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

Chapter 2: The Politics of Capitalist “Totality” in a More-Than-Capitalist World

35 2 The Politics of Capitalist “Totality” in a More-Than-Capitalist World Footnotes That Travel The argument that value, properly understood, presupposes capital and all the forms Marx elaborates for it in the chapters and volumes of Capital beyond those I have considered so far is sometimes deployed to emphasize that when Marx analyzes simple circulation (C . . . M . . . C), he does not mean that such a social form actually exists or is a historical precursor to capitalism proper. Rather than outlining a separate mode of simple commodity production or independent/petty commodity production , Marx is developing a first cut at the value theory that contains the presumption of further theoretical development. Such a reading of value as internalized anticipation should not be considered wrong. It is, however, right in a way that obfus­ cates Marx leveraging simple circulation numerous times for purposes of describing and critiquing some of the utopian socialist thought of his day.1 These are socialist experiments whose goal is, Marx argues, to have money directly express value by indexing it to labor time and, thus, labor money. This opens up Marx’s concept of value to an alternative reading in which it is addressed to and emerges from within the multiples of political economy in Marx’s time. To put this differently, Marx seems to be implicitly rendering modern bourgeois society as itself a diverse manifestation to be captured in the value concept. The gambit then is that Marx’s value-in-use is not collapsible into the value-in-motion of capital. This is a confusing point, however, 36 The Politics of Capitalist “Totality” for Marx himself writes that the model of value that emerges from the analysis of commodity exchange inevitably points to the model he develops of capitalist production. I will try, therefore , to approach the matter as carefully as possible. Not long into Capital, readers might notice Marx’s having made a number of short asides addressed to various socialist utopian schemes developed by John Gray, John Bray, Robert Owen, and others, but most especially Pierre-Joseph Proudhon .2 These asides typically are footnotes that eviscerate these schemes because of their poor understanding of the relationship between commodities and money—in particular, schemes that would try to allocate commodities justly on the basis of labor money or the time chit, as it’s sometimes called. “This philistine utopia,” Marx writes in chapter 1, “is depicted in the socialism of Proudhon, which, as I have shown elsewhere, does not even possess the merit of originality, but was in fact developed far more successfully long before Proudhon by Gray, Bray, and others. Even so, wisdom of this kind is still rife in certain circles under the name of ‘science’” (161n26). It is impossible , he writes in chapter 2, that “Proudhonian socialism” could perpetuate commodity production yet abolish the antagonism between money and commodities, “since money exists only in and through this antagonism. . . . One might just as well abolish the Pope while leaving Catholicism in existence” (181n4). His writing goes similarly in the other places where these notes and asides appear, leading the philosopher and historian Jacques Rancière to point out about Capital that “in a sense . . . what Marx wants to demonstrate in the book is achieved in the very first chapter.” In a certain political context, namely the struggles among competing socialisms, the important point about value theory is not its identification with capital but its formulation as an escape route from capital. “The crucial thing here,” Rancière writes, “is not the exposé of surplus value; everyone knows that secret, and scrupulous distinctions between the value of labor and the value of labor power have no importance in this con­ text. The crucial thing is destroying in advance Proudhon’s solution to surplus value, which is the free and equal exchange of labor between producers. . . . Once [Marx] has established that The Politics of Capitalist “Totality” 37 the equivalent form of the commodity is an exclusive form, the game is over. Proudhonism is impossible.”3 Behind the scenes ofCapital is that Marx had forged a critique of utopian socialism in the 1840s—The Poverty of ­ Philosophy— and a decade later made this a central preoccupation of “The Chapter on Money” in the Grundrisse, the notebooks Marx made in preparation for Capital. It appears, then, that much of what is contained in that chapter had been reduced to footnotes and asides...