Value in Marx: The Persistence of Value in a More-Than-Capitalist World

Chapter 4: From Necessity to Freedom and Back Again: Abjected Labor, Tainted Value

89 4 From Necessity to Freedom and Back Again Abjected Labor, Tainted Value Is Value Necessary in Capitalism? No. But also, yes! Sort of. Repeatedly, Marx shows that value is a problem that eludes capital’s apparatuses. In showing us that capital is a failed attempt to give determinate shape and form to value, he shows that value, in an alternate reckoning, lies elsewhere, in a world that remains to be made. It is a very risky strategy, as I have suggested, for the more he repeats his point, leveraging this, that, and the other mechanism or outcome of capital to do so, the more he conjures a set of problems whose solutions are hardly automatic or self-evident. Indeed, it is fair to say that he is producing a problem much more than a solution. Because the problem hinges so much around Marx’s strategy of positing capitalism’s specificity together with its generality, I would like to venture some thoughts about this ensemble of the specific and the general, ultimately to return to the problem of freedom and necessity in associated production, to which it is so intimately related. The usual way of dealing with the notion of general production and Marx’s invocation of it is to say it is a conceptual abstraction , a means of making some fairly simple comparisons and contrasts after which we move on to the preferred emphasis on historically and socially specific forms of production. Another meaning, already seen, is to equate it with the idea of 90 From Necessity to Freedom expenditure of labor time, regardless of particular objective. I would like to try a different approach, however, and suggest that the idea of production in general is the idea of what society, any society, must be capable of doing. This is to say a people must produce its life, and its life will be, other things being equal, the consequence, intended or not, of what it does. Capital cannot simply do what it wants; it must accommodate itself to the general production that operates within it, in the scene just noted, just as this generality cannot operate or exist by itself independently. I am not saying, therefore, that production in general has an independent existence but that rather a certain kind of production must be done that produces and reproduces society as such. (One could say that general production is a specific kind of production, after all—that is, that the other side of general production as potentiality is that potentiality is restricted .) If we really grasp the demands of general production, then we can garner further insight into the functioning failure, so to speak, of value, or what I earlier denote as the improbability of value, in capital: the recurring nonoccurrence of value in capital (for example, that prices diverge from value poses value as something that continually departs from and chases after its own forms). But as this is a very abstract point, let me pose a concrete question to which it gives rise: When value fails to ap­ pear and yet is the essence of capital, why doesn’t life in capi­ talism always-already come to a crashing halt? Surely this is the question to have in mind when setting out to explore the putative necessity of value in capitalism, capitalism’s failure to meet this requirement, and yet also the general production that shines through. This is an exploration that has everything to do with the actual presence of the potential for alternatives to capitalism. Cesare Casarino puts this exceptionally well: “The common is virtually indistinguishable from that which continually captures it, namely capital,” for the reason that capital and the common each has its existence in the one and only surplus, life as a living potentiality.1 If I branch off from Casarino’s arguments , though, it is in the view that Marx’s passage through value theory is rich with implication for thinkers of the common (i.e., life as living potentiality). As I increasingly argue toward From Necessity to Freedom 91 the end of this book, the value-theoretic mode cannot be laid aside in favor of the concept of the common, as if a politics of the common would resolve the politics of capital (value). Value is, I think, prophetic for the common. As Jason Read observes, though without reference to value, a problem for the common is that...