Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy
Section I: On the Critique of Political Economy as a Critical Social Theory
2. Political Economy and Social Constitution: On the Meaning of Critique
3. Society as Subject and Society as Object: On Social Praxis
Section II: Value: On Social Wealth and Class
4. Capital and Labour: Primitive Accumulation and the Force of Value
5. Class and Struggle: On the false Society
6. Time is Money: On Abstract Labour
Section III: Capital, World Market and State
7. State, World Market and Society
8. On the State of Political Economy: Political Form and the Force of Law
Section IV Anti-Capitalism: Theology and Negative Practice
9. Anti-Capitalism and the Elements of Antisemitism: On Theology and Real Abstractions
10. Conclusion: On the Elements of Subversion and Negative Reason
Introduction: Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy
1
Reason, left to work alone, creates monsters; while imagination unalloyed by the power of reason gives rise to futile ideas.
ADORNO AND HORKHEIMER, DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
Subversion and the critique of political economy
Subversive thought is none other than the cunning of reason when confronted with a social reality in which the poor and miserable are required to subsidize the financial system for the sake of sustaining the illusion of abstract wealth. Yet, this subsidy is necessary in existing society, to secure its wealth and prevent its implosion. This rational irrationality of a capitalistically organized mode of social reproduction is at the centre of the critique of political economy. It asks why human social reproduction takes this irrational form of an economic logic that asserts itself over the acting subjects as if by force of nature. The critique of political economy is intransigence towards the existent patterns of the world. It demands that all relations ‘in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being have to be overthrown’.
Debasement subsists as society unaware of itself, one in which human sensuous practice exists, say, in the form of a movement of coins that impose themselves objectively on and through the acting subjects as if the law of coins were a world apart from the social subjects who constitute the society governed by coins.
For the critique of political economy as a critical social theory, the fetishism of commodities entails the movement of some abstract economic forces that assert themselves over society on the pain of ruin. Yet, however objective in its nature, economic nature is in its entirety a socially constituted nature. The question of the social nature of the movement of coins is therefore one about the specific character of the capitalistically constituted social relations that assert themselves in the form of economic forces beyond human control. The money form disappears as a social relationship, and instead asserts an abstract economic logic, which, I argue, manifests the vanished social subject in her own social world as a personification of economic categories. The capitalist social subject is a coined subject.
There is, says Adorno, a need for a ‘practice that fights barbarism’, and yet, he argues rightly, there can be no such practice.
Barbarism cannot be fought in a direct and immediate manner– what does it really mean to struggle against money, resist the movement of coins, combat the movement of interest rates, fight price movements and resist poverty in a mode of social reproduction in which social wealth entails the dispossessed labourer in its concept? A ‘practice that fights barbarism’ is about the social preconditions that manifest themselves in the logic of reified economic forms. In terms of a critical theory of political economy, it is not the independence of economic categories of cash and coin, value and money, as forces over and above, and also in and through the social individuals, that requires explanation. Rather, what needs to be explained are the social relations of production, which manifest themselves as a relationship between reified economic things that assert themselves behind the backs of those same individuals who comprise and sustain society. That is, reification is really ‘an epiphenomenon’.
Critically conceived, the theory of reification does not substitute the religious idea of God for the logic of secularized things. Reification is either a critical concept that asks about the social constitution of reified relations or it is not, in which case it becomes affirmative in its grasp of society. Spellbound by the plight of the dispossessed in a system of wealth founded on dependent labour relations, the ‘tireless charge of reification’ is premised on the assumption that reification essentially has to do with reified things.
In this case, then, ‘the protest against reification becomes reified, divorced from thinking, and irrational’.
The critique of reification asks what is reified and what therefore appears in reification. What appear in reification are the social relations of production in the form of self-moving economic things. However reified in its appearance, the economic world is and remains a world of definite social relations.
The fetishism of commodities does therefore not just comprise, as Moishe Postone argues in his critical theory of social domination, an opposition between exchange value and use value in which non-identical things for use are treated identically as value abstractions.
Nor does the illusion in the process of exchange lie solely in the socially valid objectivity of real economic abstractions, an objective illusion as Reichelt has argued.
