1 The Discontinuity of the Attributes

The position I present here crucially depends upon the fundamental Spinozist distinction Althusser and Macherey sustain (described in the previous chapters), between the attributes of thought and extension, attributes (along with the infinite others to which humans do not have access) that in Spinoza’s view remain absolutely and infinitely distinct – without, that is to say, being subject to their sublation in the Hegelian Idea of the Absolute Subject.⁶ Following Althusser and Macherey, the theoretical object I seek to construct here adheres to this Spinozist distinction, and addresses not the historical existence and development of capitalism as a singular existing thing bearing real contradictions, but only the logics or processes of exposition to be found in Capital.

Marx famously never wrote his proposed treatise on his dialectical method,⁷ and in its absence, the logics of Capital do not constitute an autonomous ‘method’, but exist only immanently, discernible through what Althusser called their ‘structural causality’. This singular (as opposed to generalisable or even universal) ‘method’ exists nowhere else than in its real effects, which is to say, in this case, in the text of Capital itself, but in the state of a discursive practice as opposed to an explicit theory of a ramified apodictic demonstration. This implies that to determine the logics at work in Capital, as I seek to do here, requires constructing a theoretical object distinct from Marx’s literal demonstration of the capitalist social form, yet simultaneously insisting that this object of analysis remains determined in its necessity by the material object that is the finite discourse of Capital.⁸ This process, as what Macherey calls materialist explication, stands opposed to the alternative fabrication of an autonomous interpretation;⁹ the latter tends in contrast to disregard the materialist determination of Marx’s actual text and to create in its place an (aesthetic idealist) theoretical object (this, I will argue, is the case of Chris Arthur’s interpretation of the logic of Capital).

An example may help to clarify this distinction between the logics of Capital and capitalism as a historically existing, contradiction-prone singular thing. Just as the concept of the circle is not circular,¹⁰ the concept of negation is not negative, nor is that of contradiction contradictory; both can easily be defined positively and without contradiction. Bolzano, for example, defines negation positively, as the formal statement ‘Proposition A has no truth’, while Lalande defines contradiction without contradiction, as ‘The relation … that exists between two propositions, in the form: “A is true” and “A is not true” ’.¹¹ Though Marx explains how as a lived, historical phenomenon the capitalist social form produces a multitude of lived, practical and theoretical, i.e., merely apparent contradictions, the concept of surplus value, in the adequate, positive formulation it receives in Chapters 6 and 7, is not contradictory in the least. It is this Spinozist distinction, between the logical process of exposition that is the purely conceptual analysis of the capitalist social form in Capital, and the finite, sensuous temporality of the capitalist real, that constitutes the key epistemological proposition and militant theoretical intervention of Reading Capital.

At stake in this book, however, is not merely this straightforward epistemological distinction, albeit one to this day all too frequently ignored in Marxist criticism (including, ironically, by Althusser himself in ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, as I argued in my Introduction). As already noted, I wish furthermore to argue that Marx’s logical analysis of the concept of the commodity tends to replace a negative dialectical logic of exposition with a positive one. This is to say that although Marx’s initial analysis of the commodity as constituted by an internal, ontological contradiction (between use-value and exchange-value) might well have been demonstrated (as it largely was in the Grundrisse and the first edition of Capital) without contradiction, Marx furthermore, at the level of his categorial exposition, comes to replace this negative dialectical logic with a more adequate, positive logic without (ontological, constitutive) contradiction. The Hegelian logic of constitutive contradiction can certainly be presented without contradiction; for all that, it may well have proven inadequate to Marx for what Althusser calls his ‘apodictic arrangement of the concepts [as] that type of demonstrational discourse that Marx calls analysis’.¹²

2 Totality, Negation, Contradiction

To develop this position, to reprise an argument initiated in this book’s Introduction, it is important to move beyond the inadequate formulation of Marx’s dialectical (apodictic) method of exposition as a question of ‘Hegel or Spinoza’, whether we take this conjunction in its differential sense, following Althusser – as the either/or choice between two distinct modes of logical demonstration – or, following Macherey’s argument in his book of that title, also in its connective sense, to suggest as well as the variegated unity of two modes of thought indicated by these famous proper names. Hegel’s relation to Spinoza, for all its real complexity, is no mere question of disavowal and misrepresentation. In crucial aspects, Hegel explicitly and unambiguously reaffirms crucial aspects of Spinoza’s epistemology.

