Unavoidable Crises: Reflections on Backhaus and the Development of Marx’s Value-Form Theory in the Grundrisse Patrick Murray
But within bourgeois society, based as it is upon exchange-value, relationships of exchange and production are generated which are just so many mines to blow it to pieces.1 One hundred and fifty years after Marx stopped work on the Grundrisse, we find turmoil in financial markets linked to sub-prime mortgage lending practices and a remarkable real-estate bubble. What motivated Marx to write the Grundrisse was the first world crisis of cap- italism, beginning in 1857. Then, as now, proposals for banking reform arose in answer to the financial crisis. Marx begins the Grundrisse with an extended criticism of the proposals advanced by the Proudhonist Alfred Darimon. Darimon soon leads Marx to one of the most revealing topics of his analysis of the capitalist mode of production, the value-form, or exchange-value. In not grasping the value-form, Darimon failed to recognise why capitalism requires money and is crisis-prone. While financial reforms may help to forestall or better manage crises, they cannot root them out. In thinking that the troubles of the capitalist mode of production could be overcome by making changes to circula- tion, Darimon exemplified misconceptions regarding the relationships among production, distribution, exchange and consumption that Marx addressed in the general introduction to the Grundrisse.
1. Marx 1986, p. 96. 122 • Patrick Murray
For Marx, crises provide dramatic, recurrent evidence for the most fundamen- tal claim of his critique of political economy, namely, that the capitalist mode of production is historically specific and transitory. Marx’s stomach turned at the economists’ pronouncement: ‘Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any’.2 As Marx came to see, recognition of the historically specific char- acter of the capitalist mode of production begins with the value-form of the wealth it produces: ‘The value-form of the product of labour is the most abstract but also most general form of the bourgeois mode of production, which hereby is characterised as a specific type of social mode of production and thereby like- wise as historical. Therefore, if one misperceives it for the eternal natural form of social production, one, then, naturally also overlooks what is specific in the value-form, thus the commodity-form, and, further developed, the money-form, the capital-form, etc’.3 Notice the weight that Marx places on social form here. Marx has been widely misunderstood because the questions that preoccupy him, questions regarding the specific social form and purpose of labour and wealth, lie outside the discur- sive horizon shared by the mainstream of modern philosophy and the social sci- ences, notably economics. There, Marx’s questions do not register; they gain no traction. No wonder Marx’s account of the specific social form of wealth in capi- talist societies, the value-form, has been overlooked, ignored, shunned, garbled and parroted, due not simply to its conceptual complexity or any shortcomings of Marx’s multiple efforts to explicate it, but primarily because it aims at answer- ing questions that few ever ask. Over the past four decades, however, this interpretive situation has been changing. Certain currents in recent Marxian theory and Marx scholarship have been labelled ‘the new dialectics’ or ‘value-form theory’.4 A seminal text emphasising the mutuality of dialectics and value-form theory is Hans-Georg Backhaus’s 1969 essay ‘On the Dialectics of the Value-Form’ [Zur Dialektik der Wertform].5 Backhaus trenchantly diagnosed many deep misconceptions held by the bulk of Marx’s interpreters, without sparing Marx from criticism. In Back- haus’s judgment, despite multiple attempts to work out his radically new ideas, Marx’s dialectic of the value-form flopped. Backhaus points out that Marx pub- lished four versions of the dialectic of the value-form: in the first chapter of the 1859 Critique, in the first chapter of the first edition of Capital Volume I, in an appendix to the first chapter of the first edition, and in the first chapter of the second and later editions. Whether the first draft of Capital Volume I, which is
2. Marx 1963a, p. 121. 3. Marx 1966b, p. 275. All translations from ‘Ware und Geld’ are my own. 4. See Arthur 2002. 5. Backhaus 1969.