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

Notes

149 Notes Introduction 1. Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” 105. 2. For a recent treatment of these classic conundrums of value theory, see Freeman et al., The Value Controversy. Elson, “The Value Theory of Labor,” also has an excellent overview. 3. Harvie, “All Labor Produces Value for Capital,” concords well with Diane Elson’s treatment of value in “The Value Theory of Labor.” Note the spelling difference from David Harvey. 4. Arthur, The New Dialectics; Althusser and Balibar, Reading “Capital”; Karatani, Transcritique; Gidwani, Capital, Interrupted; Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus; Hardt and Negri, Multitude; Casarino , “Marx before Spinoza.” 5. On this point see Castree, “On Theory’s Subject.” 6. For the immature and mature Marx, see Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination. For the early and late Marx, see Althusser and Balibar, Reading “Capital.” 7. Jameson, Representing Capital, 1–46. 8. Gidwani, Capital, Interrupted. 9. For example, both refutation and conflation appear in Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination. 10. Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value; cf. De Angelis, “Value(s), Measure(s) and Disciplinary Markets”; cf. Miller, “The Uses of Value.” 1. The Value–Capital Couplet and How to Break It 1. In addition to the complexities of value that make it difficult to think, it also is the case that the value concept is not a given in the history of economic theory. That is, value as a concern in economic thought waxes and wanes. It is not of transhistorical importance. See Jorland, “The Coming into Being and Passing Away of Value Theories,” for example, on the history of value theories as such. 2. Spivak, “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value,” is 150 Notes to Chapter 1 a widely read interrogation of how value seizes on these matters of theory versus history. See also the lucid and instructive essays of Noel Castree, “Birds, Mice and Geography” and “Invisible Leviathan.”­ Joseph Fracchia, “Marx’s Aufhebung of Philosophy and the Foundation of a Materialist Science of History,” sketches out the tension between Marx as theoretician and as historian through a reading of the chronological development of Marx’s thought. See also Althusser, “Marx in His Limits,” a posthumously published essay on the many unspoken and unacknowledged assumptions of Marx’s arguments. The tension between theory and empirics is not the only vexation. It is a problem, of which most of the authors just cited are aware, that Marx’s thought and writing is the site of different theoretical frameworks that are difficult to reconcile. As one example of some very interesting recent discussion along these lines, see the work of Andrew Brown, “Developing Realistic Philosophy” and “A Materialist Development of Some Recent Contributions to the Labor Theory of Value,” on the realist and dialectical strains in Marxist philosophy. 3. A preeminent argument that refuses to accept that capitalism is totalizing is Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It); cf. Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics. Similar stakes, especially the question of whether capitalist (or simply market) value systems work by necessarily bracketing off and disavowing the world’s social and natural complexity or even more fundamentally are themselves internally constituted through noneconomic practices, are played out in Callon, ed., The Laws of the Markets; Miller and Carrier, eds., Virtu­ alism; and Miller, “Turning Callon the Right Way Up.” See also Massey, “Economic: Non-economic.” 4. For example, see Weeks, “Feminist Standpoint Theories and the Return of Labor.” 5. Arthur, The New Dialectics, is a representative example. Althusser , “Marx in His Limits,” pins this problem on Marx feeling obligated to adopt a certain conception of science (Hegelian) that requires beginning with abstraction rather than the concrete (39–43). That Marx could break with this method as the writing of Capital wore on is proof to Althusser that Marx is at root a thinker of overdetermined causation—Marx’s failure is his success, Althusser asserts. 6. These points, that abstract labor is obvious and yet also produced unawares, are made in Marx, Capital, vol. 1., 163–64, 166–67. 7. Clarke, “The Seduction of Space,” 70. For this particular point, Clarke draws upon Metz, “Photography and Fetish.” 8. Bauman, “Understanding as the Work of History,” 59. Notes to Chapter 1 151 9. I am painfully aware that this sort of intentionality with regard to economic affairs is scarred deeply by the historical experience of centralized planning, which gives credence to the view that there...