Tellingly, Hegel makes a point of concluding his 1827 Preface to the Encyclopedia Logic with the categorical statement that ‘It has been rightly said of the true that it is index sui et falsi, but that the true is not known [gewusst] on the basis of the false’.¹³ Repeating this ringing endorsement of the Spinozist position in the body of his text, Hegel simultaneously appends to it a condemnation of empiricist theories of knowledge dependent upon the adequation of subject and object:

Usually we call truth the agreement of an object with our representation of it. Thus we have an object as a presupposition, and our representation is supposed to conform to it. – In the philosophical sense, by contrast, truth means in general the agreement of a content with itself, to put it abstractly.¹⁴

No less than for Spinoza and Althusser, for Hegel, the empiricist model of truth remains radically inadequate and subject to ideological distortions: ‘From the fact that immediate knowing is supposed to be the criterion of truth, it follows that all kinds of superstition and idolatry are declared to be true’.¹⁵ Aligning himself with the epistemological tradition from Aristotle to Spinoza, Hegel likewise sustains, in his own fashion, the necessity of adequate demonstration and apodictic judgements.¹⁶

While I argued in my Introduction that Althusser’s initial presentation of Marx’s theory in For Marx and Reading Capital sacrificed analytical clarity on multiple fronts to the demands of a situated theoretical polemic (i.e., slippage from the theoretical to the historical, the unqualified suppression of the concept of substance, etc.), the extreme theoretical density and interwoven complexity of Macherey’s contrasting argument in Hegel or Spinoza, seeking to parse Hegel’s various (mis)readings of Spinoza through Spinoza’s own proleptic responses to such positions and misunderstandings, is unnecessary fully to rehearse here, since my object is neither Spinoza nor Hegel per se, but rather Marx’s process of exposition in Capital. Instead, in the place of proper names, it is important to focus on the specific logical operations Marx deploys in this process. Thus, instead of vaguely contrasting ‘Hegelian’ and ‘Spinozist’ logics, I wish more precisely to interrogate Marx’s process of exposition in Capital in relation to three categories, all of which are as central to Hegel’s logic as they are tendentially suppressed from Marx’s: totality, negation, and contradiction. I will proceed by confronting one of the most influential and comprehensive recent defences of a Hegelian reading of Capital – Chris Arthur’s The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital – with various moments of Pierre Macherey’s critique of these Hegelian categories, at each step bringing this critique back to bear upon the text of Capital itself in the desire not merely to counter neo-Hegelian readings of Capital such as Arthur’s, but to further the interrogation and articulation of Marx’s positive, materialist dialectic as it is deployed in his magnum opus, in the wake of the Althusserians’ relinquishing of this project after 1967.

3 Totality

Marx’s Capital does not constitute an objective totality, whether we take the term in its material, demonstrative, or logical sense. Such a position, I wish to argue, follows imperatively both from Reading Capital as well as Pierre Macherey’s general critique of the concept of totality in For a Theory of Literary Production (in which he does not discuss Capital explicitly). It also follows directly from a comparison of the Grundrisse with the revised versions of Capital, from which the term Totalität almost entirely disappears. In Grundrisse, the Hegelian concept of totality is vital and determinant, recurring nearly a hundred times in Marx’s notebooks: ‘The conclusion we reach is not that production, distribution, exchange, and consumption are identical, but that they all form members of a totality [Totalität], distinctions within a unity’.¹⁷ By the time Marx drafts and subsequently revises Capital Volume one in 1872, the term totality only occurs twice, within a single citation from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, while in the 1875 French translation, the final version Marx oversaw, the term totalité occurs just once in reference to the figure of a given sum (‘la totalité du capital employé’).¹⁸

This claim, to be sure, stands in direct contrast to the Marxist humanist tradition since Lukács and Karel Kosík, as well as to the exponents of the so-called systematic Dialectical reading of Capital such as Chris Arthur’s neo-Hegelian position in The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital.¹⁹ In what follows, I will develop this position as both a critique of Lukács’s original affirmation and Arthur’s book, as well as immanently within Marx’s text. I do so in three moments: first, by briefly recalling the Hegelian affirmation of totality; next, through an equally brief critique of its Marxist inflection in Lukács’s 1921 essay ‘The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg’ followed by an examination of Arthur’s application of this Hegelian doctrine of totality to Marx’s Capital. This will then allow for a consideration of the specific case of Capital and totality, in the three senses just mentioned: as a material totality (whether Capital the book forms a totality); as a demonstrative totality (whether Marx’s process of demonstration in Capital constitutes a totality); and finally, whether the categorial critique of Capital theorises a logical totality (in the sense Arthur affirms, that ‘Capital [the social form, not Marx’s book] is a closed totality only in form’).²⁰

