Essence and appearance - still a problem for marxian theory today?

maybe I'm just thick skulled but I always find these debates rather wearying. I mean, I find the critiques of fetish and the value form interesting in Lukacs, Holloway, Debord etc. but I just find that this debate usually ends up in philosophical LALA-land.

How the hell do you organize for change around a critique of the value-form?? From what I've seen, you don't, you just hang out with a bunch of other intellectuals in cafes acting like pretentious wanks. And class analysis leads directly to firing squads??? please...

This doesn't mean that I'd deny that Capital as a social relation is ubiquitous (ie. the bit about covering everyone with shit), but I still fail to see how the beneficiaries of the shit-storm have any basis for relating with anyone else to stop the proliferation of shit. Workers however have a basis for organizing, a specific shared relationship to capital, have concrete experience with solidarity & co-operation etc. To me, these things seem relevant to revolutionary Praxis, in a way that talking about the Value-Form doesn't.

I'm going off on a tangent here. What I really wanted to say is that there has to be an simpler way of looking at this. If understanding why capitalism sucks requires knowledge of massive volumes of text & a post-graduate education, you can pretty much guarantee that we'll never get anywhere with any of this.

Not only are they being pretentious fucklords they aren't even doing it very well, they just end up back in idealist shit.

"Implies" is often -- thought not always -- a weasel word, a way of attempting to attribute a particular conclusion or argument to someone even though that argument is not a necessary consequence of a particular statement.

Given what I wrote, that for Marx's account, classes are a derivative category, mikus is closer to the intent of my statement when he writes:

I am saying that in Marx's account in the three volumes of Capital, it is indeed the case that social classes are only to be analyzed after the analysis of value (far after the analysis of value, really, since the fragment on classes appears at the end of volume III). Whether it "makes sense" to do it that way remains unresolved, since the fragment is just that -- a fragment, one from an unpublished manuscript published posthumously by Marx's close friend and sometimes collaborator.

Given that classes have existed in all historical societies with a steady social surplus product and developed division of labor, it indeed makes sense to deal with classes only after one has dealt with the concepts which are more "essential" to describing the capitalist mode of production. Pointing out the mere existence of social classes is no great insight, and it certainly offers no help in delineating the defining features of capitalism.

I am not sure what you mean by "philosophizing" Capital. Most of the writers in Germany dealing with these issues have almost nothing to do with philosophy. They tend to be political scientists (often grouped around institutes like the OSI at the FU Berlin). Michael Heinrich is a mathematician by formal training (though I won't put up a fuss if you want to call mathematics a kind of philosophy).

Some, like Robert Kurz, are outside of academia entirely and have a purely publicistic activity, even within bourgeois organs like Die Zeit and the Frankfurter Rundschau

I assume "philosophizing Capital" = form-analytical reading of Capital?

You're intelligent enough not to confuse this for an actual argument. Presumably it's intended more as polemical dismissal. Academic-baiting remains weak, though. In my case, I'm an unemployed, barely-graduated-school former low-level union bureaucrat.

At least in the local "scene" here, it is really not uncommon to encounter value- and form- analytical discussions of Capital within the non-academic extra-parliamentary left. A few summers ago, it seemed like every teenage Antifa poseur was name-dropping Heinrich, Postone, Wolfgang Pohrt, et al, when they weren't adorning leaflets with quotes from Adorno and Benjamin.

Superficial niveau, I grant you, but even a discussion without depth outside of grad student circles is still a discussion outside of grad student circles.

Perhaps the extra-parliamentary left on the island and across the pond is less pretentious (or less literate, take your pick).

Organize for "change"? You mean like Barack Obama?

