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Themismeasureofwealth The Mismeasure of Wealth Essays on Marx and Social Form By Patrick Murray leiden | boston 2016 Contents Preface ix Acknowledgements xii Notes on Chapters xvi Introduction: Putting the Spotlight on Social Form and Purpose 1 part 1 The Essays 1 Value, Money and Capital in Hegel and Marx 55 2 Redoubled Empiricism: The Place of Social Form and Formal Causality in Marxian Theory 69 3 Things Fall Apart: Historical and Systematic Dialectics and the Critique of Political Economy 95 4 Marx’s ‘Truly Social’ Labour Theory of Value: Part i, Abstract Labour in Marxian Value Theory 120 5 Marx’s ‘Truly Social’ Labour Theory of Value: Part ii, How is Labour That is under the Sway of Capital Actually Abstract? 156 6 The Grammar of Value: A Close Look at Marx’s Critique of Samuel Bailey 189 7 Unavoidable Crises: Reflections on Backhaus and the Development of Marx’s Value-Form Theory in the Grundrisse 220 8 The Necessity of Money: How Hegel Helped Marx Surpass Ricardo’s Theory of Value 249 9 Money as Displaced Social Form: Why Value Cannot be Independent of Price 277 viii contents 10 The Social and Material Transformation of Production by Capital: Formal and Real Subsumption in Capital, Volume i 294 11 The Place of ‘The Results of the Immediate Production Process’ in Capital 325 12 Beyond the ‘Commerce and Industry’ Picture of Capital 341 13 The Secret of Capital’s Self-Valorisation ‘Laid Bare’: How Hegel Helped Marx to Overturn Ricardo’s Theory of Profit 373 14 The Illusion of the Economic: The Trinity Formula and the ‘Religion of Everyday Life’ 398 part 2 Critical Engagements 15 Avoiding Bad Abstractions: A Defence of Co-constitutive Value-Form Theory 425 16 The New Giant’s Staircase 443 17 In Defence of the ‘Third Thing Argument’: A Reply to James Furner’s ‘Marx’s Critique of Samuel Bailey’ 465 18 Reply to Geert Reuten 485 19 The Trouble with Ricardian Marxism: Comments on ‘The Four Drafts of Capital: Towards a New Interpretation of the Dialectical Thought of Marx’, by Enrique Dussel 505 Bibliography 517 Index 536 Preface The Mismeasure of Wealth: Essays on Marx and Social Form brings together in a single volume most of what I have written on Marx and Marxian theory since the publication of my Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge in 1988. All but the introduction and ‘The Grammar of Value: A Close Look at Marx’s Critique of Samuel Bailey’ have been previously published. Most of the chapters started out as papers written for the annual working conferences of the interdisciplin- ary research group the International Symposium on Marxian Theory (ismt).1 The essays, which focus on Marx as a theorist of specific social forms – in par- ticular, capitalist ones – appear here in a rough conceptual order rather than in order of publication. There are several writings that primarily respond to the ideas of other interpreters of Marx: Chris Arthur; Enrique Dussell; James Furner; Geert Reuten and several proponents of the Temporal Single System Interpretation (tssi), namely Alan Freeman, Andrew Kliman, Maya Gonzalez and Michael Posner. I have collected these under the heading ‘Critical Engage- ments’ at the end of the book.2 1 A few have been translated: ‘Marx’s “Truly Social” Labour Theory of Value: Part i, Abstract Labour in Marxian Value Theory’ has been translated into Spanish by Mario L. Robles Baez as ‘La dialectica de la conceptualizacion de la abstraccion del trabajo’, in Dialectica y Capital: Elementos para una reconstruccion de la critica de la economia politica, edited by Mario L. Robles Baez (Mexico City: Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, 2005), pp. 59–95. ‘The Necessity of Money: How Hegel Helped Marx Surpass Ricardo’s Theory of Value’ has been translated into Spanish by Mario L. Robles Baez as ‘La necesidad del dinero: como Hegel ayudo a Marx a superar la teoria del valor de Ricardo’ in Dialectica y Capital, pp. 143–70. ‘Redoubled Empiricism: The Place of Social Form and Formal Causality in Marxian Theory’ has been translated into the Italian by Tommaso Redolfi Riva as ‘“Empirismo raddoppiato”: Il posto della forma sociale e della causalita formale nella terorea marxiana’, in Marx in questione: Il dibattito ‘aperto’ dell’International Symposium on Marxian Theory, edited by Riccardo Bellofiore and Roberto Fineschi (Naples: La Citta del Sole: 2009), pp. 119–50. ‘The Place of “The Results of the Immediate Production Process” in Capital’, has been translated into Chinese as part of a translation of Re-reading Marx: New Perspectives after the Critical Edition, edited by Riccardo Bellofiore and Roberto Fineschi, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 2 Parts i and ii of ‘Marx’s “Truly Social” Labour Theory of Value’ are, among other things, a reply to Reuten 1993 and ‘Unavoidable Crises: Reflections on Backhaus and the Development of Marx’s Value-Form Theory in the Grundrisse’ is in part a reply