The category of totality is central to Hegel’s doctrine of logic, and constitutes one of the most familiar aspects of his systematic thought. The theme of totality is crucial to the systematicity of Hegelian logic, and Hegel strongly underscores this importance in the capstone of his thought, the Encyclopedia Logic.²¹ Hegel argued that a coherent and comprehensive philosophical doctrine required systematic form, in the sense of its apodicticity, i.e., that all propositions be rigorously derived one from another in a systematic and methodical demonstration. Furthermore, this systematicity necessarily implied for Hegel the culmination of this demonstration (and thus his presentation of that system in the Encyclopedia as the capstone of his life’s work) as a single closed system, one that would comprehensively present the logical structures of the real (the Idea, in Hegel’s jargon). As opposed to Spinoza’s absolute separation of the attributes thought and extension, thought for Hegel sublates extensive reality (‘Nature’, in the terminology of the Encyclopedia), such that in conceptualising the real, thought is understood to think itself in schematising the determinations of the natural world.²²

This moment of sublation occurs in the crucial, final paragraph of the Encyclopedia Logic, which engenders the passage from the presentation of the system of logic itself to that of the natural world as Idea: ‘The idea, which is for itself, considered in terms of this, its unity with itself, is the process of intuiting [Anschauen] and the idea insofar as it intuits is nature’. The idea, Hegel continues, is not a separate attribute through which to grasp an aspect of being, but is ‘released’ from its containment in nature:

Yet the absolute freedom of the idea is that it does not merely pass over into life or let life shine in itself as finite knowing [i.e., as mere logical systematicity], but instead, in the absolute truth of itself, resolves to release freely from itself the moment of its particularity or the first determining and otherness, the immediate idea, as its reflection [Widerschein], itself as nature … This idea insofar as it is [diese seiende Idee], is nature.²³

In Hegel’s understanding, philosophy itself forms a totality,²⁴ its constructed and reflected unity constituting a whole: ‘The science of [the absolute] is essentially a system, since the true insofar as it is concrete exists only through unfolding itself in itself, collecting and holding itself together in a unity, i.e. as a totality [Totalität]’.²⁵ In this manner, Hegel’s system depends upon the notion of totality at all three levels indicated above: the three-volume Encyclopedia constitutes a material totality, its pretension being to present the total system of absolute knowledge – from its most abstract initial moment, to the most concrete, the absolute idea – across the material expanse of its pages and the discourse they convey; a demonstrative totality, the sequence of its argument proceeding apodictically from each moment to that which it logically entails, to demonstrate in sum the systematic unity of being in its totality; and, logically, the Encyclopedia presents the absolute idea as the rational totality of its determinations.

More precisely, Hegel’s entire philosophical system consists in not just one final totality (the absolute idea) in distinction to the contradictory inadequacy of all its prior moments, but through the articulation of its various sections, it articulates a sequence of totalities. This is to say that each determination of being – from the first, most abstract determination of being and nothingness as becoming, through to the complete and sufficient totality of the absolute idea, along with the many other forms of determination Hegel considers along the way (finitude, identity, etc.) – constitutes an aspect of the totality of being according to a specific, determinate form. Hegel famously visualises this as a system in which the totality of being, understood as absolute idea, ‘presents itself as a circle of circles, each of which is a necessary moment, so that the system of its distinctive elements makes up the idea in its entirety. … Each sphere of the logical idea proves to be a totality of determinations’.²⁶

If each Hegelian determination of being, from the most abstract to the most concrete, forms a totality, each of these (prior to the absolute) must furthermore be understood as ontologically constituted by its inner negativity and inadequacy;²⁷ each determination of being, in other words, is not simply a totality, but stands as an inadequate or illegitimate totality, to adopt Michela Bordignon’s terminology.²⁸ This is to say that each logical determination or category of being through which Hegel articulates his system of logic defines a totality according to a certain form: being as it is perceived under the determination of quantity, of finitude, of identity, etc.