The mysterious character of an equivalent exchange of money for more money (M . . . M’; say, £100 = £120) has to do with the transformation of the commodity labour power into a surplus value producing labour activity (M . . . P . . . M’). The understanding of the mysterious character of an equivalence exchange between unequal values does therefore not lie, as Reichelt suggests, in the objective character of the equivalent exchange relations themselves. Rather, it lies ‘in the concept of surplus value’.
Adorno thus argues that the equivalence exchange relations are founded ‘on the class relationship’ between the owners of the means of production and the seller of labour power, and this relationship vanishes in its social appearance as an exchange between one quantity of money for another.
Adorno’s point not only focuses the critique of political economy as a critique of the capitalist form of wealth, and its production, it also renounces the established view, according to which the critique of political economy is a critique from the standpoint of labour.
The standpoint of labour does not reveal an ontologically privileged position. Rather, the standpoint of labour is in every aspect tied to the capitalist economy of labour.
Indeed, both the capitalist and the worker are ‘personifications of economic categories’.
That is, ‘society stays alive, not despite its antagonism, but by means of it’.
Against the grain of the classical Marxist tradition, I argue that the critique of political economy amounts to a critique of ontological conceptions of economic categories, including the category of labour as a trans-historically conceived activity that defines the human metabolism with nature in abstraction from society. The origin of this critique goes back to the early Frankfurt School challenge to the orthodox Marxist tradition, and it was later taken up by the so-called new reading of Marx that developed in Germany in the aftermath of the 1968 student movement.
On the critique of political economy as a critical social theory
The context of this book is the ‘new reading of Marx’, which was principally developed by Hans-Georg Backhaus, Helmut Reichelt and also Moishe Postone. Reichelt and Bachkaus in particular developed the critical theory of the early Frankfurt school, especially Adorno’s account, as an alternative to the existing versions of Marxism that originated from the second and third Internationals as the theoretical expressions of social democracy and Leninism.
It rejected Marxian economics as a radicalization of Ricardo’s political economy, which, as Marx had argued, develops the labour theory of value on the basis of some undifferentiated conception of labour that is presumed to be eternally valid as ‘a goal-directed social activity that mediates between humans and nature, creating specific products in order to satisfy determinate human needs’.
Ricardo, says Marx, views ‘the bourgeois form of labour . . . as the eternal natural form of social labour’.
For the ‘new reading’ this critique of classical political economy was pivotal. Instead of the classical Marxist view that purports a dialectics between the trans-historically conceived forces of production and the historically specific relations of production, it developed Marx’s work as a critique of ‘capitalism in terms of a historically specific form of social interdependence with an impersonal and seemingly objective character’.
The ‘new reading’ thus renounced the classical argument about trans-historically valid economic laws of development and in its stead, conceptualized the economic appearance of society as the necessary manifestation of definite social relations. Its stance entailed the further rejection of the idea that economic development is an expression of the struggle for hegemonic class power. The new reading argued that capitalist economic categories belong to the society from which they spring. In a society that asserts itself behind the backs of the acting subjects, one in which the individuals are really ruled by economic abstractions, the idea that society is after all nothing more than a manifestation of the balance of class forces is purely instrumental in its view of ‘the social forces’.
Adorno’s negative dialectics did not just provide the theoretical catalyst for the new reading. Rather, it provided both the incentive and the critical insight for the development of the critique of political economy as a critical social theory.
The happenstance that Adorno, and Horkheimer and Marcuse too, did not publish a work about Marx’s critique of political economy has been taken to mean that they did not concern themselves with political economy nor with economics, be it bourgeois economics or Marxian economics.
There is, as Dirk Braunstein remarks drily, no economist by the name of Adorno or a political economist called Horkheimer.
The early Frankfurt school developed a distinctly heterodox Marxist approach to the critique of political economy. Its critical intent can be summarized with reference to the subtitle of Marx’s Capital – a critique of political economy – which as Alfred Schmidt argued succinctly, amounts to a conceptualized praxis (begriffene Praxis) of the capitalistically constituted social relations.
In this context, the title of Adorno’s defining work, Negative Dialectics, is emblematic. It is neither a dialectics of structure and agency, nor a dialectics of history as a self-moving ontology of the being and becoming of economic matter; nor is it also a dialectics of the trans-historical forces of production that manifest themselves in the anatomy of capitalist social relations.