to Hans-Georg Backhaus’s ‘On the Dialectics of the Value-Form’, but I include all three with the essays in the first part of the present volume as Chapters Four, Five and Seven, respectively. x preface Several terms have been put forward to characterise various streams in the renewal of research into Marx and Marxian theory beginning in the late 1960s and the 1970s. They include ‘Hegelian Marxism’, ‘systematic dialectics’, ‘new dialectics’ and ‘value-form theory’. In his reinterpretation of Marx’s crit- ical theory, Moishe Postone criticises ‘Traditional Marxism’ for adopting the classical labour theory of value, which treats the categories of value and of the labour that produces value as applicable across history rather than being specific to capitalist societies.3 ‘New dialectics’ and ‘systematic dialectics’ are more recent phrases; they focus on method in contrast to the older, broader rubric of ‘Hegelian Marxism’.4 These three terms encompass interpreters with divergent views on Hegel, Marx’s criticisms of Hegel and the actual relation- ships between Hegel and Marx.5 In an exchange with Geert Reuten, I argue for the distinctiveness of Marx’s experientially based systematic dialectics, which departs from the ‘presuppositionlessness’ of Hegelian systematic dia- lectics.6 As for ‘value-form’ theory, I argue that its proponents diverge. Michael Eldred and Marnie Hanlon go one way; in their view, value is constituted solely in the exchange of commodities for money. Value-form theory is sometimes mistaken for this one-sided view. The other direction, which I attribute to Marx and defend, sees value as being co-constituted across production and exchange.7 My work can be associated with all these labels, but, with the subtitle ‘essays on Marx and social form’, I want to emphasise a broader consideration, that of attending to historically specific social forms, a subject matter that charac- terises the best recent work in Marxian theory. I agree with Chris Arthur, who coined the term ‘new dialectics’: While the mainstream position in Marxist theory has read concepts such as value, socially necessary labour time and abstract labour, largely in a technical sense, I adhere to the growing minority that centralises the idea of social form, insisting that all such categories have to be explicated 3 Postone 1993. I mention only those streams most closely related to the interpretative ap- proach taken in the present essays. There are others, including Analytical Marxism, Sraffian or neo-Ricardian Marxism, Althusserian Marxism, postmodern Marxism and post-Marxism. 4 See the introductions to Arthur 2002a and to Albritton and Simoulidis 2003. 5 For some assessments see Burns and Fraser (eds.) 2000 and Moseley and Smith (eds.) 2014. 6 See Murray 2000a, 2000b and 2002c, included in the present volume as Chapters Four, Five and Eighteen, respectively, and Reuten 2000. 7 See ‘Avoiding Bad Abstractions: A Defence of Co-constitutive Value-Form Theory’, included as Chapter 15 in the present volume. preface xi within an account of specifically capitalist social forms of production and exchange.8 What Arthur refers to as ‘the mainstream position in Marxist theory’ matches what Postone criticises as ‘Traditional Marxism’. It is Marx’s attention to histor- ically specific social forms – in particular the constitutive forms of the capitalist mode of production, the ‘value forms’ – that separates Marx and Marxian the- ory from traditional Marxism.9 Here, in his investigation into the commodity, value, money, surplus value, wage labour and capital, lies the heart of Cap- ital and the basis of Marx’s singular relevance for critical social theory today.10 These social forms make up the grammar of commercial societies, but, today, where do we look to learn this grammar? Its topics lie outside the horizons of mainstream social theories, whether in social philosophy or social science, for they pay no heed to the specific social forms constitutive of the capitalist mode of production. 8 Arthur 2002a, p. 39. The topic of abstract labour is complex and controversial. 9 ‘The value-form of the product of labour is the most abstract, but also the most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production; by that fact it stamps the bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of social production of a historical and transitory character. If then we make the mistake of treating it as the eternal natural form of social production, we necessarily overlook the specificity of the value-form, and consequently of the commodity-form together with its further developments, the money form, the capital form, etc.’ (Marx 1976a, p. 174, n. 33). 10 I intend to explore the scope of Marx’s significance for social theory in a future book, Capital’s Reach: How Capital Shapes and Subsumes. Acknowledgements In the fall of 1990 a thick letter-sized envelope showed up in my office mail- box.
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