The key point, then, is that if Hegel’s analysis of being under the attribute of identity, or any other determination, constitutes a totality (the totality of being grasped via the concept of identity), this totality must necessarily, insofar as it refers to the totality of being, refer as well to the definition of identity itself as an element of this totality.²⁹ If each logical totality constitutes a set, then the immediate consequence to be drawn is that each and every one of these sets (i.e., each of Hegel’s logical determinations of being) is ‘illegitimate’ in the familiar sense of Russell’s paradox: in Bordignon’s terms, ‘each logical determination denotes a set of which it is a member, and thus refers to itself’.³⁰

Hegel’s familiar example of the contradictory logic of identity makes this paradox apparent.³¹ Being, when grasped under the attribute or determination of identity, constitutes a totality – and since the definition of the absolute as a determinate totality necessarily includes the definition of identity, this set refers to itself (the concept of identity) as well. That identity is identical to itself (necessarily, according to its definition), however, implies, as Hegel shows in the doctrine of essence, that it is different from, not identical to, what it is not, namely, difference. Its difference from difference is thus not merely external, but gives identity its self-identity, making it a member of the set of all being grasped under the determination of identity. And yet, since its difference from difference constitutes in this sense, ontologically, the very identity of identity, it can be said that the concept of identity necessarily, ontologically, contains difference within itself. If this is so, then it cannot be a member of the set of all being grasped as self-same, determinate identity without difference. Or in Bordignon’s recapitulation: ‘Insofar as identity is identical with itself, identity differs from difference and thus it involves difference in itself and transcends the limit of the totality that it is supposed to define and that it is a part of’.³²

Now, the interesting conclusion Bordignon draws from this presentation, which simply translates the notion of Hegelian negative dialectic into the language of set theory and Russell’s paradox, is that this ‘illegitimacy’ of all Hegelian set theoretic determinations of being leads not to their ruination (as it will for Badiou, for example), but rather constitutes the singular power and dynamic source of Hegelian logic. Hegel, she argues, while not anachronistically adopting set theoretical terminology, was nonetheless quite aware of the contradictions governing such logical totalities, but simply rejected their ‘illegitimacy’ as a symptom of a specific, inadequate form of rationality, precisely one that could not incorporate such contradictions within its compass.³³ Instead, Hegel affirmed such contradiction [Widerspruch], in its integral necessity to the totality of the absolute idea, as a new form of logic, one precisely able encompass such limited, determinate forms of totality, negation.

4 The Imaginary Presuppositions of Systematic Dialectics

At stake in this chapter cannot be a summary judgement of Hegelian logic as such, nor abstractly to claim its absolute distinction from Marx’s various modes of demonstration in Capital. As will become clear below, at certain moments, Marx does depend upon precisely such a Hegelian logic of constitutive totality, negation and contradiction (for example in the presentation of the concept of the commodity in the Grundrisse and the first, 1867 edition of Capital). The question instead must be to determine the multiple modes of demonstration that Marx deploys in Capital through an explication of the text itself, without invoking a transcendent, reified totality of which each of these moments would be a determinate expression.³⁴ This Althusserian analytical protocol, as the general rejection of the category of expressive totality, finds analogous iteration in Macherey’s programme in Theory of Literary Production (discussed in the previous chapter); at the same time, it stands in direct opposition to the neo-Hegelian reading of Capital to be found in Chris Arthur’s The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital.

To confront these two influential readings of Capital then is at once to choose between a reconstructive interpretation of the (Hegelian, negative dialectical) logical form of Capital (Arthur) and the autonomous construction of an analytic theory of Capital’s modes of demonstration and the necessity governing their organisation. At the same time, it is to clarify the decision drawn between an understanding of Capital as a unified, totalised negative dialectical object, in which each moment incompletely expresses this totality, and Capital as a materialist structure of multiple logics and concatenated conceptual singularities without totality.³⁵ In rejecting the inadequate nominal abstraction of ‘Hegelian’ vs. ‘Spinozist’ (or Marxian) logics, I choose to focus instead on three aspects of Marx’s apodictic demonstration: totality, negation, and contradiction. I begin with the problem of totality not only because it offers a stark and radical contrast between Arthur’s and Macherey’s understandings of the process of exposition in Capital, but even more because Arthur’s analysis of the status of negation and contradiction in Capital crucially depends upon his initial assertion of the book’s status as a formal totality.

