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Chapter 5: The Value Hypothesis: Three Scenes for a Political Imaginary of Value
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111 5 The Value Hypothesis Three Scenes for a Political Imaginary of Value In the summer of 1868, Marx wrote a letter to his then-friend Ludwig Kugelmann that gathers together many of the core themes I try to ferret out in this book. In frank annoyance with his detractors, he writes: All that palaver about the necessity of proving the concept of value comes from complete ignorance both of the subject dealt with and of scientific method. Every child knows that a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish . Every child knows, too, that the masses of products corresponding to the different needs require different and quantitatively determined masses of the total labor of society. That this necessity of the distribution of social labor in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can only change the mode of its appearance, is selfevident . . . . The history of the theory certainly shows that the concept of the value relation has always been the same—more or less clear, hedged more or less with illusions or scientifically more or less definite. . . . The essence of bourgeois society consists precisely in this, that a priori there is no conscious social regulation of production. The rational and naturally necessary asserts itself only as a blindly working average. And then the 112 The Value Hypothesis vulgar economist thinks he has made a great discovery when, as against the revelation of the inner interconnection , he proudly claims that in appearance things look different. In fact, he boasts that he holds fast to appearance , and takes it for the ultimate. Why, then, have any science at all? But the matter has also another background. Once the interconnection is grasped, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions collapses before their collapse in practice.1 Marx places the important tenets in Kugelmann’s hand. Value and capital do not exhaust each other and are not coterminous. Value, while appearing differently in different modes of production (including the ironic failure to appear and yet have itself rescued by natural necessity), is a domain of thought and critique applicable to no single sort of mode of production. Instead, it is a problem for them all, an enduring problem that—even though Marx describes it from within the moment of capitalism—any society must come to grips with. And yet societies are not restricted to producing only one idea of what value is and may not have an idea of it as such. Marx’s encounters with bourgeois political economy, with utopian socialist political economy, and indeed with Kugelmann exemplify this. And though Marx makes a plea for science, he affirms that this is itself a terrain of struggle. The “concept of the value relation,” as Marx puts it, is conceived by him against the background of his own times and that of “another background”—of the future, of associated production. All of this is consistent with the archive of multivalent statements whose reading I have tried to assemble here. At the same time, this reading indicates that it would be best to approach Marx’s letter critically, seeing it not just as a defense of value but as a statement about the problem of value— namely, that it is one thing to grasp a necessary and self-evident interconnection between the distribution of social labor and masses of products but quite another to make the interconnection appear properly. For good reason Marx avers on the matter , since it is a question not simply of planning but of oppor- [3.90.33.254] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:51 GMT) The Value Hypothesis 113 tunities and outcomes that arise amid struggles that will have considerable say in producing the different needs to which Marx alludes.2 That is why in The German Ideology, penned in the 1840s and today a beacon for those Marx-inspired writers, such as Hardt and Negri, who have rallied around notions of the common, Marx and Engels write that “communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”3 Just the same though, Marx says enough about what he means by associated labor...