Communist values. Or a positive theory of socialism? - Per Henriksson

The economists want the workers to remain in society as it is constituted and as it has been signed and sealed by them in their manuals. [/] The socialists want the workers to leave the old society alone, the better to be able to enter the new society which they have prepared for them with so much foresight. – Marx, Misery of Philosophy, 1847

This text is an effort to address certain problems related to how to understand revolution as communisation, and the more fundamental, seemingly Marxological, question about value and abstract labour. Its aim is to discuss how, and with what categories and concepts, we are to understand the value form and therewith the laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production, as well as the abolishing of these laws by the establishment of communist relations. What spurred the writing of these remarks was the need to discuss, and reply to, the critique directed towards a communisation perspective from Peter Åström, at the time participant in the projects riff-raff and Sic, as well as the understanding of value and abstract labour at the basis of his critique. At stake is how to understand our present situation, with its concrete struggles, the state of health of the capitalist economy, the violently coming climate crisis, the geopolitical conflicts, etc., and at the same time the possible prospect of communism. About the latter, I will argue, is less to be said than what Åström tries to do, and as he claims to be a precondition for a successful communist revolution. When, however, communist relations, and thus communisation, first and foremost are to be determined negatively, they may hypothetically be posed positively as ‘communist measures’, or ‘communist initiatives’.¹⁾ The problems addressed concern what communism is, the way there from our horizon, how a communist revolution may take place, and what is abolished in this communist revolution – the capital relation, as a historically specific social relation of production.

These problems are theoretical. Communist perspectives are not yet another branch of left-wing dogmatism, programmes in hand, saying: This is the truth! On your knees! As a theoretical problem, its solution is practical: self-conscious, ‘grasped’ practice. The abolition of the capitalist mode of production, fundamentally constituting and constituted by the antagonistic relation between labour and capital, the proletariat and the capitalist class, implies the abolition of these classes, the proletariat included. How can we grasp and express this today? That is, as defined by TC, ‘How can the proletariat, by acting strictly as a class in the capitalist mode of production, abolish all classes and, by this, itself; i.e., how can the proletariat produce communism’.²⁾ I suggest this question can still serve as a guide to our efforts as communists. This decisive aspect of our understanding of capitalism and our projection of future communist relations are completely absent from Åström’s critique, and will only be dealt with in brief in the following.

I will argue that a communisation perspective is valid and adequate for our need to grasp the revolution of our time as a theoretical and negative ‘deduction’ from the really existing capitalism of today. Included in this specific notion of revolution is the practical abolition of the fundamental capitalist categories: value, money, labour, both as value-producing and as a separate activity, and classes. They will be abolished through the establishing of communist relations between individuals. They are to be understood as internally related, and as ‘thing-like’, institutional expressions and embodiments of the capitalist relations of production. They are not some random list of ‘evils’ to be done away with.

Further, I will try to show how Åström’s critique of the value-form paradigm misses its point, and that his understanding of value, labour, and Marx’s theory is both substantialist and essentialist, suffering from a kind of positivist sclerosis. The problem with his programme is not only and not primarily his preoccupation with value and abstract labour logically, as it were, or quantitatively. His problem lies deeper: With his focus on value proportions he can’t see that value expresses a specific relation of production; a social relation, at once constituting and constituted by the capitalist classes.

At the same time, however, he has exposed some weak spots in certain articulations of both the communisation perspective and the value-form paradigm, and this merits a continuation of the discussion. At best, Åström suggests a non-answer to the flaws he locates in communisation theory; at worst, the alternative he suggests, in its practical implementation, would take the shape of a state-planned economy, where socialist engineering, rationality and instrumentality, instead of capital, rules and dominates the individuals, specifically the immediate producers.

On the terrain Åström directs his critique, the controversy is not so much about communist revolution in a historically determined, specific form as communisation, but in a more abstract realm where we try to project a revolutionary overcoming as such. It may be illustrated by the frequent references in this discussion to the theory of Marx from the mid-decades of the 19th Century.

Åström claims that the communisation perspective as it has been promoted by, specifically, Théorie Communist (TC) and the Sic journal is characterised by an apocalyptic notion of revolution, which risks to annihilate the current level of productivity which, Åström argues, is the very precondition for the establishing of communism. Against this, Åström claims that communism may rationally solve the capitalist contradiction constituted by the fact that abstract labour is posited as the measure of wealth, while capital, at the same time, strives to reduce this labour to a minimum – ‘it does not need to blow everything up’ (Åström).³⁾

According to Åström, the value form and the commodity form are not internally related, i.e. necessarily and dialectically related. Value is not exclusive for capitalism and generalised commodity exchange, and may–should–exist also in communism. Abstract labour, as the substance of value, is to be the basis for the allocation of resources also in a communist society, to make possible the successive reduction of ‘necessary labour’ by making use of the development of the productive forces historically achieved in capitalism, and, as a result, make free up time for voluntary and creative work. He insists that it is not logically necessary that the value form be tied to the commodity form, although ‘logically possible and historically true’. The reason, according to him, is that abstract labour (‘labour in general’) is something transhistorical and not a kind of labour belonging exclusively to capitalism. Nevertheless, it is from the emergence of capitalism that abstract labour has become something real. It is no coincidence that value historically took a specific form with the commodity form. It is so due to the fact that the capitalist mode of production is the first mode of production in which abstract labour becomes ‘practically true’ when the immediate producers are no longer tied to a particular, concrete form of labour (agricultural labour) but forced to find employment wherever possible, as ‘labour in general’, to get money–i.e. wage labour.

Capitalism, according to Åström, is characterised by the circumstance that ‘we’ are ruled by value production, while communism must mean that ‘we’ take control over this production, in a first step towards the abolition of this form of production. In a society of ‘associated producers’ all labours are brought together in one total labour producing a total product, the distribution of activities is made on the basis of ‘socially necessary labour time’ and exchange is replaced by the plan. The product of labour is no longer a commodity since labour is not ‘private labour’ and the individual countributions are counted only as parts of one total product that, logically, cannot be exchanged for any other product – thus, it can no longer be an exchange value. It is, however, Åström claims, a value product since ‘the expended labour is calculated’ (Åström). Production and distribution are governed on the basis of this information. If there is no mechanism to take the place of commodity exchange, then there is no possibility to keep track of socially necessary labour-time.

‘Concrete’ and ‘abstract’ labour is expended simultaneously by the individual, so Åström claims, and concrete products of labour thereby contain abstract labour substance, i.e. value, but do not appear as bearers, or deposits, of value. In excess of this, a ‘surplus’ is produced as insurance for natural and other catastrophes and to compensate for natural variations of production. Capital, on the other hand, can ‘by definition’ not be taken over in the same manner due to its imperative to accumulate. He thereby argues that capital is to be abolished, but value is to continue its existence.

According to Åström, the analysis of capital and its dialectical presentation is not to take as its point of departure the value form of a commodity as the logical precondition for abstract labour. If we, like Chris Arthur, Åström claims, argue that the value form logically precedes value-producing labour, and that the value form in its manifestation as commodity form logically leads to the money form, and further to the capital form, and from this constitutes the capitalist totality, we have only deduced that the value form of the commodity, by logical necessity, must assume money and capital form. By such a procedure, you only take the ‘really existing value form’ as your point of departure (which is also what Marx does, according to Åström). And now you are only capable of analysing capitalist production.