Chris Arthur’s influential 2002 book The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital offers a sustained reading of the logic of Capital as what Arthur calls a ‘systematic dialectic’.³⁶ By this, Arthur rightly seeks to distinguish this form of analysis as the attempt logically ‘to articulate the relations of a given social order, namely capitalism’, from what he calls the ‘Old Dialectic’, the Soviet Stalinist ‘school of “Diamat”, rooted in vulgarised versions of Engels and Plekhanov’, a tradition that, retaining Hegel’s teleological philosophy of history, has read Capital as the historicist analysis of the origins and progression of capitalism from so-called primitive exchange to the fully developed industrial capitalist social form.³⁷

In contrast, the process of exposition Arthur calls ‘systematic dialectic’ adopts Hegel’s concern to demonstrate the logical form of its object, as for example that found in the Logic or the Philosophy of Right, arguing that Marx univocally adopted this Hegelian logical dialectic in Capital.³⁸ While I have argued above that the Spinozist distinction between the historical development of capitalism, in the attribute of temporal extension, and the exposition of its logical structure in that of thought forms the basis of Althusser’s epistemology in Reading Capital – a theoretical reference that Arthur, in his anti-Althusserian Hegelianism unsurprisingly neglects to mention – this quasi-Althusserian distinction that Arthur draws constitutes little more than an opening prelude to his analysis.

Instead, Arthur’s introductory exposition of his project confusingly – from the Althusserian position I am arguing in this book – conflates a salutary rejection of Diamat historicist readings of Capital, with the imaginary, unexamined, and undemonstrated presupposition that Marx’s Capital, via what Arthur calls its ‘systematic dialectic’, presents the logic of capitalism as a unitary expressive totality (‘the significance of each element is determined by its place in the totality’, Arthur states categorically) via a negative, contradiction-based dialectic.³⁹

Arthur’s undefended position implicitly invokes the authority of the entire Marxist humanist tradition, a position that originates in Marx’s early writings,⁴⁰ to find its definitive and most influential formulation in Lukács’s 1921 essay ‘The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg’: ‘The decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought [is] the point of view of totality’.⁴¹ In Lukács’s famous treatment, the category of totality constitutes ‘the essence of the method that Marx took over from Hegel’.⁴² This position necessarily implies, Lukács argues, the mediated unity of both subject and object as totality, such that ‘only classes can represent this total point of view’. For Marx, abandoning the initial political sloganeering of the Communist Manifesto, the category of class would come to represent in Capital’s science of causes the terminal explanandum of its thousands of pages of analysis (in the form of the four, incomplete paragraphs of Volume III, chapter 52, ‘Classes’), with the science of value in the capitalist social form its explanans. For Lukács, in contrast, the subjective point of view of totality, which is to say, that of the proletariat, miraculously explains the teleology it presupposes, the faith-based theodicy of revolution: ‘Revolution’, writes Lukács, ‘is the product of a point of view in which the category of totality is predominant …. As doubt develops into certainty the petty bourgeois and reactionary elements disappear without a trace: doubt turns to optimism and to the theoretical certainty of the coming revolution’.⁴³ This assertion culminates in Lukács’s dogmatic certainty of the historical necessity of revolution, as if the imputed, merely imagined proletarian standpoint of totality could predict the fall of paving stones on the collective head of the capitalist class: ‘This certitude [of proletarian revolution] can be guaranteed methodologically – by the dialectical method … as the certitude that the … historical process will come to fruition’.⁴⁴

Proletarian revolution having weathered the vicissitudes of the twentieth century, in Arthur’s case, unlike that of Lukács, the ‘standpoint of totality’ remains strictly limited to that of a logical presupposition devoid of any explicit political teleology.⁴⁵ ‘Ontologically’, Arthur summarises, systematic dialectic ‘addresses itself to totalities and thus to their comprehension through systematically connected categories’.⁴⁶ While, as we have seen, Hegel explicitly understands the object of his various analyses to be totalities, whether this is true for Marx remains uncertain in the absence of some degree of textual analysis on Arthur’s part that would support this fundamental claim. Instead, Arthur simply begs the question regarding this shibboleth of the Systematic Dialectic school, and directly proceeds to draw his own original conclusions from a position that may or may not correspond to Marx’s argument in Capital.⁴⁷

Arthur thus rightly underlines the specificity of Marx’s logical – as opposed to historical – form of demonstration, stressing its discontinuity with the order of historical events (‘The expositional order of [the] categories does not have to coincide with the order of their appearance in history’), while in the very same sentence presupposing without demonstration that the categories of capitalism serve to ‘conceptualise an existent, concrete whole’.⁴⁸

Macherey, in contrast, decisively rejects a vision of critical interpretation as the revelation of the consonant unity of the work, ‘the postulate of harmony or totality: the work is perfect, completed, and constitutes a finished entity’.⁴⁹ While in this view its constitutive dissonance subtracts the work from the category of totality, it is nonetheless a singular, existing thing.⁵⁰ Whether, like Marx’s Capital, it remains a radically unfinished and incomplete work in progress, or nominally complete, like Spinoza’s Ethics or Proust’s A la recherche, the work, despite and even because of its infinite determinations, remains a finite thing, and, consequently, emphatically not a totality: ‘If the work does not produce or contain the principle of its own closure, it is nevertheless definitively enclosed within its own limits (though they may not be self-appointed limits). The work is finite because it is incomplete’.⁵¹