So from the fact Marx starts an analysis of capitalism from the commodity and value in Capital you deduct that he is saying that social relations come from value?
The fact that there were social classes and then value would suggest to me that social classes are not derivative of value per se but rather brought it into being and are in turn shaped by it, which means they have a dialectical relationship and a dialectic that the proletariat is to explode from the inside out. There is a reason Marx talks of capital being the living dead, that it is dead labour that continues to haunt the living, because it is the actual alienated activity of real people which gives value it's power, it would really be something if Marx thought it was this spectre that ultimately determined the real relations of society in the final instance, it'd almost be like he'd went and put Hegel back on his feet again after initial turning him on his head.

Then again why actually bother dealing with subject/object and materialism, when you can just pretend the only thing that matters is the fact Marx starts Capital off by a discussion on the commodity and then ends with classes, no need to worry about the real relations of men or their history or the fact that there has to be a stratification of classes and a whole host of actual historical processes ie dispossesion, land clearance, colonialisation, slavery and such before commodity production could ever take off?

Angelus is correct on one thing though, I wouldn't call these Value form analysises philosophical at all, instead it's the idealism of bourgeois objectivism, our group of 'political scientists' and the like have made the basic error of mistaking the categories and form Marx uses to articulate his analysis of the capitalism with capitalism itself, much in the same way that bourgeois economists insist that it is real people that are wrong when their projections and policies fuck up. So the fact that Marx starts with the commodity and ends with classes leads to these muppets imagining that classes are simply deriative of value, in the way that someone reading a map to get to alandmark might imagine that the map created the landmark as they had the map before the landmark.

This gets to the heart of the matter, the fact that social classes aren't particular to capitalism doesn't mean to say they are 'less essential', that is absolute lunacy, like imagining electricity to be less essential to a PC because the use of electricity isn't what defines it against say a hairdryer. Infact it goes one step further and essentially claims that the PC itself creates the electricity. Seems Hegel wasn't the last of the German Idealists, when can we look forward to the publication of "Phenomenology of Value", I hope it's faster paced than it's prequel, maybe a chase scene or a love triangle in this one?

No. You're confusing Marx's depiction with the social reality he is describing. The account in _Capital_ is logically constructed, not historically. It's not like the book of Genesis, "in the beginning there was value". Rather, value is the determining subject of a productive process whose historical origins are not the subject of the book per se (the historical material is illustrative, that's why the stuff on primitive accumulation comes at the end of the book, not the beginning).

No, to say that the social classes of capitalist society brought value into being is to cease thinking of class as a social relationship and to think of it as an objective category. The process of primitive accumulation described by Marx involves the construction of these social classes as well as the social relationships that are the historical precondition for the system analyzed by Marx in the preceding chapters.

Whenever I hear the words dialectical and dialectics in casual conversation, that's when I reach for my revolver. As far as I can tell, most of the time it's meant to say "stuff is related to other stuff."

There is no way that anyone advocating a form-analytical approach to capital, not me, not Postone, not Sean68, not Heinrich, nobody, would state things in that way.

The irony here is almost suffocating. See the beginning of this post.

accidental double post.

Eh my point was exactly that Marx's starting point of analysis of the commodity is logically constructed, it was you that was implying it was because Marx saw
social classes as ACTUALLY derivative from Value.

Christ you can't even seem to keep track of the discussion ffs.

How is saying that value was a product of class relations ceasing to see classes as a social relationship? This is just nonsense. Changing social relations brought value into being and value in turn shapes the further development of these social relations. Class struggle is the engine of history afterall.

As for dialectics, well the term is used to cover a multitude of sins but in describing the relationship between subject and object, concrete and abstract it's pretty useful. Odd though that you can put soo much effort into an examination of Capital yet poo poo dialetics considering the importance of dialectics in Marx's writings. I mean the realtionship between social classes and value isn't simply interaction because they aren't two seperate entities rather one is actually internal to the other yet appears outside and above it, that is the supernatural nature of the commodity, as Marx says like a spectre. Social relations are haunted by their own ghost in the form of value.

libcom is haunted by its own ghost in the form of proselytism and the patronizing homophobic rants of cloistered, frustrated nitpickers

No, learn to read. I wrote:

Did you notice the key word, "account", and the phrase "in Marx's account"?