Negative dialectics is the dialectics of a social world in the form of the economic object, one that is governed by the movement of economic quantities. The economic world comprises the sensuous world of the ‘doing’ individual as a ‘charactermask’ or ‘personification’ of a social totality that though created and reproduced by the acting subjects themselves, asserts itself behind their backs.
Critical theory conceives of society as an existing immanence that is ‘antagonistic in itself’.
There is only one reality, and that is the reality of the existent social relations. The social individuals themselves produce their own reality, and it is their own reality that, as Horkheimer put it, ‘enslaves them’.
The social individual is ‘governed by the products of his own hand’, and it is his own social product that acts ‘with the force of an elemental natural process’.
What manifests itself behind the backs of the social individuals is ‘their own work’.
Negative Dialectics is the dialectics of the manner in which definite social relations vanish in their own social world only to reappear as, say, relations of price competitiveness. On the pain of ruin, their own social world rules over and through them as if by the force of an invisible hand that takes care of ‘both the beggar and the king’.
Conceived as critical social theory, the critique of political economy flouts tradition. It conceives of historical materialism as a critique of society understood dogmatically. It therefore rejects Engels’s idea of dialectics as a ‘science of the general laws of nature, human society and thought’.
As a science of general laws, dialectics is the method of a bewitched world; it transforms social laws into laws of nature, and thus treats society as a manifestation of the forces of economic nature in being and becoming.
Engels’s conception of a dialectics of general laws of nature lies at the foundation of what Heinrich characterizes as ‘worldview Marxism’.
Worldview Marxism represses the notion that the existent relations of economic objectivity are socially constituted in their entirety. Instead, it views the economic structure of society as an expression of some trans-historically active forces of production that manifest themselves in the rise and fall of particular social relations of production. Critically conceived, the natural character of ‘capitalist society is both an actuality and at the same time a necessary illusion. The illusion signifies that within this society laws can only be implemented as natural processes over people’s heads, while their validity arises from the form of the relations of production within which production takes place.’
In distinction to the classical view of a dialectics of history and nature, for the critical theory tradition dialectics is a method of presenting or developing the categories of a definite and finite form of society, unfolding the social genesis of the whole system of real economic abstractions.
Critically conceived, Capital is therefore not an economic ‘text’.
Economics is the formula of an inverted world.
This stance raises the question about the meaning of critique in the critique of political economy. What is criticized? According to Marx, his critique of political economy amounts to a ‘critique of economic categories’ and he argued that the economists deal with unreflected presuppositions.
That is, in the hands of the economists the ‘law of capitalist accumulation [is] metamorphosed . . . into a pretended law of nature’.
The critique of political economy focuses thus on the system of economic inversion and its categories of cash, price and profit to decipher the social relations that vanish in their appearance as personifications of ‘particular class-relations and class-interests’.
The circumstance that every individual reacts ‘under the compulsion’ of economic forces begs the question of the origin of this socio-economic nature and the manner in which it renders individuals ‘mere character masks, agents of exchange in a supposedly separate economic order’.
The question of ‘capital’ thus becomes a question about the social relationship between persons expressed as a relationship between economic things, that is, real economic abstractions. Just as the critique of religion does not criticize God on the basis of God, the critique of political economy does not criticize real economic abstractions on the basis of real economic abstractions. Rather, the critique of religion deciphers the social relations that assume the form of God and vanish in the idea of God only to reappear as cowed believers in God, mere human derivatives of divine rule. Similarly, the critique of capital is not a critique from the standpoint of economic nature. Like the critique of religion, it too deciphers the definite social relations that manifest themselves in mysterious, seemingly extra-mundane economic forms and forces that prevail in and through the social individuals as personifications of economic forces.
The new reading of Marx and the critique of economic forms
The ‘new reading of Marx’ developed as a sustained effort at a critical reconstruction of the critique of political economy as a critical social theory. It unfettered Marx from dogmatic certainties, opening up a number of critical perspectives, and, I argue, did not fully reveal what it had unchained. In particular it kept at arms’ length the political form of capitalist society, that is, the state, and in particular the class antagonism and the class struggle, which is the dynamic force of a negative world. Indeed, the ‘essence of an antagonistic society is that it is not a society with contradictions or despite contradiction, but by virtue of its contradictions’.