Readers of The New Dialectic have tended to focus on the inadequacies of Arthur’s liberal reconstruction of the capitalist social form, taking issue for example with Arthur’s ‘random selection of categories of Hegel’s Logic … applied to a selection of more or less random categories of the first five chapters of Capital’, as well as with Arthur’s reconstructivist claim that Marx prematurely introduces abstract labour as the substance of value in the first chapter of Capital.⁵² Here, I wish to focus not on Arthur’s interpretive reconstruction of the capitalist social form, but instead on the adequacy of categories such as totality and constitutive negation for understanding Capital’s process of exposition. On this score, Jacques Bidet’s is to my mind the most relevant critique of The New Dialectic, for he asserts (without actually developing this argument) the basic inadequacy of the categories of totality⁵³ and the expressive determination that totality would bestow on each determination.⁵⁴

The initial presentation of The New Dialectic is predetermined by a significant silence, in the form of its unquestioned presupposition that the concept of ‘dialectic’ refers to Hegelian, negative contradiction-based demonstration. Here too, Arthur simply presupposes what needs to be shown: if dialectic refers to the notion of logical reasoning in general,⁵⁵ and Hegel’s dialectic based on constitutive negation and contradiction constitutes only one variety of this process, could it be that Marx deploys other modes of demonstration across the thousands of pages of Capital? Never actually addressing this possibility, one striking aspect of The New Dialectic is Arthur’s general willingness to forgo analysis of Marx’s actual modes of logical analysis and demonstration, and instead liberally to ‘reconstruct’ his own understanding of the (negative) dialectic of capitalism. With the important exception of his chapter 6, where Arthur analyses ‘The Negation of the Negation in Marx’s Capital’ (discussed below), The New Dialectic never develops its claim for Capital’s ‘systematic dialectic’ via a systematic analysis of Capital’s dialectic (in the general sense of its modes of demonstration), but instead only occasionally inserts citations selected to support its negative dialectical presuppositions, these most frequently being taken from the Grundrisse and earlier drafts and editions of Capital in which the influence of Hegel’s logic remains most pronounced.⁵⁶

Here too, we can say that Arthur’s procedure confirms Macherey’s critique of interpretation, in its tendency to conceal the complex, overdetermined work and its constitutional dissonance behind the gleaming image of the vision of totality it artfully constructs: primarily directed toward ‘an external end’ (the articulation of his own original understanding of the negative dialectical systematic dialectic of capital) rather than an explication of the necessary and complex dynamics of the text itself,⁵⁷ Arthur’s interpretive effort amounts to ‘a mythical task that endows [the work] with a unity and totality into which it vanishes’.⁵⁸ This process of reduction and revelation culminates in Arthur’s schematic and reductive chart of correspondences between Hegel’s Logic and Capital.⁵⁹

5 The Problem with Totality

Capital is not a totality, whether considered materially or logically. This general conclusion follows simply as a logical consequence of the nature of all axiomatic logical systems.⁶⁰ Any logical system requires an axiomatic foundation to establish the basic principles allowing for its demonstrations, and the largely informal logical system of Capital is no different. I argue throughout this book that the first sentence of Capital provides such an axiomatic starting point to Marx’s argument – that capitalism is the social form characterized by the generalization of commodity production and exchange, with the commodity as its basic unit – and that many of Marx’s propositions follow apodictically from this initial axiom – that in the capitalist social form, all commodities require a value form; that generalized exchange requires a general equivalent form; that labour power is the only commodity capable of creating surplus value; that the value and price of a commodity tend to diverge, etc.

Now, any axiomatic system can be said to be complete – a logical totality – if it can derive whether any proposition formulated within its language is true or false, and it can be said to be consistent as a totality if its derived propositions do not result in logical contradictions. While I argue that this is the case for the great majority of Marx’s propositions and demonstrations, Macherey, Balibar, Antonio Negri, Jacques Bidet, Riccardo Bellofiore and others have all shown that there exist multiple points of logical rupture and discontinuity in Capital: in other words, that the logic of Capital is incomplete because its own consistency or inconsistency cannot be derived from its initial axioms.⁶¹ Without needing to rehearse their various readings, I will simply argue below that it is Arthur himself who undermines his own assumption for the logical totality of Capital, insofar as he can only present this ideological image of a complete functional system by excluding from consideration the anomalous, disjunctive, disruptive power of living labour.