Again, learn to read.

How would one go about demonstrating the truth of a statement like that?

I didn't say anything about its usefulness. I did say that I only have a vague notion of what people mean when they drop the word into casual conversation.

I didn't "poo-poo" anything.

Do me a favor for the duration of this exchange: read what I write closely, and respond only to what I write. If you want to make inferences, try to make inferences that necessarily, or at least plausibly, follow from what I write. If the meaning of what I write needs clarification, ask for it.

For me to continue engaging in an exchange that eats into valuable translating time, I have to be getting something out of it. I get nothing out of it when you leap to conclusions that do not plausibly follow from what I write. It just gives the impression that you're quickly glancing over what I write and hitting the "post comment" button.

So let me get this clear, do you think Marx was saying classes are derivative of Value and more to the point do you agree with this or not? If you don't agree with it surely it puts at odds with Value form theorists such as Postone?

As for class struggle being the engine of all history well it was a quite from Marx and ofcourse requires many qualifications and is problematic if used to reduce all history to a crude economic determinism) but essentially I was using it to say that it is the social relations of men that ultimately drive history and not some abstract idealist value that somehow stands above us, remember value and the commodity only derive their supernatural powers from the alienation of our activity).

Regarding dialectics, well you're words were,

Which is slightly more loaded than "I have a vague idea what it means", no? Infact it came across as an off hand dismissal of dialectics as essentially meaningless and so allowing you to ignore my point. I also wonder how you can make sense of Postone's work if you don't have a notion about what a dialectic or think it's just 'inter relatedness' in regards to capital, afterall if their is one thing Postone is bang on the money about it's that labour and capital relations are two poles of the same dialectic.

What is that supposed to mean?? Just because politicians like to throw around words doesn't mean that the words themselves connote something bad. Yeah, let's give up on changing the world altogether.

Or maybe everyone is supposed to just see the Value-Form for what it is, and we'll all somehow suddenly be liberated by some sort of process of anti-fetishism or something????

that does seem rather unlikely, tsi. i'd say that beyond all the theory, one must :organize for change" not around some critique or theory, but around/WITH the people that are going to make that change for themselves. communists organize for change around their ideology/critique/whatever. people aren't liberated by magical processes of anti-fetishism. classes have little to do with value. they have to do with the exercise of hierarchical power and with fictional ("nominal") 'value' that people with power assign to things in order to best benefit themselves. that you're "proletarian" doesn't mean you're valuable or valueless. it means you have no control over what the world does with you. take control over your own life and you become a revolutionary. start trying to control others' lives and you go from revolutionary to rigid, off-in-far-flung-worlds-of-theory-and-illusions-of-grandeur communist brainwashee.

In Marx's account, meaning the three volumes of the MEW (23-25) that together constitute the three volumes of _Capital_, the social classes of capitalist society are a derivative category of value.

One can only meaningfully discuss classes, their constitution, their activity, their consciousness, only after systematically depicting the determinate forms of the capitalist mode of production.

As distinct from pre-capitalist modes of production, relations of domination are not personal, but impersonal, the objective (German: sachlich, or "thingly") domination of value and capital structures society.

This is as clearly formulated as it goes. I'm at a loss to put it any clearer.

Furthermore, this objective domination of value is not merely a misperception or illusion that covers up the "real" domination of one social class by another:

(emphasis mine)

If a statement requires many qualifications, at some point it's no longer a meaningful statement.

a) the Communist Manifesto was an agitational pamphlet, not a scientific treatise

b) It was written many years before Marx had begun with undertaking the critique of political economy. Only those who conceive of a static, unchanging Marx can use his work "as a quarry from which to extract quotations" (Heinrich) to present as "the" Marxist position.

Huh. I'd say that the laws of physics "ultimately" drive history, but WTFDIK?