What Åström claims to do is, hypothetically, to keep the category of value and all its ‘logically necessary dimensions’: substance–labour in general–; measure–socially necessary labour time–; and form (as such). By implication, value may assume another form than that of commodity form and exchange value. He claims that the value-form paradigm assumes categories such as value, abstract labour, etc. as necessarily related, capitalist categories, and these are not investigated properly. The result of this faulty procedure is that if one category is done away with, then all the others must follow by logical necessity.

Thus far Åström’s argument, that hits soft-spots in both the communisation perspective and in value-form theory, as well as what may seem like ambiguities in Marx’s theory. The first part of this text will address Åström’s critique of the communisation perspective and the image of a post-capitalist society that emerges, manifest and latently, from his argumentation. The second part will focus on Marx’s doctrine of value and on Åström’s understanding of the same, and the implication it has for our practice and orientation in the present situation. The approach will be to, essentially, limit the discussion to those aspects of Marx’s theory that are immediately addressed by Åström. Thus, no effort will be made to reconstruct Marx’s doctrine of value (and capital) as such.

It is always hazardous to speak of the future […].⁴⁾

Since riff-raff no. nine (and Sic no. one) was published in 2011, and Peter Åström wrote his text on “Crisis and communisation”, he has come to develop a critique of the communisation perspective–a critique of the dignity of a veritable break with this entire perspective. In the same process, he has also re-valued his understanding of the conceptual apparatus of Marx, in particular the key categories “value” and “abstract labour”, with implications for both the understanding of the present situation and of a possible, future communist society, as well as for the path leading there.⁵⁾

It seems to be one text in particular that provoked Åström's fierce critique of the communisation perspective: (the late) BL’s “The suspended step of communisation” in Sic no. 1 (2011). What may have triggered his critique, and after a while his abandonment, of this entire milieu and “paradigm” may eventually be illustrated by the following quotations:

The situation where everything is for free and the complete absence of any form of accounting is the axis around which the revolutionary community will construct itself. Only the situation where everything is for free will enable the bringing together of all the social strata which are not directly proletarian and which will collapse in the hyper crisis. Only the situation where everything is for free will integrate/abolish all the individuals who are not directly proletarian, all those ‘without reserves’ (including those whom revolutionary activity will have reduced to this condition), the unemployed, the ruined peasants of the ‘third world’, the masses of the informal economy. [– – –] The process of communisation will indeed be a period of transition, but not at all a calm period of socialist and/or democratic construction between a chaotic revolutionary period and communism. It will itself be the chaos between capital and communism. It is clear that such a prospect, though well-founded, has nothing exciting about it! [– – –] Communism integrates production and consumption, as well as production and reproduction. For that reason, all book-keeping–all keeping track of accounts–is abolished, since accounting for ‘products’ in itself supposes the separation between production and consumption.⁶⁾

For BL, thus, it is about a situation when means of subsistence have been rendered “gratis” (free of charge), and when production and distribution is not calculated and accounted on the basis of the amount of labour bestowed upon them. This will forcefully attract non-proletarian layers into the movement of communisation, since they will no longer be able to sell their products (as commodities). This revolutionary process will be all but a peaceful process of socialist construction according to some rational plan.

In his text “Crisis and communisation” from 2011, Åström emphasised that a global crisis of exploitation will not automatically lead to revolution, but that a revolution is not conceivable in the absence of such a crisis; at the same time, ‘a communist revolution today is one of the most difficult and dangerous things one can imagine […]’. The communisation perspective, he claimed at the time, is not to be understood as a strategy or method among others, as if the proletariat stand in front of ‘a smörgåsbord of possible revolutionary solutions’. It is, to the contrary, to be understood as a material necessity to be confronted by means of ‘communist measures’.

Today, he characterises such a scenario as an apocalyptical notion of revolution where its advocates prefer and even emphasise a situation of chaos, rather than descriptively project in what kind of circumstance it is plausible to speak of communist measures at all, a process of communisation as a revolution within the revolution (TC). Åström claims that such a perspective of revolution threatens to extinguish decisive elements of the forces of production that Man has developed historically, in particular during the era of capitalism. The result would be that we remain within the ‘realm of necessity’. Socialism, according to Åström, must be understood as a positive abolition of capitalism, an Aufhebung that will preserve but restructure the achieved level of material production and reproduction in capitalism. Man, then, would master technology instead of the opposite, as today, to be subsumed under technology in the form of capital, personified by the capitalist.

Be that as it may. The problem is inadequately posed. What should be emphasised is the social praxis of Man, not its object or result.⁷⁾ With praxis we focus on social relations. Communism, fundamentally, is about praxis and social relations. Expressed abstractly, what we will have to do is to de-reify capitalist categories as material forms of appearance of the inverted relations of bourgeois society.

Concerning the discussion about the level and extent of the forces of production as the precondition for a post-capitalist, socialist society, what should be brought to the front is science in the broad sense, and with it social Man himself as the most important force of production. ‘The productive forces and social relations—two different aspects of the development of the social individual—appear to capital merely as the means, and are merely the means, for it to carry on production on its restricted basis. IN FACT, however, they are the material conditions for exploding that basis’.⁸⁾ In a post-capitalist context, in ‘a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle’ (Capital I),⁹⁾ other goals and aims will apply than profits, not even the most efficient way to produce, to expend the least amount of ‘socially necessary labour-time’ in order to increase ‘surplus labour-time’, now in the form of the greatest amount possible of disposable, free time.

It is, therefore, one-sidedly and, thus, faulty to consider forces of production as mere technology. Such a one-sidedness results in and expresses the reification of social relations in capitalism. It limits the perspective to a narrow infra-capitalist perspective that is incapable of seeing beyond the horizon of bourgeois society. It has a hard time seeing the implications of those phenomena through which the capitalist mode of production points beyond itself. Material forces of production are immensely important, but do not by themselves define the very level of the forces of production claimed to be necessary for the overthrow of the capitalist relations. Of greater importance is the intellectual capabilities of Man in the widest sense, our compiled and historically developed ‘objectified power of knowledge’ [Wissenskraft], as Marx expressed it in the Grundrisse.¹⁰⁾ Social Man carries the real achievements and level of science as ‘the repository of the accumulated knowledge of society’.¹¹⁾ As a separate activity and specialised domain, however, science will be abolished too to be included in communist praxis as a totality.

What should be in our focus when it comes to forces of production, their level and preservation in, and after, a revolution is the very capabilities we carry inside, as it were, in the form of the level of science in its widest sense, and in our intellectual capabilities and possibilities expressed in reason. With this in mind, the material rebuilding in and after revolution, after capital has unleashed its destructive forces against Man and matter–and not, as claimed by Åström, because the revolutionary process will destroy machinery, etc. as some apocalyptic communisation movement–, seems to be a practical-material problem not too hard to handle. And we disregard here already those means of production that are immediately destructive today and therefore must be abolished, or, when possible, made use of in other, sustainable forms. Concerning the latter, Åström’s argument is to consider revolution as ‘de-accumulation’, the successive abolishing of destructive and redundant technology.¹²⁾ These are complex problems, and cannot be further developed within the confines of this text.