Following his private critique of Althusser’s use of the concept of totality in the first edition of Reading Capital,⁶² Pierre Macherey would develop a more sustained critique of the concept in Theory of Literary Production and his writings on Spinoza.⁶³ Macherey’s critique is extensive, if not systematically argued: totality, he argues, can and should only refer to the fabrication of imaginary, inadequately determinate sets (such as Arthur’s undemonstrated position), and necessarily remains a tendential, incomplete construction of a thought object. In Macherey’s understanding, the explication of a text must seek instead to construct an analysis of the necessity that governs its overdetermined, dissonant complexity:

Rather than sufficiency and ideal consistency, a determinate insufficiency and incompleteness actually shapes the work. The work is necessarily incomplete in itself: not extrinsically, in a fashion that could be completed to ‘realise’ the work. This incompleteness, indicated by the confrontation of distinct meanings, is the true reason for its articulation. The thin line of the discourse is the temporary appearance behind which we recognise the determinate complexity of a text: on the condition that this complexity is not that of a ‘totality’, illusory and mediate.⁶⁴

Constitutionally finite and incomplete, the work is never a terminate totality or unified whole. This position, one that Macherey articulates so resolutely, nonetheless itself remains underdetermined: what, we may ask, does the concept of totality in fact indicate, and why does Macherey, following Spinoza, so vigorously assert its epistemological inadequacy?

Derived from the Greek To holon [τὸ ὅλον], the Latin totalis indicates a complete and integral whole.⁶⁵ Conceptually, the notion of totality thus implies that which has nothing essential to its nature outside itself: it is the thing entirely self-sufficient and in-itself [in se est]. This as opposed to all finite singular things [res in suo genere finita (EID2)], which, as finite, necessarily depend causally upon other things for their determination, and, via the infinity of these reciprocal determinations, are in fact, Macherey observes, overdetermined by other things within their genre or attribute: a body (in the sense of any extensive material thing) will always be limited and essentially determined by other bodies, just as any finite thought [cogitatio] will necessarily be limited and determined by other thoughts.⁶⁶

The conclusion Macherey draws from Spinoza’s incipient definitions constitutes a rejection of the notion of totality as applied to any finite thing: Spinoza’s ‘logic of the finite [indicates that] a finite thing, whatever it may be, can never be thought absolutely for itself, but only relatively by the intermediary of its relation to another thing’.⁶⁷ The implication of this initial position is thus that to speak of any finite, determinate thing as a totality (such as the capitalist mode of production and/or the logical system of the book Capital for Arthur) is to have recourse to a merely imaginary figure based on our sense impressions of that object as a discrete and self-sufficient thing, as opposed to adequately grasping its necessarily infinite determinations by other things. Consequently, this imaginary figure (say, Arthur’s abstract hypostatisation of the capitalist mode of production) is then imagined to produce effects upon the various moments of the system. Marx, in Capital, proceeds in precisely the opposite fashion, from the logical demonstration of the essential nature of a thing (such as the commodity) to its necessary effects, without the imputation of what Lukács called ‘the standpoint of totality’.

Indeed, Macherey indicates in his commentary that the topic of Book I of Ethics is precisely not some finite, determinate thing, but ‘an object that is infinite, and even infinitely infinite: the set [ensemble] of reality considered in its totality and as a totality, according to the principles that found its unity [and] develop a rational thought on the subject of all [au sujet de tout] by treating this whole according to its nature as whole [sa nature de tout]’.⁶⁸ It would thus seem that Macherey expressly limits the notion of totality or whole [τὸ ὅλον] to Spinoza’s substance, not as the hypostatisation of a thing, but as the starting point for the adequate knowledge of nature.