The new reading developed a critical alternative to classical Marxism, including Althusserian structuralism, by turning against the traditional idea of society as an historically overdetermined structure of some general historical laws. Instead it developed the categories of political economy from within their social context. Against the traditional view, it thus conceived of the categories of political economy as the finite and transient products of the finite and transient reality of capitalist social relations as an existing totality. Nevertheless, by keeping the class antagonism at arms’ length, it treated society as a contradictory though conceptually logical system of economic inversion. As a consequence, it has also very little to say about the political form of political economy, the state. By viewing political economy as a supposedly separate economic order of ‘monstrous inversion’, its conception of capitalist society as a negative totality remains a mere postulate.
The new reading saw that Marx’s work entailed contradictions and inconsistencies, argued that his critique of political economy was therefore not fully developed and that the ‘dialectical method’ of presenting the economic categories as ‘perverted forms’ of definite social relations had in fact been ‘hidden’ by Marx, apparently in an attempt at popularizing his work.
In the hands of Backhaus and Reichelt, critical reconstruction entailed at first archaeological textual analyses and comparisons between the various editions and drafts of Capital, and all other works, to ascertain nuances and changes in the meaning of categories. This attempt at reconstruction assumed, wrongly as Reichelt argued later, that Marx’s work contained a hidden veracity, which can be reconstructed and put together to form a consistent and complete account of what Marx had intended.
The attempt at establishing the veritable Marx ended up amplifying the very contradictions and inconsistencies that it had set out to overcome. The ‘new reading’ thus revealed the unfinished and ambivalent character of Marx’s work, and it moved hither and thither to establish a consistent account where none could be found, leading towards a circular argument that, say, on the one hand, rejected naturalistic explanations of abstract labour and then, on the other, posited Marx’s naturalist definition of abstract labour as evidence for the still incomplete character of critical reconstruction.
Hans-Georg Backhaus developed Marx’s value form analysis as a most robust and insightful critique of economic categories.
For him, economics is the discipline of monstrous economic forms. Economic theory manifests thus the categorical unconsciousness of economic abstraction, and he therefore defines economics as a discipline without subject matter. This then raises the question about the foundation of economic forms. According to Backhaus, the critique of fetishism deciphers economic categories on a human basis. It reveals the human content of seemingly extramundane economic things.
This argument, however suggestive in its critical intension, comes at a price. The anthropological standpoint is not the critical standpoint. ‘Man’ in general does not do anything. Does not work, does not eat, does not truck and barter and has no natural tendency, needs, consciousness, etc. Man in general does also not alienate herself in the form of value. In distinction to Backhaus, Man has needs only as concrete Man and the ‘determinate character of this social man is to be brought forward as the starting point, i.e. the determinate character of the existing community in which he lives’.
Neither economic nature nor anthropology but the ‘definite social relations’ that manifest themselves in mysterious economy forms are ‘the point of departure’.
That is to say, the reified world of economic necessity is innately practical – it entails the actual relations of life in their inverted economic form.
Helmut Reichelt developed the critique of economics as an immanent critique of the existing social relations.
For this critique, the dialectical method of exposition is fundamental – it unfolds the economic forms as real abstractions of social mystifications. The critique of political economy intends therefore to be more than ‘just a critique of the discipline of economics’. Fundamentally, it is ‘an exposition of the system, and through the exposition, critique of the system’.
Although the value form expresses the abstract essence of capitalism – value vanishes in a constant movement of forms, in which economic quantities assert themselves as independent and seemingly irresistible economics forces – it is as incomprehensible as the existence of God in the religious world. Value form analysis thus amounts to an exposition of the law of value as a process of social ‘autonomization’, which economics analyses in terms of price movements, stock market developments and other such macro-economic analyses of, in themselves, incomprehensible economic quantities. The purpose of the dialectical exposition of the economic system is therefore to establish, say, the need of money to ‘lay golden eggs’ as the ‘objective necessity’ of the law of value and not as an entirely contingent chance development based on the decision and will of this or that banker.
Adorno captures the ‘objective necessity’ of society well when he argues that ‘the objective rationality of society, that is exchange, detaches itself from the logic of reason. Society as an autonomised force is therefore no longer comprehensible. What alone remains comprehensible is the law of autonomisation’.