Today, in 2022, we seem to be standing in front of the very same sample-card of possible revolutionary solutions Åström criticised a Decade ago. We seem to face a rational consideration of the advantages of communism when it comes to production and reproduction as opposed to market anarchy and the exploitation by capital of humans and nature. It seems to rest on premises that take for granted, as if we ‘could undertake reconstruction in some sort of void’ (Pannekoek),¹³⁾, and to postulate ‘revolutionary change without revolution’ (Dauvé).¹⁴⁾ That this is impossible, Åström most certainly agrees with. After all, he does not advocate ‘temporarily liberated zones’ (including a piece of land you just may have bought and from which you may contemplate a coming insurrection) or some aristocratic ‘withdrawal’. The immediate problem with his perspective, however, is practical. It would seem to be impossible, and futile, to apply your plan elaborated in advance, according to the scheme of Åström, in the absence of a rather calm sea and an acceptable level of immediate subsistence (food, clothing, shelter, infrastructure (including the Internet), etc., so you will have the time and resources to start putting into action a planned reconstruction. No less important, it postulates the absence of any counter-revolutionary force–ultimately, it would amount to the absence of a revolutionary situation. And as noted in the introduction above, already ‘class’, and thus class struggle, is absent from Åström’s programme.

Still more important are the implications indicated when the image is drawn ad absurdum. To begin with, the distinction between a realm of necessity and one of freedom implies a split into two of the social working-day, which would also imply that labour has not been abolished as an activity distinctly separated from other aspects of life. That is, the proletarians would not yet have turned ‘against the existing “production of life” itself’, but would rather act within the same logic as earlier–non-proletarian–revolutions that have only tried to revolutionise ‘the separate conditions of the existing society’.¹⁵⁾ Communism, however, is about the overthrow of precisely human activity, praxis, and not merely a successive reduction of ‘necessary labour-time’ to set free disposable (surplus) time. This pair of categories is obsolete with communist practical relations.¹⁶⁾

Philosophically stated: communism is a vita activa. We should not fear seriousness and effort. We may therefore concur with Marx’s position, that ‘really free work, e.g. the composition of music, is also the most damnably difficult, demanding the most intensive effort’.¹⁷⁾ In Åström’s argument we see a notion of necessary labour as ‘repulsive’ (Adam Smith)–which it very well may be, but that is of lesser importance when we discuss communist versus capitalist (wage-labour) activities.

Further, a revolution is not solely necessary as the only way to overthrow the powers that be, but because the force that shall overthrow the old shite itself will have to be revolutionised and capable of constitute the new (cf. The German ideology). Communist individuals are not the precondition for, but the result of a revolution as well as its means. Communism is done, conscious-self-reflectively, spontaneous and experimenting–rather than as following a plan. You make a revolution–and that will change people, as Martin Glaberman once said. The proletariat makes revolution–warts and all; all forms of oppression obviously have to be opposed in each and every situation, already today.

When it comes to the notion and perspective of communisation, I suggest they be developed from the theoretical efforts and work by, in particular, TC, and specifically their understanding of ‘programmatism’ and its collapse, as well as their periodisation and their stress on how the ‘economic’ aspects of the relation of capital is internally related to the aspects of class and class struggle. To be emphasised, in this context, is their theoretically deductive approach in understanding communisation in relation to the collapse of programmatism and an entire cycle of struggles. As argued in ‘Proletariat et capital’ they ground the judging on the clues, and glimpses, provided by and recognised in the struggles of a fundamental questioning of the class belonging of the proletariat, on a déduction théoretique.¹⁸⁾ They have developed their theory in order to be able to grasp and explain the phenomenon they face–class struggle. In the same way, the decline of the workers identity is to be understood as a logical deduction of the structure of the restructured relation of exploitation. It is, however, not to be understood as a one-way street from above to below but as a specific dialectic with which concept and phenomenon are developed simultaneously. In other words, the struggles that are being analysed from the theoretical perspective and system in which we are situated–we are not situated outside of class struggle or the capital relation, with some pretension to analyse them objectively, externally, unbiased or without presuppositions, as it were, without getting our fingers dirty. Our practical and interpretative horizon is objective; at the same time, concepts and perspectives are being developed in the process in which struggles occur and are being analysed. Further, this is related to the larger context understood as the really existing capitalism (and class struggle) of today.

I will limit myself to a brief reconstruction of aspects of TC’s work to be considered key, and possible to develop further, that are relevant in the context of this conversation with Åström.

In ‘Self-organisation and communisation’, TC, inter alia, discusses how to understand communisation in relation to autonomy and self-organisation. Autonomy as a category, goal and phenomenon cannot be separated from a stable working class that can relate to itself in its struggle against capital, and from this affirm itself as a potential, future ruling class. ‘Autonomy’, TC claims, ‘was the project of a revolutionary process extending from self-organisation to the affirmation of the proletariat as the dominant class of society, through the liberation and affirmation of labour as the organisation of society’. Its demise is not the demise for class struggle as such, but the demise for a historical era or phase of class struggle: It is ‘a radical form of unionism’. It was in the large factories that the workers could demand from capital their recognition due to the productive labour being the life-giving fire of capital. They could, thus, demand to be recognised as a legitimate party of negotiation. Obviously, these factories have not disappeared, but they do not any longer define the principle of organisation of the labour-process and valorisation-process. The workers’ identity that expressed this relationship has lost its foothold with the restructuring of the relation of capital and of class since the 1970s, which today constitute the actually existing capitalism.

For TC, the point is not ‘to make a normative condemnation of self-organisation, but to state what it is […]’. Expressed somewhat philosophically: ‘the proletariat as revolutionary subject abolishes itself as subject of autonomy’ in the revolution as communisation, it is a rupture within class struggle, ‘the self-transformation of a subject that abolishes what defines it’. TC’s claim is that in the current struggles we can see communisation as une annonce in the ‘gaps’ produced by the struggles, and these gaps are ‘the dynamic of this cycle of struggles’.¹⁹⁾ This cycle of struggles is characterised primarily on the one hand on the decomposition of proletarian identity, and on the other hand on the reconstruction of the capitalist mode of production which implies that the antagonism between labour and capital is situated on the level of the reproduction of the classes.²⁰⁾

What I suggest is that the communisation perspective is both relevant and adequate for our understanding of communism and revolution based on the contemporary actually existing capitalism. For this, TC’s participation can serve as a point of departure. Åström’s critique of the more wild or speculative (in the ordinary sense) aspects of the communisation perspective, may hit some soft-spots in this theoretical system; nevertheless, it misses the hard kernel of the revolutionary perspective of a notion of communisation.

Åström’s, explicit and implicit, alternative is, at best, a huge leap back in history, at least to a revolutionary program à la 1920. At worst, where his argument ends, as it were, an image is conjured up of a planner state, constituted by a rational and instrumental ’socialist engineering’. Even this image, however, seems to be unlikely, already from the fact that both class and class struggle is absent from his scheme, and that revolution, thus, seems to be a revolution without revolutionary overthrow, or rather a revolutionary overthrow without revolution, in which ‘production’ (‘labour’) is kept as a separate sphere–to be able to maintain the achieved level of labour productivity (understood most narrowly). Only distribution is to be altered from the anarchy of the market to the regulation of the departments of planning and prognosis. One could even argue, that this scheme is based on a Schumpeterian ‘socialism’ as a bureaucratic overgrowth into a socialist planned economy, in which bureaucrats and intellectuals regulate the economy, or, in a more dramatic scenario, as a palace revolution. The invisible hand of the market is replaced by the visible and transparent hand of bureaucracy.

The somewhat dismal image I have felt obliged to conjure up from Åström’s argument has its theoretical ground in Åström’s reconsideration of Marx’s conceptual apparatus, first and foremost of ‘value’ and ‘abstract labour’, and in the remaining part of this text I will focus on this aspect.

