsity" of the world of commodities characterized by equivalent exchange. Although the Value-Form School opened a new line of dialectical research, the "realization" relationship they understood between use-value and value eternalized the "false illusion" of the value-form, thereby leading the school to the opposite of Marx’s position. Our next task is to use Critique II to integrate the problem of the beginning and use the critique of ideology to reinterpret the internal relations among the various elements of the beginning. Among these, the dialectical category of negation is the key category for demonstrating the characteristics of dialectics. Only by examining categories related to "negation" can we realize Marx’s Critique II.
The Value-Form school's key argument regarding the problem of the beginning is the interpretation of Capital through the Hegelian language and method of the Grundrisse. Juan Iñigo Carrera argues that the Hegelian "research method is clearly visible in the Grundrisse, but is deliberately hidden in Capital." He formulated this view while aligning himself with two other prominent Marxist scholars, Martin Nicolaus and Helmut Reichelt. The sublation [8] of this perspective also requires returning to a textual interpretation strategy centered on the Grundrisse. In the first half of the Grundrisse, regarding the problem of the beginning, Marx did not establish the commodity as the starting point, but was still hesitating over the relationship between the two attributes of the commodity. However, he raised a fundamental question: namely, "whether value should be conceived as the unity of use-value and exchange-value." On the basis of opposing Ricardo’s and Say’s views—which established the magnitude of commodity value and the utility of the commodity as the logical starting points—Marx identified that the exchange-form of value should enter the study of political economy, yet maintained that the value-form should "have a certain use-value as its substance." Regarding the relationship between the form of value and the substance of value, Marx did indeed use the discourse of use-value being "realized" into exchange-value at the level of circulation, such as: "use-value becomes use-value through the mediation of exchange-value, and exchange-value takes use-value as its own mediation." Marx also provided the example of the emergence of surplus products in agriculture leading farmers to produce for exchange. These narratives lead the Value-Form school to mistakenly believe that Marx’s understanding of the form of value is a Hegelian-style self-realization. However, the problem with this interpretation is that there is only identity, not heterogeneity, between the categories associated with "self-realization" (use-value, value, and the form of value). The basis for this is that, on the issue of the exchange of commodities and money, Marx repeatedly emphasized "losing oneself and standing in opposition to the other." This is an opposition at the level of heterogeneity; the value represented by money cannot completely subsume use-value. It is precisely the non-objectification of value that brings about the difference between value and use-value. In Marx's texts, explicit discussions of this difference are scarce, requiring a return to the German categories used by Marx to reveal the "negative" significance of the dialectic.
Broadly speaking, looking at the original text of the Grundrisse, the problem of the beginning is directly related to "being (existence) / non-being (non-existence)," and there are two key categories within the related cluster of categories: verschwindet (disappears) and Verrücktheit (derangement/craziness). First, the opposition of internal heterogeneity within the commodity is manifested in Marx's important term verschwindet. In Hegel’s Science of Logic, similar terms regarding "absence" are explicitly used: "Nothing is merely the absence (Abwesenheit) of being, just as darkness is merely the absence of light, cold merely the absence of heat, and so on." Christopher J. Arthur uses the word "absence" to argue that the beginning of Capital is value and its forms of appearance, but this is a forced interpretation of the text. In fact, the Grundrisse uses "disappear" (verschwindet) and non-being (Nichtsein). "Disappear" signifies that at the moment exchange-value is realized, use-value temporarily disappears. Non-being is used in the sense that labor, as a use-value, "disappears"; when labor is appropriated by capital, the laborer is abstracted into labor capacity, and the laborer "posits himself as the object of his own non-being (Nichtsein) or the being of non-being."
