Value-Form Theory and Class Definitions

What is your anecdotal example supposed to show? That there is a grey area borderline zone between exploited and exploiters? Well of course there is a grey area and there always has been even at the time of Marx. What does that prove though?

So the revolutionary subject is not the working class but instead an imaginary think tank?

It's the New True Socialism again (for the millionth time). Ellen Meiksins Wood dealt with this tiresome revenant a quarter of a century ago (See her "Retreat from Class" from 1986).

The only difference is the Germano-phile shtick. But then we all know that the German left from the 60s to present day, has always had problems reconciling "marxism" with their basic alienation from, and hostility to, the actually-existing German working class (in the shape of their parents). From Anti-Imp through to Anti-Deutsche, this unifying factor remains unchanged. This shit is so old...

Is that seriously the best PD has to offer? A rather un-original regurgitation of Manifesto Gegen Arbeit, which itself wasn't really that original. Talk about a dinosaur of an argument.

The thing is, value-form theory (in the broadest sense) is basically academic Marx philology, the debates within it are generally not about direct political questions, but issues of Marx research and interpretation. Of course the value-form people, merely by virtue of the fact of being people with an interest in Marx, are also "political" people, but it's not a unified political tendency.

The sole exception to this are left-communist political sects that incorporate value-form theory within a broader programmatic perspective. But as a result these are people who just mouth value-form jargon in an incoherent way (Anti-Germans are quite typical of this), or kind of squeeze value-theory into a sort of publicistic/journalistic agitational context, but without any real independent theoretical innovation (prime example being the Nuremberg "Wertkritik" groups that PD worship).

The Endnotes piece, which I find quite good, while offering a pretty good summary of the main focus that unifies various individual thinkers, is more intended as a way of teasing out some shared implications between the primarily German "value-form" debates and the primarily French "communisation" school that Endnotes has an affinity for.

To be fair, the two German journals that PD likes to claim as co-thinkers generally regard their critique of the "proletariat" as being categorical rather than phenomenal. So they're not criticizing the revolutionary potential of actually existing working-class people in a sociological sense, but rather taking issue with what they regard as a false philosophy of history that sees that proletariat as "destined" to play a revolutionary role (I notice this quite a bit with groups and individuals coming from a CLR James influence, for example).

I have quite a few problems with this approach (above all, the tendency to reduce all manifestations of the historical workers movement to being system-immanent struggles for the maintenance of the wage system and struggle for social recognition), but it's miles away from the inflated rhetoric of PD. As has been pointed out on other threads, PD seem blissfully unaware of their purported co-thinkers actually writing in support of union strikes, etc.

P.S. PD actually seem to like workers and unions so long as they suffer oppression in Islamic societies, which is kind of syptomatic of the quasi-Anti-German perspective they seem to have adopted on international politics.

Note also their positive reference to Adorno and Marcuse's notion of the "totally administed society", a position that their suppose co-thinker Robert Kurz vociferously attacked in his book on the Anti-Germans.

Seriously, PD really need to learn German so they can at least be up on what their claimed co-thinkers actually say, so as to spare themselves embarassments like this in the future.

Angelus Novus rightfully reminds us that 'value-form' theorists do not constitute a unified political tendency as this discussion between representatives of EXIT, Permanenent Crisis and Internationalist Perspective at the recent Platypus conference well illustrates:

http://media.platypus1917.org/marx-and-wertkritik/

Some interesting points made by all three speakers though IP comes closest to my point of view at least when I'm in a positive mood.

The discussion I mentioned above is also available via a link on the Internationalist Perspectrive blog alongside their contribution to the 'Differing Perspectives on the Left' workshop at the same conference, though the sound quality for those of us with some slight hearing disabillities is not great:

http://internationalist-perspective.org/blog/