"Alienation" is used within the context of the Parisian Manuscripts in a Feuerbachian sense to describe the alienation of a "human essence". Marx and Engels broke with this anthropological conception of human nature in the German ideology, and the category of "alienation" is non-existent in the critique of political economy (I think the word alienation might be used one or two times, but it's used in an "everyday" sense, not in a conceptual or categorical way).

It's a slightly more polemical way of saying "I have a vague idea of what it means". My issue is not with people like Chris Arthur or Moishe Postone who use "dialectic" in the specific sense of describing a way of developing categories.

My problem is with Marxists who drop it into casual conversation as a synonym for denoting how things are somehow connected to each other, or when they say that something has to be considered "dialectically", meaning that something has to be considered "on the one hand" and "on the other hand". Or it's used as a ten-dollar word for denoting supposed "opposites", like when you refer to capital and labor as being "two poles of the same dialectic".

I think "dialectic" is a word that should be avoided if one can make one's point in simple language.

You miss my point entirely. When you throw around vague, general terms like "change", you are leaving things wide open and subject to any interpretation.

Fascism would be a change from the current state of affairs. Regression to barbarism would also be a change. A new mode of regulation within the framework of capitalist commodity production would also be a change. Hell, a mere change in elected governments is also "change".

I am not for change as such. I am for communism.

I would formulate it this way: to be against capitalism, one has to know what capitalism is.

I have a word to describe purported anti-capitalists lacking a concept of capitalism: Chuck0

Specificity is good. Speaking about something clearly is good, but forgive me if I still say that you're nitpicking here.

Reaction is always going to be co-opting the language of the left and using it against us if history can serve as any guide whatsoever. In order to advance the libertarian-communist cause and prevent reaction, we ought to be organizing and forming a revolutionary Praxis that can stand up to the task of making revolution happen and overcome counter-revolutionary currents.

I take your point about Academic-Baiting being another common (usually devoid of content) form of armchair-revolutionary-syndrome, however, I think that there is a real point to be made about the estrangement of theory and practice.
n

This is true. But again, if knowing what capitalism is is a specialized discourse that the majority of workers are excluded from, well, we're screwed.

so what are we supposed to do exactly???? and then, what does embody socialism in 2008????

If these questions can't be answered definitively and succinctly I can't really see what use analyses of "the role of the underlying deep structure of capital" have.

"Ranting endlessly about wages, hours and working conditions" makes sense because it is rooted in concrete struggle, and grounded in the reality of what it is possible for us to effect in the immediate.

to be honest I didn't enter this discussion to disagree with Value-Form analyses per se or anything of the sort, but I'm starting to see why Revol is saying that this is Idealist and a Philosophizing of Capital. Am I mistaken???

If I am right to assume that you are being consistent here in objecting to Revol's phrase because it uses "alienation" in a conceptual way, I think you are quite wrong to say that Marx did not use this concept in his economic works. Without going into too much detail with regard to the Paris Manuscripts, I think that Marx was not merely Feurbachian here. Althusser was a poor philosopher, but he was correct, I think, in seeing the unwanted (for him) themes of the Paris Manuscripts in Marx's discussion of fetishism. There is an interesting passage in The German Ideology, buried in the section on Stirner, which I think very much goes against the narrative of the definitive "rupture" with the 'Early Marx':

I think here Marx is recognizing that in 1843-1844, his "real trend of thought" was already a significant advance on Feuerbach. This advance is evident in an understanding of alienation of "social relationships" themselves, as opposed to a fixed, ahistorical human essence, clearly brought out with regard to exchange-value in Marx's 1844 notes on James Mill:

The Grundrisse uses the same concept of alienation:

There are important passages where Marx summarizes many of his ideas using the concept of alienation. Here is the Grundrisse again:

Another example in Theories of Surplus Value:

So I think there are key passages where Marx is clearly using this concept. I don't think there is anything surprising about this, as he is quite clear that he is investigating a topsy-turvy world.