[A] man who has not understood the present state of society may be expected to understand still less the movement which is tending to overthrow it, and the literary expressions of this revolutionary movement.²¹⁾

To be able to say anything about a way out of bourgeois relations, the capitalist relations of production, we must have a clear view of what it is we are to abolish in a communist revolution that sublates these relations. And who will do it. If we say that a communist revolution will sublate or abolish what determines the proletariat as a capitalist class–the capitalist categories value, money, capital, etc.–it is not about some mere discursive abolition, a change of words for phenomena that, as such, will subsist after capitalism as well. Needless to say, when categories are abolished in a revolutionary sense it is the phenomena (relations) that are expressed in concepts and categories in capitalism, and these are, as it were, objectively valid within and for this system, if, however, false in the sense of expressions of false relations. To pose it as a question: What is to be undone? (Endnotes)

Marx’s theory of class is developed on the basis of his theory of value, and the relation between wage labour and capital determines the entire character of this mode of production.²²⁾ These main characters of the drama personify and embody the economic categories wage labour and capital, as specific social characteristics of the individuals of bourgeois society. The aim of capital is not merely to produce food and machines as fast and as cheaply as possible in order to, at the end of the day, having earned as much money as possible. The result of the capitalist process of production is not only commodities, and not only surplus value–the overarching goal of capital is the production and reproduction of the very capital relation itself, the relation between labour and capital, between the proletariat and the capitalist class.²³⁾ This is realised by way of the exploitation of the wage labouring class, in an expanding scale within and through the accumulation of capital. Capital is the overarching moment of the capital relation; it dominates and constitutes bourgeois society. As process of accumulation, it is a historical development at each and every time appearing historically in a specific character. That is, same ole capitalism, in constant change.

We find commodities, value, capital, money, etc. earlier in history. But, Marx notes, it is only with capitalism that the exchange of commodities becomes general, and with this value and its form of appearance as money become predominant. That is, only with capitalism does the commodity form becomes the general form of the products of labour, produced to be exchanged on the market. First and foremost, this applies to labour power itself; it assumes commodity form in capitalism: it becomes wage labour. For the wage labourer it is the wage, i.e. money, i.e. exchange value, that is the very aim and goal of working. This is so, because of the fact that the immediate producer has been historically robbed of both means of production and subsistence–tools, material, and food. She is forced to sell her labour power to be able to eat, dress, and find shelter. Her poverty, thus, is absolute, not relative.

This, I suggest, is what Marx has in mind in his famous ‘Introduction’ to the critique of political economy from 1857–often, but a bit carelessly called the introduction to the Grundrisse. In this sketch, Marx labels the abstraction of labour, as it had been presented by the classical economists, as being ‘true in practice’.²⁴⁾ In our context, it is telling that this formulation is emphasised by Åström in his critique of the value-form paradigm, and by Dashkovsky in his critique of Rubin’s doctrine of value in the 1920s.²⁵⁾ As noted in the reconstruction of the argument of Åström above, he claims that it is only in capitalism that ‘labour in general’ becomes a reality, something ‘practically true’, because the immediate producers are no longer tied to specific tasks and forms of labour, but free to take any and all employments, i.e. the immediate producers are absorbed by the social and historical form of labour, wage labour, with its mere aim and goal in money.

In his ‘Introduction’, Marx notes that this practically true abstract labour is most, and most clearly, developed in the US. There, labour, labour as such, ‘not only as a category but in reality’, has become the means to the creation of wealth as such, i.e. abstract wealth: exchange value, money.²⁶⁾ In the US, in contrast to vast parts of Europe at the time, individuals may, and must, move between different kinds of labour, employments, and places. This creates a certain indifference in the working individual towards the kind of labour to be performed, towards the content of labour, since the aim and goal of working is money, i.e. the wage. However, Marx will note a decade later in Capital III, that it is not (the category) wage labour that forms the commodity value:

Although the form of labour as wage labour is decisive for the form of the entire process and the specific mode of production itself, it is not wage labour which determines value. In the determination of value, it is a question of social labour time in general, the quantity of labour which society generally has at its disposal, and whose relative absorption by the various products determines, as it were, their respective social importance. The definite form in which social labour time prevails as decisive in the determination of the value of commodities is of course connected with the form of labour as wage labour and with the corresponding form of the means of production as capital, in so far as solely on this basis does commodity production become the general form of production.²⁷⁾

For our present purpose, as well as for the theory of value and capital by Marx, it is important to distinguish between different determinations and abstractions of labour that express value and commodity producing labour in capitalism.²⁸⁾

In a rather straightforward way it is obviously the wage labourers that produce the products the capitalists sell as commodities in order to make a profit. But in the form of immediate producers–with the aid of means of labour and production–, as individuals performing living labour, this determination of labour has to to with the concrete aspect of commodity producing labour. The capitalist purchases the right to use the labour power of the wage labourer for a certain time, and as a commodity this labour capacity, this use value, belongs to the capitalist for the contracted time. It is consumed by being put in use, as labour, together with other factors of production to create the objects, products of labour, that are to be sold as commodities on the market with the aim to provide the capitalist with a surplus above the money spent on buying these factors of production (in the form of commodities). In this circumstance, living labour is functioning as a use value for the capitalist; but it constitutes the source of the exchange value he has in mind: money, and on closer inspection, surplus value in the form of more money than he had in his pockets before making his investments. Dough tastes better than the cake, also for a cookie manufacturer.

The unique use value the capitalist wants to lay his hands on, use value par excellence, however, is the ability of labour power to produce more value than it itself represents, i.e. to produce surplus value for total capital, and profit for the individual capitalist. The surplus labour-time, producing a surplus product, the capitalist appropriates ‘gratis’, free of charge; in value form, it constitutes the surplus value capital has in mind when purchasing the right to use the labour capacity of the wage labourer. With the assumptions made by Marx in Capital, the wage labourer is paid with money representing the value of her labour power. But the capitalist has the right to use the labour power for a longer period than the time corresponding to the reproduction of this labour power (in value terms), and with this institutional arrangement he appropriates surplus value, i.e. more value than implicated by the exchange of equivalents between worker and capitalist.²⁹⁾

When we–and Marx–speak of value producing abstract labour it is, according to its concept, other than the category of wage labour. To be able to grasp the theory of value it is vital to distinguish between the categories abstract labour and wage labour. Practically and historically, however, they belong to each other intimately, since only in capitalism do the products of labour, on the basis of wage labour, with wage labour as its precondition, in general assume commodity form, thus value form. In the strict and systematic sense, thus, it is not wage labour that produces value.

To return to the argumentation of Åström: The abstraction of labour that is ‘true in practice’ in Marx’s 1857 “Introduction” has to do with wage labour, and not with value producing abstract labour as it is developed and determined in Critique and Capital. Thus, in general, we need to observe that it is not necessarily the same kind of abstraction of labour in the Grundrisse and in Capital.³⁰⁾ It is misleading, I’d claim, to speak of value producing abstract labour as being ‘true in practice’, since that label has to do with another category and abstraction of labour. However, emphatically, we should by value producing ‘abstract labour’ understand this abstraction of labour as a real abstraction, socially effective in the capitalist mode or production.