What however is autonomized and what appears in the appearance of society as a movement of real economic abstractions, such as price and profit? The ‘new reading of Marx’ conceived of this law of autonomization as the manifestation of the law of value, and perceived value as the self-moving essence of capitalist wealth. In distinction to this conception of value as the essence of society, I argue that society is fundamentally Man in her social relations. What is therefore ‘autonomized’ is not some abstract essence of value as the ‘ontological foundation of the capitalist system’ that generates an ‘inverted reality’ in which commodities ‘simply instantiate their abstract essence as values’.
Rather, it is the definite social relations of production that subsist in the form of mysterious economic things that seemingly possess the mystic character to ‘instantiate’ themselves. Theoretical mysteries find their rational explanation in the comprehension of the historically specific character of human social practice, however perverted this practice might be in the form of a relationships between economic things. That is, ‘definite social relations between men themselves assume . . . the fantastic form of a relation between things’ that assert themselves as real economic abstractions, upon which movement the life of the social individuals depends in its entirety. Yet, their genesis is founded on the ‘peculiar social character of the labour that produces them’.
The ‘new reading’ focuses on the exchange validity of value without examining the peculiar social character of labour, leading to a conception of the value form as some abstractly valid self-moving essence of wealth, an ‘universal in re’ that posits its own expansion.
However, the exposition of the capitalist categories falls short if it proceeds as a merely logical derivation of economic forms. These forms are the forms of definite social relations, which are historically branded and antagonistic from the outset. In distinction to the new reading, the social antagonism does not derive from the economic categories as the real-life expression of their contested movements. Rather, and as I set out to argue, the class antagonism is the constitutive premise of the economic categories.
Moishe Postone develops the critique of political economic as a critical theory of both the form of wealth and its production. He argues that the economic system has its origin in the commodity form of labour and develops this notion into a powerful critique of classical Marxism, which views labour in trans-historical terms as the goal-orientated human effort of production. Postone’s critical theory therefore renounces the classical analyses of capitalism from the standpoint of labour, according to which capitalist economy is an irrational and exploitative system of labour that socialism will transform into a rationally planned economy for the benefit of workers.
In distinction, Postone argues that ‘labour is the object of the critique of capitalist society’.
Yet, his own conception of labour as a specifically capitalist form of labour remains flat: he does not tell us how this historically specific form of labour was branded and how its branding holds sway in the conceptuality of capitalist wealth, and its production. In distinction to the new reading, including Postone’s account, I argue that the conditions which led to the creation of the capitalist form of labour, that is, the divorce of the mass of the population from the means of subsistence, passes over into ‘results of the presence’.
In Postone’s account capitalist society appears as a rigidified system of commodified labour. He assigns to this labour systemic properties that establish the economy of labour as an objective framework for action that structures the social conflicts and class struggles in concrete social settings.
His conception of ‘class’ is a traditional one – the life world of the social individuals is determined by their market situation, which expresses itself in a multiplicity of class-relevant and other forms of conflict. In distinction, I hold that class is not a revenue-based category. Rather, it is the critical category of capitalist wealth. A critical theory of class does not partake in the classification of people; it thinks in and through society to comprehend its existing untruth.
Scope and structure
Helmut Reichelt is right when he argues that the time has come to reconsider the purpose of reconstruction, moving it on from an attempt at finding the veritable Marx to the development of the critical themes and insights that the new reading of Marx has established as fundamental to the critique of ‘the monstrous objective power’ of economic things.
In distinction to the new reading, the development of the critical themes and insights rests on the acceptance that Marx’s account is fundamentally ambivalent, beyond reconstruction. This point is most strongly made by Michael Heinrich.
He establishes that Marx’s revolutionary break with classical political economy is marked by the pains of transition, leaving a multi-layered argument that, say, in the case of the conception of abstract labour, which is the value producing labour, overlaps with naturalistic definitions that derive from the tradition of classical political economy.
This book develops the critique of political economy as a critical social theory of economic objectivity, beyond critical reconstruction. At its best, the critique of political economy thinks against the spell of the dazzling economic forms. It wants to get behind the secret of our world, to demystify its fateful appearance as a force of economic nature. Critical theory does not think about (reified) things. Rather, it thinks ‘out of these things’.