Regarding how to deduce exchange-value from use-value, Marx held that "the commodity only becomes exchange-value when it disappears in circulation." Here, the commodity specifically refers to the commodity substance—namely, use-value and the concrete labor behind it. The result of "disappearing" in its verbal sense is the noun-form "absence" or "nothingness." However, the Value-Form school’s interpretation primarily uses "absence" or "nothingness" in the substantival sense. Arthur supports and cites Bhaskar’s explanation of "absence," but Bhaskar’s formulation is that "absence is as much a reality as presence... that which is absent is not a pure 'nothing,' but a 'determinate nothing' formed by the specific process that produced it." Differing from this, Marx used "disappearing" in a verbal sense. The verbalization of "disappearing" not only explains the emergence of "non-being" but also demonstrates a negative power directed against being. Since "disappearing" is the condition for the emergence of exchange-value, the absence of use-value or the commodity substance becomes non-being or "nothingness," and non-being manifests as being (exchange-value). Regarding this, Marx also believed that "use-value becomes use-value through the mediation of exchange-value." Superficially, this phrasing seems Hegelian; however, in a clearer articulation of the relationship between use-value and value, he explicitly points out: "[use-value] does not stand in opposition to exchange-value as a use-value determined by exchange-value itself; on the contrary, use-value itself does not enter into a relation with exchange-value, but rather becomes a specific exchange-value only because various use-values are measured by their commonality—which is labor time—as an external measure. The unity of the two is still a direct separation." It is evident that while Marx expressed use-value appearing as value, he affirmed that the two are in a relationship of "separation." Marx repeatedly expressed the "alternating" relationship of disappearance and transformation within "C-M-C" (Commodity-Money-Commodity). The non-being formed by the "disappearance" of the commodity's use-value allows exchange-value to negate use-value, such that the two become opposed. He thus believed that exchange-value is "the direct opposite of use-value, because it is use-value for others, and is thus negated direct, individual use-value." Viewed this way, "disappearing" is the cause of the opposition between use-value and value; the "nothingness" formed by the disappearance of use-value brings about exchange-value as being, and also endows it with negative power. In Capital, Marx once again uses "disappearing" and "phantom" to explain the opposition between private labor and social labor: in exchange, "the various concrete forms of labor also disappear... nothing remains but the same ghost-like objectivity." This "disappeared" use-value and concrete labor are not completely objectified by the "phantom" of value; on the contrary, they form a negative power against the value-form and capital.
The term "disappearing" shows that use-value and private labor, having not been objectified by value (form), transform into "non-being." Non-being is not non-existence, but rather non-presence; it still maintains a negative connection with being (value and its forms). Marx's other category, "derangement" (Verrücktheit), better illustrates the specific mechanism of this negative connection. Arthur found that Hegel's "nothing" is only a nothingness at the level of determinacy, whereas Marx's "nothing" is "an abstraction so fundamental from being itself as genus that nothing is left" as a starting point. Arthur calls this abstraction the "self-presence of Nothing." Although he believes that non-being should occupy the same status as being, the function of this non-being lies solely in "confirming" being. Arthur identifies that "if this 'non-being' cannot confirm itself as the 'Being' of exchange, then it will lose any ontological status." Differing from this, the relationship between non-being and being of which Marx spoke is a heterogeneous relationship, concentrated in Marx’s use of the category "derangement." In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel used the term "derangement" to describe the contradictory relationship between individual consciousness and actual necessity when self-consciousness transitions to the stage of the "heart." Within the "heart" exist two types of consciousness: one takes actual necessity as its object, the other takes non-actual necessity (the individual consciousness of the subject) as its object; actual necessity suppresses non-actual necessity, producing antagonism. "Individual consciousness wants to directly become a universal, but in fact, this intention of consciousness is something deranged and inverted, and its actions will only force it to become aware of this contradiction." Regarding the antagonism between individual consciousness and necessity, Hegel believed that for the sake of necessity, consciousness must renounce individuality. Similarly, Marx also believed that the "rule [of money] appears as pure derangement," meaning that while use-value manifests as the value-form, its own richness is suppressed. However, Marx directly pointed out: "use-value stands in opposition to exchange-value merely as abstract chaos." Abstract chaos is the state of use-value as non-being. In this state, an opposition arises between use-value and value. It is clear that Marx's opposition between non-being and being is not merely a "difference in determinacy" as Arthur suggests, but a driving force pushed by contradictions in reality.
The negative power of "nothingness" highlighted by "derangement" can pierce the "illusion" on the surface of the sphere of circulation, completing the task of the Critique of Political Economy II. When Marx discussed the relationship between commodities and money, while repeatedly mentioning that commodities are realized as money, he also constantly emphasized that "the direct existence of circulation is pure illusion. Circulation is a surface phenomenon of a process going on behind it." This seemingly contradictory formulation is puzzling; in fact, in the subsequent paragraphs, Marx clearly explains that circulation itself has no self-sustaining motive power: "commodities must be constantly thrown back into circulation from the outside, like fuel being thrown into a fire. Otherwise, circulation would lose its effect and disappear." Thus, the heterogeneity between the commodity and money themselves is the relationship through which circulation unfolds, and the deep structure of this heterogeneous relationship is that while the commodity manifests as money, the concreteness of the commodity and private labor is "absent" and transformed into "nothingness."