Concerning the (implicit) claim by Åström that value and value form are accidentally and externally related, it immediately seems to contract Marx’s spirit and letter. Value (as such) is to be considered as a purely qualitative determination, socially necessary labour time as a purely quantitative determination, and the value form as uniting and expressing these determinations as exchange value, price, money. Thus considered, they are necessarily, and not accidentally related. Marx highlights this internal relation between value and value form most clearly in the first edition of Capital I (1867), in which, immediately before what from the second edition (1872) is known as the doctrine of the fetish character of the commodity, he notes: ‘What was decisively important, however, was to discover the inner, necessary connection between value-form, value-substance, and value-amount; i.e., expressed conceptually [ideell], to prove that the value-form arises out of the value-concept’.³¹⁾ In other words, this is to be understood as the historical form of a product of labour as commodity being internally related to its aspect as object of value, the supersensible, social aspect of a commodity, carried by its sensuous-concrete aspect as object of utility and use value. ‘Value’ is thus not to be understood as some substance that exists without form or context, as some natural, positive substance of a thing as soon as it has been touched and transformed by a human hand, produced for some useful purpose whatsoever. Value does not dangle in mid-air, waiting for some form to enter. In the same sense, the value form does not exist positively without content, as some arbitrary container waiting to be filled by a substance. Both create and are created by each other by way of the exchange of products as commodities against, and through, money.³²⁾

Actual value has to do with the historical social form that is characterised by a general and dominating exchange of commodities, i.e. a capitalist mode of production and a bourgeois society. Value is a social relation of production and not some property of a thing as product of labour.³³⁾ As noted by Marx in a letter to Engels (April 2, 1858), value as such is to be understood as a ‘historical abstraction’. An obvious indication for the historical determinateness of value is provided by Marx in the Grundrisse: ‘The concept of value wholly belongs to the latest political economy, because that concept is the most abstract expression of capital itself and of the production based upon it. In the concept of value, the secret of capital is betrayed’.³⁴⁾

As categories, commodity form and value form are not identical and shall not be blended. The value form is merely one aspect of the commodity form of a product of labour. They are, however, internally related: ‘Every product of labour is, in all states of society, a use value; but it is only at a definite historical epoch in a society’s development that such a product becomes a commodity, viz., at the epoch when the labour spent on the production of a useful article becomes expressed as one of the objective qualities of that article, i.e., as its value’.³⁵⁾ In a letter to Engels (July 22, 1859), Marx notes: ‘the specifically social, by no means absolute, character of bourgeois production is analysed straight away in its simplest form, that of the commodity’. By exchanging products of labour as commodities they become objects of value. At the same time, it is only in a specific historical epoch that the ‘objective’ property of the products of labour is expressed as labour, as time, as value. For this reason, Marx speak of the value character of a commodity as its ‘ghostly objectivity’ [gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit], as the ‘common [gemeinschaftliche] social substance’ of different commodities.³⁶⁾

This circumstance becomes even more clear when Marx, in Capital III, in discussing human labour as such as ‘a mere ghost’, notes: ‘“the” Labour, which is no more than an abstraction and taken by itself does not exist at all, […] the productive activity of human beings in general, by which they promote the interchange with Nature, divested not only of every social form and well-defined character, but even in its bare natural existence, independent of society, removed from all societies, and as an expression and confirmation of life which the still nonsocial man in general has in common with the one who is in any way social’.³⁷⁾ This ‘mere ghost’ does not positively exist, as an empirically fact, but it has practical effect in capitalism; it is a poltergeist making its presence known both day and night. It is the phantom that ascribes to the product of labour its objectivity as value, its ‘ghostly objectivity’, as one aspect of the fetish character of commodities: that the aspect of human labour that produces value seems to be ‘human labour as such’. This character of being human labour is its specific social character, and what makes it a historically determined form of ‘social labour’. Value producing abstract labour is thereby not ‘labour’ without any form, but a specific (social, historical) form by which labour appears as ‘labour’.

What in all forms of society is, formally, expressed in the products of labour as objects of utility assumes in capitalism also a purely social objectivity as value, constituted by ‘abstract labour’ as a historical determination of human labour. In his marginal notes to Adolph Wagner, from 1881–2, Marx clarifies that ‘the “value” of the commodity merely expresses in a historically developed form something which also exists in all other historical forms of society, albeit in a different form, namely the social character of labour, insofar as [sofern] it exists as expenditure of “social” labour-power’.³⁸⁾ The bare expenditure of labour-power is, in capitalism, the social form of value producing labour. Value is the purely social substance of commodities that is established and existent in the relation between (at least) two commodities, as their common ‘third’, as it were. The price-tags of commodities have nothing to do with some metaphysic property of human labour as such. But, as commodities, the labour bestowed upon them nevertheless appear as their value, as, in the words of Marx’s critique of the Gotha programme (1875), ‘a thing-like quality possessed [bessesene] by them’.³⁹⁾

We can look further back in history and find phenomena similar to the one that in capitalism is labelled ‘value’, as the economic form-determination of a product of labour. If you (Åström) prefer to call them ‘value’, you will have to consider that they are ‘values’ in a sense different from in capitalism. First and foremost, this is due to the fact that no mode of production prior to capitalism has been characterised as dominated and defined by value as a social relation of production. The fundamental and critical question par excellence is why human labour assumes its expression in value, and the time necessary for its production is expressed in the quantity of value. It is not about reducing the exchange values of commodities to human labour, as was achieved already by classical political economy, but, from this abstraction, show why (a specific aspect of) human labour necessarily expresses itself in the value of the products of labour whenever they are transformed into commodity form, and why the amount of this labour determines its quantity as the proportion according to which different commodities relate to each other.

In this light, I suggest we should interpret the widely cited–by Åström too–letter by Marx to Kugelmann (July 11, 1868) in which he makes clear that ‘the form in which this proportional distribution of labour asserts itself in a state of society in which the interconnection of social labour expresses itself as the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products’. That is, as the value character of the products, as objects of value, and as values of specific amount and proportions. In general, as a general abstraction, Marx claims, it is a tautology to say that the distribution of ‘social labour’ according to the (historically) varying needs cannot be denied with some historically specific form of social labour. Therefore, we cannot agree with the interpretation by Åström that Marx in this letter merely states that the concept of value, and the product of labour as an object of value, is a truism for the self-evident fact that Man always has to produce her physical and social existence, and to distribute the products of this production according to the specific needs.

It is true that in Capital III Marx makes the remark that ‘after the abolition of the capitalist mode or production, but still retaining social production, the determination of value continues to prevail in the sense [in dem Sinn] that the regulation of the labour time and the distribution of social labour among the various production groups, ultimately the bookkeeping encompassing all this, become more essential than ever’.⁴⁰⁾ But as noted by e.g. Paul Mattick, in this context the word ‘value’ is only to be understood as a manner of speech.⁴¹⁾ When Marx’s conceptual apparatus is strictly applied, the category of value is not to be handled as a mere manner of speech; the determination of the commodity as an object of value is not some value nominalism.

Value is the purely social substance of exchange value, constituted by abstract labour, as a social relation–not as a thing-like property, other than as (a socially necessary) illusion (Schein). As such, this relation is reified, and necessarily expressed in and objectified as the autonomised form as money. Without form, value can neither be measured nor observed; value is not something in itself invisible, as, e.g., radioactivity or carbon monoxide. Value does not exist positively without form, without a value form, without its necessary form of appearance as money. When Marx remarks that no chemist has ever found value in a pearl or diamond, it is not only as irony but as a matter of fact.

From a bourgeois horizon, the appearance of ‘labour’, as substance, as ‘objectivity’–obviously!–be categorised as ‘value’; then, however, it is not ‘real’ or ‘actual’ value, but value in one-sided, undeveloped (mentally ideal), mutilated form, as an analytical abstraction. In brief, when Marx in his letter to Kugelmann, cited above, speaks of social labour (in general), he does not necessarily speak of abstract, value-producing labour or value, as something general, transhistorical, that exists in itself, ready to find some (contingent) historical form dangling in mid-air. Value is not a transhistorical category that expresses ‘human labour in general’ and, pace Åström, will prevail in a future communist context. Value is a historical abstraction as the (social) substance constituted by a specific form of social labour, that in and through the form of money makes labour count, and be counted, as human labour as such.