For this task, the insights of the new reading are fundamental, especially the argument that the capitalist social relations manifest themselves in the inverted form of objectively valid, seemingly natural economic abstractions. Yet, taken by itself, it does not explain the social character of economic objectivity. What is objectified? In distinction to the new reading, I argue with Adorno that the ‘movement of society’ is ‘antagonistic from the outset’.
Further, I argue that the critique of political economy is not just a critique of the economic form of society. It is also a critique of the political form of society, which I develop first by means of an argument about the relationship between world market and national state, and then by an account of the state as the political form of the capitalist social relations.
The book is divided into four parts. The first part contains a connected argument about the character of a critique of political economy. It contains a chapter (Chapter 2) on the meaning of a critique of political economy, which I develop with the help of the new reading. The chapter explores the difficulty of determining the subject matter of economics, expounds the classical Marxist interpretation of economic laws and develops Marx’s characterization of his work as a critique of economic categories as critical theory of social constitution. Chapter 3 develops the implications of this characterization further into an argument about the capitalist forms of social practice, which I develop with the help of Adorno’s negative dialectics.
The second part develops the class character of the law of value in three connected chapters. In distinction to the new reading, it argues that the social antagonism is the logical and historical premise of the law of value. Chapter 4 argues that the hidden secret of the law of value is the forceful expropriation of the labourer from the means of subsistence. In this context I argue that the attempt of the new reading to develop the economic categories by means of logical exposition banishes the class relationship from the critique of political economy. In distinction, the chapter argues that the existence of a class of labourers with no independent access to the means of subsistence is the fundamental premise of the capitalist social relations. Chapter 5 develops this argument further into a critical theory of class as the objective category of the capitalist form of wealth and thus of the entire system of social reproduction. The law of value is premised on the force of law-making violence that established a class of surplus value producers who depend for their life on the sale of their labour power. Chapter 6 extends discussion of the creation and reproduction of a class of dispossessed producers of surplus value into an argument about abstract labour as the historically specific labour of capitalist wealth, of value. It argues that the value-producing labour manifests the force of law-making violence in the form of an economic dictate of a time-made abstract. Social wealth manifests itself in exchange as the labour of ‘socially necessary abstract labour time’.
The third part develops the critique of political economy as a critique of the form of the state. I reckon that the law of value has no independent economic reality. It does not dominate anything and anyone, nor does it instantiate itself – just like that. Value relations are relations of political economy, and political economy presupposes the force of law making violence as the premise of its – civilized – appearance as an exchange relationship between the sellers and buyers of labour power as equal legal subjects, governed by the rule of law. Chapter 7 establishes the world market as the categorical imperative of the capitalist form of wealth. The world market asserts itself as a coercive force over labour in production. However, coercion is not a socio-economic category. It is a political category, which characterizes the state as the political form of bourgeois society. I argue that the world market society of capital entails the (national) state in its concept. Chapter 8 focuses on the state as the political form of bourgeois society. In distinction to traditional accounts that derive the state from the economic, I hold that the law of value is premised on depoliticized exchange relations, and I argue that the state is the concentrated force of socio-economic depoliticization. Fragments apart, Marx’s promise of a critique of the form of state did not materialize. The chapter therefore develops its account with reference to Hegel’s political philosophy and Smith’s classical political economy and its further development in neo-liberal thought, to make sense of Marx’s characterization of the state as the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. The conclusion returns to Marx to argue that the state is the political form of capitalist society.
The fourth and final part assesses the anti-capitalist implications of the critique of political economy as a critical social theory. Chapter 9 presents forms of anti-capitalism that personalize the critique of capitalism as the power of money or the power of imperial force, or both. Here, the critical notion that the social individual personifies the economic categories regresses into the condemnation of hated forms of capitalism that are identified with the interest of particular persons. The personalized critique of capitalism entails the elements of antisemitism from the outset, which the chapter explores as a perverted critique of capitalism. Chapter 10 is the final chapter. It summarizes the argument by exploring Adorno’s demand for a praxis that fights barbarism. Contrary to the rumour about critical theory, its entirely negative critique of existing conditions does not entail an impoverished praxis. Rather, it entails the question of praxis – what really does it mean to say ‘no’ in a society that is governed by real economic abstractions?
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