Not only that, in Capital, "non-being" as a negative power continuously appears and self-augments in subsequent stages of logical development. In the phase of use-value and value, their absence and opposition were still latent, and the language was relatively obscure. After the value-form transforms into capital, the function of non-being manifests more directly. In the relationship between capital and labor, Marx explicitly pointed out that concrete labor itself is excluded, its own substance disappears, it transforms into non-being, and becomes the pauper; it is abstracted into a single labor capacity: "the process of realization is also the process of the non-realization of labor; labor posits itself as an object, and also posits the object as its own non-being or the being of non-being—namely, capital." In this sentence, Marx describes the process of labor objectifying into capital as a process of "losing" the original richness of labor; the unappropriated object becomes non-being. This is not entirely a relationship of "realization," but a relationship of opposition. On this point, Marx held: "the production process as realized existence stands outside of labor, but this realization is, for labor, the realization of another; it constitutes wealth in opposition to labor." That is to say, Marx determined that this non-being exists outside of the capital realized from labor, forming an opposition with the realized being (capital). It should be noted that although Marx did not use the specific term "non-being" in the text of Capital, the meaning remains; specifically, he further distinguished between labor and the use of labor-power. In the process where labor is abstracted into labor-power, unabstracted concrete living labor stands as a form of non-being in opposition to objectified labor.
The aforementioned argument regarding the fundamental status of "non-existence" (wu) aims to demonstrate that the starting point of Capital is not the value-form possessing powers of subsumption and synthesis, but rather the internal contradictoriness of the commodity. In his later work, Notes on Wagner [9], Marx revisited the internal heterogeneous contradiction of the commodity, repeatedly emphasizing that his point of departure was not the abstraction of "value," but the commodity as a "concrete social form." He wrote: "The 'commodity' is, on the one hand, use-value, and on the other hand, 'value'—not exchange-value, for the mere form of appearance does not constitute its own content." In other words, the form of appearance cannot completely "rule over" use-value; the "non-existence" presented by use-value as it appears as value is not entirely discarded, but rather generates an internal negation. The negating power of "non-existence" as a productive substance also echoes and affirms, at the dialectical level, Critical Realism's [10] confirmation of the foundational status of production: "the concept of use-value does not merely represent the natural attributes of the commodity; it inherently possesses rich connotations of social critique." Finally, we may revise Christopher Arthur’s [11] table of relations for the starting point of Capital (see Table 2). In Row A, accidental commodity exchange already contains the latent causal relationship between production (existence) and exchange; in Row B, as the equivalent form and money form become universal forms, the relationship between non-existence (production or use-value) and existence (exchange) undergoes a reversal. On the surface, the relationship between non-existence and existence is one of potentiality and realization, but at a substantive level, the two stand in a relationship of negation and heterogeneity.
(Note: The columns for "Production" and "Exchange" represent the theoretical insights of the value-form school—primarily located in Chapter 8 of Arthur's The New Dialectic and Marx's Capital—while the "Relations" section is the author's analysis of the school's inner substance, and the "Revision of Relations" section is the author's critical reconstruction.)
Conclusion
The value-form school's interpretation of the starting point of Capital deepens the reading of historical dialectics into the "realm of being and non-being" (you wu zhi jing) [12] constructed by "existence/non-existence." However, because the intervention of the method of the critique of political economy fundamentally sublated the world of "being" (existence) established by the value-form, it reversed the logic of "non-existence arising from being" into "being arising from non-existence" (you sheng yu wu) [13]. This conclusion is conducive to deepening our understanding of the "rational form" of Marx's historical dialectics. By contrast, the post-structuralist interpretations of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri merely explain historical dialectics as a structure built upon a cross-section, failing to penetrate the historical flux itself. Praxis-oriented and phenomenological interpretations argue that the subject of practical activity is itself the source of momentum, viewing the dialectical movement of Capital as "the Odyssey of a concrete historical form of praxis." The "rupture" or "void" in this assertion lies in its failure to resolve, at a meta-philosophical level, how the practical subject achieves historical flux; thus, it cannot fundamentally solve the problem of the mechanism of dialectical movement and is ineffective in piercing ideological illusions. From the perspective of the negative relationship between non-existence and existence, the dynamic of dialectical movement lies in the fact that the absent non-existence (wu) within the life-context of the practical subject negates existence (you); the dialectical "drift" represents the practical subject realizing continuous flux within the unstable practical field of history.