Even if we would accept a notion of communism characterised by the accounting and measuring of labour-time as the basis of the allocation of the social resources, it would still not be ‘value’; value is–to state it once again–a historically determined, specific social relation of production, neither a property of a product of labour nor of human labour as such. The character ‘value-producing abstract labour’ is not a property of human labour in general.

The relation between the substance and the measure of value (socially necessary labour-time), too, is internal and dialectical–not external or contingent. This is emphasised by Marx in the afterword to the second edition of Capital I (1872), with the remark that this relation, in the first edition, remained only ‘alluded to’.⁴²⁾ Socially necessary labour-time, that determines the quantity of the value of a commodity, is its purely quantitative determination; it is itself determined by several concrete and technical circumstances of which Marx lists a brief summary, as, e.g., the level and extent of technology, the fertility of land, the development and application of science, etc. This labour-time is established on the social level and provides thus, as expressed in the Grundrisse, an external yardstick.⁴³⁾ This entity is not known in itself, but at each and every moment something given, as a datum, and therefore not merely an arithmetical but an actual social average that, however, appears as an ‘external abstraction’–‘this average is very real’.⁴⁴⁾ It is expressed in the money form of a commodity as price, as the amount of money against which a commodity is exchanged, and as a kind of latent entity appearing a posteriori in the price in which the value of a commodity is realised. It creates for experience a sense of expectation and custom, and it provides the basis on which capitalists make their strategic and tactical decisions. It is, however, a mere coincidence if this transformation, or transubstantiation, actually occurs, and occurs in full, i.e. whether the whole (‘individual’) value is realised.⁴⁵⁾

What is being highlighted with this discussion is the importance of bearing in mind Marx’s methodological procedure in his presentation of the doctrine of value. He starts by examining exchange value from its qualitative aspect, as ‘value in general’, ‘the quality of being value as such [überhaupt]’, as it is further clarified in the Ms of 1861–3,⁴⁶⁾ with its form, too, disregarded. Once ‘value’ is determined, Marx moves on to its quantitative aspect: socially necessary labour-time.⁴⁷⁾ To pin-point these moments and to hold fast to them for analysis, we have to our disposal only our ‘force of abstraction’.⁴⁸⁾ When we want to grasp the commodity as an object of value, we thus have to separate, and at the same time unite its quality (value, produced by abstract labour), its quantity (the amount of value-producing labour, socially necessary labour-time), and, finally, its exchange value, expressed ideally in its price, as the unity of these moments as a definite amount of value, in proportion to which a commodity is exchanged for another on the market.

Private labour is objectified in different use values–skates, skirts, and skittles–and becomes in a specific way, through the social division of labour and market exchange, social labour. Actually, individual labour becomes ‘labour in general, and in this way social labour, only by actually being exchanged for one another in proportion to the duration of labour contained in them. Social labour time exists in these commodities in latent state, so to speak, and becomes evident only in the course of their exchange’. The character ‘universal social labour’ is ‘consequently not a ready-made prerequisite but an emerging result’.⁴⁹⁾ The answer to the riddle of value, thus: Time will tell.

At times, Marx reduces the expression of value producing (abstract) labour to human labour or social labour–often with the addition ‘as such’. But human labour as such does not produce the value of commodities; not social labour as such either, since all human labour is social in one way or another, it is always labour for and together with others, even if different in different forms of societies and modes of production. As expressed in the ‘Introduction of 1857’: ‘All production is appropriation of nature by the individual within and by means of a definite form of society’.⁵⁰⁾ Such expressions by Marx are thus to be understood as shorthands for value producing abstract labour (abstract general labour, human labour in abstracto, etc.).

In capitalism, ‘private labour’ produces commodities for exchange on the market.⁵¹⁾ This seems to be a contradiction or paradox: private labour produces commodities each of which is constituted by a use value and an exchange value aspect–and as an expression of this, an aspect of concrete labour and another of abstract labour. The value aspect, however, is constituted by the purely social aspect of labour. How does private labour become social labour in commodity production and exchange, in other words, in capitalism? As highlighted above, the labour of an individual becomes social by way of the manner in which this labour relates to the labour of all the other individuals in the form of the total social labour, in the social division of labour, and, in the end, by way of money as the general equivalent: ‘The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective [gegenständliche] characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties [gesellschaftliche Natureigenschaften] of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution [quid pro quo], the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time suprasensible or social [sinnlich übersinnliche oder gesellschaftliche Dinge]’.⁵²⁾ In Contribution this phenomenon is illustrated in the note Marx makes, that the labour-time of an individual is the labour-time of the individual without any distinction from the labour-time of any other individual–‘the labour time common to all; consequently it is quite immaterial whose individual labour time it is’. Only as ‘such a universal magnitude’ does labour-time ‘represent a social magnitude’.⁵³⁾ This takes place as if all individuals brought together all their individual labour-times to a total social labour-time to be distributed to each and everyone as aliquot parts, with the result that the time needed by an individual to produce a commodity is the labour-time needed by, or necessary for, society. Thus, the value of a commodity is not constituted by the labour-time expended for this specific commodity but by the total labour-time of society: ‘The real value of a commodity is, however, not its individual value, but its social value; that is to say, the real value is not measured by the labour time that the article in each individual case costs the producer, but by the labour time socially required for its production’.⁵⁴⁾

It is precisely the specific manner in which private labours relate to each other that determines the character of labour as ‘abstract labour’, that aspect of commodity producing human labour that produces value. ‘Abstract labour’ is thus not an aspect of human labour as such, but a form-determination taking place in the capitalist mode of production which makes this abstraction take possession of a concrete and particular labour (and product).

To pose the question once again: How does the labour of an individual become social labour, as an aliquot part of social total labour? It is emphatically because of the exchange of products on the basis of a social division of labour, in short, because of the exchange of commodities on the (world) market. All particular labours of individuals are being equalised in and through this exchange by being exchanged for a general equivalent, viz. money. As Marx remarks in the Ms of 1861–3: ‘But it is only FOREIGN TRADE, the development of the market to a world market, which causes money to develop into world money and abstract labour into social labour. Abstract wealth, value, money, hence abstract labour, develop in the measure that concrete labour becomes a totality of different modes of labour embracing the world market. Capitalist production rests on value or the development of the labour embodied in the product as social labour. But this is only possible on the basis of FOREIGN TRADE and of the world market. This is at once the precondition and the result of capitalist production’.⁵⁵⁾ With the world market, serving the presentation of capital by Marx as both precondition and result, the value of commodities are developed on the global level. Only now money fully functions as immediately social form of realisation for ‘human labour in abstracto’; only now is ‘its mode of existence adequate to its concept’.⁵⁶⁾ Money as money is ‘world money’.

Finally, what is the form of value? The simple answer is: exchange value, the value form, or price. This is made clear by Marx already in the title of this section in Capital I–‘The form of value or exchange value’. If the use value form of a commodity is its material form, such as bread, butter, and beer, its value form is the economic, social form; it is the ‘suprasensible’ aspect of a commodity.