As for the philosophizing of Capital, if you think Marx is developing his categories according to some dialectical logic of theory-construction, whether a negative, positive, inverted, backwards, or dangling dialectic, I think you are philosophizing Capital. As Paul Mattick, Jr. put it,

so basically, if value is not destroyed as a social mediator we're going to run into an environmental pinch???? is anyone really arguing against the destruction of the value form??

Why do we need this long and rather cumbersome value-form analysis for this?? Isn't it sufficient to say "let's organize production democratically for the purpose of satisfying need!"?????

I'm just having some real trouble picturing a dystopian future where people are lamenting on the eve of mass-genocide, "if only we'd analyzed capitalism as being fundamentally characterized by the Value Form rather than a struggle between Classes!!!!"

In that case "implies" would not be the correct word to use. The problem would not be with the word "implies" but with a poor usage of it. And I agree that it is frequently abused. I do think that if you had argued that social classes were derivative of the category of value this would imply idealism. But I see you weren't arguing that now. More below.

The fact that Marx analyzed social classes after analyzing value doesn't say anything about social classes themselves, which is what the original discussion was about -- not about the "category" of social classes. This is why I saw your argument as idealist; it seemed that you were arguing something about social classes themselves on the basis of the "categorical" (a word I hate) relation of social classes to value (as "categories").

As an aside, the whole "Marx had to analyze things in such and such order" is a bit silly. He just as well could have started with social classes. Remember that the theory of value is not understood until price and interest (as well as rent and commercial capital) are understood. And also remember that value only exists because of the compulsion to cut costs, i.e. because of competition between capitals (which itself implies the existence of profit, and deviation of prices from value). Marx could just as well have started with competition and moved to an analysis of socially necessary labor-time which is enforced through competition (eventually getting back to commodities). Or perhaps he could have started with interest and then moved on to a discussion of its basis in the profit of industrial capital, at which point he would have went to surplus-value. Or maybe he could have started with an analysis of the State, of its source of revenue (tax on wages and profit, as well as state enterprises), and then moved on to the source of its revenue (the accumulation of capital and the wages and profit bound up with it).

In other words, he could have done it in a lot of different ways. Different things would be highlighted, and different things would have got finished in his lifetime, but since the capitalist system is reproducing one would have to return to the starting point of analysis in any case.

A lot of paper has been wasted on discussion of the starting point of Capital. I'm fine with Marx's starting point but I don't think it's a big deal in any case. It's more of a pedagogical issue than a substantive one.

The specific features of the classes of capitalist society are certainly historically specific, so there is no reason that the specifics of the social classes of the capitalist mode of production couldn't have been a starting point.

Basically, yes. The whole "value-form" school is a retreat from economics into a particular way of looking at labor in capitalism. (And certainly not an analysis of actual labor in capitalism!) The theses are not empirical ones but philosophical ones. Instead of talking about the causal relation of labor-time to prices (and to profit and capital), what is talked about is what supposedly occurs upon the "equalization" of commodities on the market: all of the differences between different labors are erased. (Or so the story goes.) One could just as well have said that all commodities are treated as equal sums of hydrogen, that no difference in the hydrogen content of commodities is acknowledged. But this is not discussed because the value-form people want to talk about labor-time. There is no claim that labor-time actually has a causal effect on other features of a capitalist society (such as prices or profit), but rather a strange view of what "necessarily" occurs when commodities are "equalized".

I can't see anything to call this but philosophy.

(I'm not supporting Bohm-Bawerk here, by the way, if you are thinking that.)

And no, I'm not saying that value-form theorists are primarily philosophers by profession. I'm saying that their way of doing economics is just bad philosophy.

It's not an argument. It's an expression of my attitude towards the type of Marxism you are in favor of. Like if you were saying "2+2=5" and I said "I'm glad you're not teaching children math!" Not an argument against your claim, but nonetheless a completely sensible statement.