Only as general form of value does the value form correspond to the concept of value.⁵⁷⁾ This form is a transitional form to the form of general equivalence, i.e. the money form of the commodity and value, and as such the form of value as such. Already the developed form of value makes is clear that the value of a specific commodity is expressed in the world of commodities, and only with this, this value itself ‘appear truly as a jelly of undifferentiated human labour’, as abstract labour. ⁵⁸⁾ From this, we may conclude that the value form and the value concept correspond to each other in the money form, as a specific expression of exchange value, the aspect of exchange value of a commodity, as the unity of the quality value in general and the quantity socially necessary labour time. Thus, when, in the discussion about the doctrine of value by Marx, we speak of the ‘value form’ it is the over grasping characterisation of the value form in general, as general form of equivalence, as money form: ‘The universal equivalent form is a form of value in general’.⁵⁹⁾

Capital is not a thing, but rather a definite social production relation, belonging to a definite historical formation of society, which is manifested in a thing and lends this thing a specific social character. – Marx, Capital III

According to Åström, when it comes to value it is something we can, will, and ought take control over and utilise to measure and allocate total social labour in socialism. Capital, to the contrary, cannot be controlled or taken over, due to its imperative to accumulate. To return to the argument of Åström and its implication for our grasp of Marx’s conceptual system, it could be argued, ad absurdum, that if capital is the self-valorisation of value, then, so Åström would say, we can abolish the first part of the expression: both the ‘self’ and the ‘valorisation’, but keep the residuum: value and its production. It will prevail, but will no longer be valorised, and no longer be the dominating power that increases by appropriating the (surplus) labour of others. It will be a phenomenon a future ‘we’ will control, regulate, and subsume.

Åström’s argument can be traced back to Marx’s presentation of the capitalist process of production in Capital I: On the one hand, it is a unity of labour process and value producing process; the former corresponds to concrete labour, and the latter to abstract labour. On the other hand, as value producing process it is, when further examined, a process of valorisation, i.e. a surplus value producing process. Following Åström, the former is to be kept, and the latter is to be abolished. Consequently, the labour process is to function as a value producing process, but no longer as a surplus value producing process. An implication of this argument is that Åström collapses value producing process into labour process, as–conceptually–one and the same process, as two words for one and the same thing. This is, to be noted, how it appears in capitalism, as the fetish character of the capitalist process of production that by way of an objective illusion (Schein) appears to be a human process of labour as such.

However, a capitalist process of production is to be understood as a valorisation process; this is the only way it makes sense. It is the pursuit of profit, grounded in capital as self-valorisation of value, that is the motivating force of capitalism, its overarching end.⁶⁰⁾ Considered thus, value producing process, as well as labour process, is merely moments of the capitalist process of production as valorisation process, abstract, in itself, as a such one-sided aspect that does not positively exist as such, outside and external to the capitalist process of production.⁶¹⁾

To toy around some with the argument of Åström’s: The circuit of capital is Money (M) – Commodity (C) – more Money (M’), viz. M–C–M’. To exchange £100 (M) for £100 (M) is absurd in the context of capital. To interrupt the process of production after its value producing aspect, as it were, and to think, with this, that you have reached a point at which capital, as ‘accumulation’, is abolished, and to maintain ‘simple reproduction’ based on ‘value’, understood as socially necessary labour time, is naïve, if not vulgar. As stressed above, labour process and value producing process do not exist in themselves, empirically, positively, when you abstract from the valorisation aspect. They are, as it were, subsumed under, and incorporated in the valorisation process understood as a capitalist process of production. In Marx’s presentation, they are mere conceptual steps in his theoretical development of the capitalist process of production as surplus value producing process.

How, then, is a theoretical presentation of capital to be designed, and introduced? These questions are of particular importance for a dialectical presentation such as Marx’s Capital. A dialectical, critical-scientific presentation must not presuppose a science before science, as it were. This was one key methodological remark Marx made against Ricardo.⁶²⁾ A dialectical presentation is not axiomatic, but a systematic development of concepts, proceeding from the most simple (abstract) to the more complex (concrete).⁶³⁾ In the doctrine of value we deal with categories that are internally related and thereby presuppose each other (and are not added to each other as some chain of ‘external’ links). Therefore, it is not self-evident which category is to introduce the presentation. As we know, Marx starts with the commodity, as a concrete, everyday, and seemingly simple object.⁶⁴⁾

One key angle of Åström’s critique of the value-form paradigm, as represented by Chris Arthur, and one important point of reference for Sic and Endnotes, is that if you take your point of departure in the value form, and from it develop the money form and, thereafter, the capital form, and if you introduce value producing abstract labour only after having presupposed the value form, you can only analyse a capitalist economy. If, to the contrary, logically, you start from abstract labour, as human labour in general, there is no logical necessity for exchange-value to be the necessary form of appearance of value, as value form, and, further, the capital form as self-valorising value. In Åström's logical hypothesis, this abstract labour may just as well assume a form that instead of expressing the anarchy of the market may be adequate to a socialist planned economy, in which labour is consciously allocated.

But, as emphasised above, abstract labour is a purely social form-determination of human labour, internally related to capitalism, to generalised commodity production, and to a general equivalent, i.e. money. It is not an abstraction of labour that merely appears in the realm of shadows of formal logics. Abstract labour, as the substance and source of value, is itself determined by the form and the law of value. This presupposition is itself posited. As noted by Marx, ‘In order to develop the concept of capital, we must begin not with labour but with value, or more precisely, with the exchange value already developed in the movement of circulation. It is just as impossible to pass directly from labour to capital as from the different races of men directly to the banker, or from nature to the steam-engine’.⁶⁵⁾

Marx himself takes as his point of departure the deduction of classical political economy of labour from the exchange value of a commodity, although he acknowledges the limitations and one-sidedness of such a generalisation. While nature and labour co-operate in the production of objects of use, it, he notes, is a tautology to say that only labour produces exchange value.⁶⁶⁾ This is so, since exchange value, and the value that appears in this form, is a purely social, human practical relation, a social relation of production that (necessarily) appears in the exchange values of commodities, i.e. in their prices.

Above, we cited the critical question par excellence in Marx’s doctrine of value: why does labour appear in value, and its quantity, as labour-time, in the magnitude of value? These forms, in particular, unveil the fact that they belong to a society in which the process of production dominates Man, and Man not yet it.⁶⁷⁾ Why labour assumes value form and why its quantity is measured in socially necessary labour-time is a socially-practical question, not some logical or physiological result of human labour as such. Value is not some nature-given product of labour's ‘supernational creative power’.⁶⁸⁾ Value is thus not to be understood narrowly economically or technically but as a historically determined relationship: ‘As values, they constitute only relations of Men in their productive activity’.⁶⁹⁾ Åström, and others, however, de facto understand capital as a ‘thing’ and not as a relationship.

The mystical character of a commodity has its source in the dual character of commodity producing labour. Labour, on the one hand, produces the value form of a product of labour and its mystical character; on the other hand, this labour is itself form determined as commodity producing, and in particular its specifically social character as value producing abstract labour. In the first edition of Capital, in the addenda ‘Value form’, Marx clarifies: ‘Within the value-relation and the value expression included in it, the abstract general counts not as a property of the concrete, sensibly real; but on the contrary the sensibly concrete counts as the mere form of appearance or definite form of realisation of the abstract general’. Marx continues on the same page: ‘This inversion by which the sensibly-concrete counts only as the form of appearance of the abstract general and not, on the contrary, the abstract general as property of the concrete, characterises the expression of value. At the same time, it makes understanding it difficult’.⁷⁰⁾ Thus, value producing abstract labour is not a property of concrete-useful human labour; it is not, as it were, the least common denominator of different concrete forms of labour. The labour of tailoring, to use one of Marx’s examples, does not, in its relation to, e.g., the labour of weaving, possess ‘the general property of being human labour’.⁷¹⁾ On the contrary, concrete labour–in the commodity serving as the general equivalent, i.e., in money–becomes the form of appearance and realisation for the qualitative property of being human labour as such.