And I'm not academic baiting. I have respect for academics, such as chemists, physicists, astronomers, and so forth. I have nothing but contempt for the sort of Marxism that exists in the academy. (With a couple of exceptions.) And this has nothing to do with anti-intellectualism. I'm familiar with the writers you have spoken of (insofar as they have been published in English) and I think that the sort of theory they produce is a joke. If intellectuals wanted to do very technical analyses of capitalism I'd be fine with it, and to some extent interested in it. But they don't do that. Instead they do bad philosophy.

I suppose you're right, in Germany grad student Marxism does seem to have penetrated outside of the grad student scene. Kind of like in America a certain kind of silly Negrian "Empire" talk has gone outside the bounds of grad school. It still makes sense to describe Negrian "Empire"-speak as basically confined to grad students.

Extra-parliamentary leftists in the US are just as pretentious and probably just as literature. They just have different taste.

I didn't say you said "I don't understand it so I like it." The fact that you like it and don't understand it is enough.

This is just plain wrong, and again rests on bad philosophy.

There is no "logical" construction in Capital. It is not a work of speculative philosophy (and thank God for that!). There is no "logical" connection between value and social classes, or between, say, money and surplus-value. If there is a connection, there is an empirical one. (And I do believe there is.) There is no logical connection between facts.

If the book was "logically" constructed the what we'd have would be one giant deduction, which is not the case. Your argument comes from a tendency to view Capital as a sort of Marxist version of the Science of Logic, where each category "necessarily" impels us to go to the next one. That is not the case. You may remember that Marx introduces quite a few "categories" by fiat (the most obvious one being "capital"). This is what happens in any real science.

If value were the "determining subject of [the capitalist] productive process" then cost-cutting would not be a factor in investment decisions, and you'd just have capitalists trying to work you as long as possible without caring about what they paid to get you to work that long. (As it generally is now, they only want you to work longer so long as it doesn't cut into the rate of profit.) You forget that it is the competition between capitals to cut costs which drives technical development and accumulation itself, and that this depends on the existence of profit (because that is what capitalists use in order to accumulate capital). Postone's tendency to write about "value" as if it determined everything in a capitalist society and his disdain for talking about surplus-value mischaracterizes the very nature of the capitalist mode of production. He attempts to fit the capitalist mode of production into his little philosophical box (in his case, a supposed real-life parallel to Hegel's Logic), and does considerable violence to his subject-matter (both the capitalist mode of production and Marx's Capital).

I wouldn't claim that social classes brought value into being, but this sentence is false -- classes existed before value and they were nevertheless social relationships. (Value isn't the only social relationship, after all.)

One thing we can agree on, but the whole school of thought that you are such a proponent of is very much indebted to dialectical nonsense.

To be fair to revol, your initial post was definitely unclear on whether or not you were talking about social classes or the "category" of social classes.

''Honey, I shrunk the Proletariat''

A hilarious new situation-comedy from diaprince studios in which zany philosophers shrink the proletariat and have to save them from the bumbling clutches of ''the left'', and their slightly hopeless evil leader played by bob hoskins.

The fact that you call emphasis on the appropriation of labor by non-laborers "vulgar" shows the kind of disdain that you have for discussion of surplus-value, which in Marx's account of capitalism is the main driving force for the capitalist system. (Although this operates through the thirst for profit and the cost-cutting that goes along with this.) Talking about "value" all day long won't get you anywhere in describing why technical progress is so important. True, Postone does talk about the so-called "treadmill effect" of productivity increases, but that isn't even remotely new, and any orthodox Marxist could have/would have told you the same thing. And he generally talks about this "treadmill effect" with regard to value, rather than surplus-value, which doesn't begin to do the topic justice.

And I have read Postone's book, probably more carefully than most of his supporters. The fact that I think it's garbage doesn't change that.