In the section on the ‘General value-form’ in Capital I, chapter 1, Marx makes a remark that throws light on the problem we are faced with here: ‘The general value form, which represents all products of labour as mere congelations of undifferentiated human labour, shows by its very structure that it is the social resumé of the world of commodities. That form consequently makes it indisputably evident that in the world of commodities the character possessed by all labour of being human labour constitutes its specific social character’.⁷²⁾ The quality ‘human labour in general’, thus, is emphatically its ‘specific social character’ in capitalism, and not some property of human labour in itself.

Value producing abstract labour, therefore, is not to be understood as a property common to all different concrete labours whenever we abstract from their concrete form determinations, even if it may seem so when we follow Marx’s initial presentation of his analytical deduction. This abstraction of labour is, on the one hand, an analytical abstraction, made by us, that is possible to reach through a detailed analysis of the exchange value of a commodity. On the other hand, it is a real abstraction, an abstraction of concrete human labour with the capacity to an effective domination over the individuals of the bourgeois society on and through the capitalist market. That kind of abstraction that dominates individuals is the law of value, which, like a social law of nature, subsumes them.

How to dissolve a social relation? Abolition of money is not only, nor primarily, the abolition of coins as a means of payment. The abolition of capital is not the abolition of machines and infrastructure; not even getting rid of the boss as boss. Such perspectives are superficial and naïve. To abolish ‘capitalist categories’ is least of all some discursive dissolution. No concepts fall ready at hand from the skies, and no concepts may be sent back to space. It is no quixotic attack on ‘value’, ‘capital’, ‘the (world) market’, etc. Advocates of the communisation perspective are no ‘alchemists of the revolution’ (Marx).⁷³⁾ Abolished, rather, are the social relations expressed, conceptually and institutionally, in such economic categories.⁷⁴⁾

The perspective suggested here, as communisation, is best understood as a deduction from the present form of appearance of the capital relation, as the actually existing capitalism. It is characterised neither by faith nor certainty, but rather by hope, effort and stakes, with all the risks that cling to it. It is also about the alternatives being worse, futile, or obsolete. To be able to consider them as such is due to theory, as a model of explanation. Communist theory is not some marketing of prophecies, nor to precede, but an effort to grasp. It is about getting a grasp of a phenomenon that has not yet taken place, based on a critical understanding of the movement that in its determined actions points beyond itself and, by that, beyond the bourgeois horizon. Communist theory, thus, is more about the relations of today, less about the possibilities of tomorrow. It is, essentially, ex negativo, i.e. a determination grounded entirely on the present state and configuration of capitalism. If, stated philosophically, this seems to be an abstract negation of capital, that communist relations are not-capitalist relations, it may apply to our theory, to our perspective.⁷⁵⁾ In actuality, in the establishment of communist relations, it is a determinate negation, it is the building of something new, as it were, on the ruins of the old, with bits and pieces, and acquired knowledge, that can be made use of. And we must remember, communism is neither the logical nor the necessary outcome of capitalist development, but the revolutionary, the revolutionising, solution of a fundamental contradiction internal to capital, i.e. class struggle.

To state this a bit vulgar: The abolishing of capitalist categories is about doing and acting in another way, other than today and hitherto; it is to act together within revolutionary circumstances. Often it takes the form of confronting your boss, politician, union official, or the cops, being the incarnations of these abstractions (institutionalisations, social roles). And this is so way before a revolutionary situation. It is, as it were, the chain of command in everyday life in capitalism. At the same time, capital is embodied in the capitalist, it takes material form in machinery, in means of production and subsistence.⁷⁶⁾ As stated by TC: To abolish a social relation is a material thing.

It is a characteristic inversion of the state of things in capitalism that abstractions, such as value and capital, haunt factories and take possession of the individuals of the bourgeois society (workers, capitalists, and others), so that the latter appear on the capitalist stage as character masks, as personifications of economic relations. Shoot your boss, and he will disappear as a private person; but the boss as boss, as a social role and function, will remain, since capital will remain, and there need to be some body to possess for it to make its ghost-walking around the globe.

We have seen how Åström’s unarguably formal-logical line of argument result in rather obscure conclusions that seem pretty distant from Marx’s dialectical presentation of Capital: He wishes to keep ‘value’, but not ‘valorisation’; the aspect of the process of production as ‘value-producing process’, but not as ‘valorisation process’, that, nevertheless, is to produce a ‘surplus’. This, he claims, will abolish capital since ‘accumulation’ will no longer be the overarching and dominating aim and goal of social (re-) production.

Åström claims that ‘abstract labour’, understood as ‘human labour in general’, and ‘value’, understood as this labour measured by ‘socially necessary labour-time’, will/shall prevail after capitalism, not only since they, for him, represent supra-historical categories (and phenomena) but because only on the basis of these may ‘socialism’ rationally make use of and develop–and then successively abolish–the productive forces of labour and the levels they have obtained with capitalism, for the ‘realm of freedom’ to flower along with the diminishing of the ‘realm of necessity’.

In brief, Åström wishes to pile off the contingent form of the capitalist mode of production to reveal some eternal and natural human production: labour and labour process in general–this mere ghost that in itself, according to Marx, does not exist at all. There is no ‘production in general’, only particular production in different and varying, corresponding forms. In capitalism, in production based on (surplus) value, labour and production, nevertheless, appear as being ‘in general’–and in this form as ‘specifically social’.

To conclude, I have tried to argue against this and to show that and how value and abstract labour are categories (social relations) that have to do with capitalism, that they are internally related to this mode of production, and that they will be abolished in the very same revolutionary process that will abolish all categories constituting the class relations in capitalism, including the classes themselves.

Further, I have highlighted that communism fundamentally has to do with praxis, with other ways to act socially, individually and in common, and that human activity must assume other forms than in the capitalist division of labour, not only between industries, nations, or genders, but also, and most fundamentally, between ‘labour’ and ‘leisure time’. Such a re-formulation of praxis at one and the same time expresses and makes happen this revolutionised content. As long as labour productivity is regarded as the overarching aim and mean of society, the imperative to increase efficiency, and to exploit the immediate producers–for the best of ‘society’–will remain, and, therefore, the classes and oppression will continue or be able to rise again, as the acute forms of counter-revolution.

We have seen that on the level which Åström addresses his charges against a communisation perspective, a response necessarily will have to be focused on already the more abstract level of revolution and communism as such, as it were, and not as specific and historical determinations and forms as communisation, as the revolutionary perspective of the present moment.

In Åström, just like in so many other utopian programmes and sketches throughout history, there is an authoritarian scent, if, however, involuntary and implicit. To return to the initial quote as the motto of this essay, it is a utopian scent to Åström’s charges against a communisation perspective, that he makes his plea to reason when it comes to a post-capitalist alternative to the misery of today. Ad absurdum, however, the position of Åström expresses a mix of naivety–about capitalism, class struggle, and counter-revolution–and dystopia–a planner state. By this, he misses the opportunity to develop a productive critique of both the communisation perspective, as it has been advocated by TC in particular, and the value-form paradigm, as exemplified by Chris Arthur. Luckily for us, however, the last word in this conversation has not yet been spoken.

March 2022