I would argue, moreover, that Macherey’s initial use of the terms totality and whole in reference to Spinozist substance that I have just cited is itself merely imagistic, in the sense that the indefinite article (‘a totality’) tends to hypostatise into a determinate thing, what Macherey goes on to steadfastly and repeatedly argue is precisely not a thing, determinate and countable (as one monist substance): ‘to think the real in totality according to the synthetic procedure or geometric order that proceeds from the cause to its effects, and not the reverse’ requires a conception of substance not as a thing but as Being, understood as the presupposition that ‘conditions the set of its [determinate] affections’.⁶⁹ To think of substance as a thing is ‘to transfer onto [the concept of substance] characteristics that belong only to its affections …. Substance, insofar as it exists necessarily [i.e., as causa sui], thus by virtue of its proper [seule] nature, does not exist in the manner of a finite thing, and thus in the mode of an individual existence, as a singular entity finding its place next to others within a series that can be enumerated’. Substance, in other words, is not one or a substance or totality; ‘it is not “an” existence, in the sense of a particular existence that would depend upon causes exterior to its nature, but existence itself thought as absolute … the fact of existing understood in itself, thus independent of reference to any particular existence whatsoever’.⁷⁰

To think of Spinozist substance as a determinate thing or totality is to grasp this most difficult concept inadequately, through the imagination.⁷¹ ‘To attentively think the nature of substance’, Macherey observes,

is a new manner of thinking existence, in itself and no longer in number [non plus en nombre], and thus without bringing to bear consideration of exterior causes …. The nature of substance is such that it is subtracted from the grasp of the imagination, which can only denature it in replacing it in a network of exterior determinations in which it figures as an existing thing next to or above others [as a transcendent instance or subject of monism, Althusser would have said], which amounts to denying its absolute relation to itself that excludes all relation to anything other than itself.⁷²

To think Spinoza’s idea of substance, then, is to refuse to speak of ‘a’ substance at all, but instead, Macherey continues, of ‘subsisting [le subsister], or existing [l’exister] considered as such’.⁷³

If the concept of totality or the whole as hypostatised thing is thus necessarily inadequate and imaginary, both in the case of substance (because to speak of substance as a thing is to reify it as an existing thing) as well as of any determinate object of thought (since the process of adequate construction of an object of thought is infinite), how does Spinoza, in Macherey’s reading, allow for the adequate understanding of any existing thing or ‘whole’ (such as the capitalist social form)?

In his letters of 10 and 14 May 1965 to Althusser on the problem of totality in Reading Capital, Macherey somewhat cryptically suggests that Spinoza’s 1665 letter XXXII to Oldenberg contains the theoretical resources to overcome Althusser’s ungrounded references to ‘the structured whole’ in the first edition of Reading Capital: ‘It seems to me’, Macherey writes, ‘that when you speak of a set [ensemble] or of a whole, you thereby add a concept that is absolutely unnecessary to the demonstration, and which may later become an obstacle (the idea of the real whole in opposition to that of the spiritual whole is not very clear: the idea of the whole is really the spiritualist conception of structure) …. Each time I have encountered the phrase “structured whole” in what you have written, I was struck by the problems that it raises’.⁷⁴ Macherey’s point is that reference to totality or a whole, whether expressive totality, the explicit object of Althusser’s critique in Reading Capital, or structured whole (as Althusser suggests positively) is ‘absolutely unnecessary to the demonstration’. In what sense is this the case, following the Spinozist logic Macherey refers to?

Let us look at Spinoza’s letter XXXII more carefully than Macherey does in his suggestion to Althusser. There, in answer to Oldenberg’s inquiry into ‘the grounds of our belief that each part of Nature accords with the whole’, Spinoza begins by pointing out that ‘the actual manner of this coherence and the agreement of each part with the whole … is beyond my knowledge. To know this it would be necessary to know the whole of Nature and all its parts’. Instead, Spinoza argues to his correspondent that our knowledge of any putative whole, and not only being qua being, remains inadequate and imaginary in the absence of its systematic, adequate demonstration, whether through common notions or intuitive knowledge. Rather than developing a systematic and comprehensive demonstration of this point as he does in the Ethics, however, Spinoza fabricates for his correspondent a striking, hauntingly graphic and even fantastic image, his famous parable of the worm in the blood. The point of Spinoza’s allegory is that the decision as to whether an object (such as the blood in which Spinoza’s imaginary worm swims) constitutes a whole or a part is necessarily subjective.⁷⁵ It is possible to understand any determinate thing as either part or whole, depending on how this knowledge is constructed, whether things are understood to ‘adapt themselves to one another so that they are in closest possible agreement’, such that each is a part of a whole, or, alternatively, ‘are different from one another’, such that each is understood to constitute a whole. As objects of knowledge, the parts of the blood (what we today identify as white and red blood cells, plasma, etc.), in Spinoza’s example, can readily be understood either as whole or part: from the perspective of their ‘agreement [they] form all together one fluid’, but were we to consider each in its singular difference from the others (white vs. red cells, etc.), ‘to that extent we regard them each as a whole, not a part’.

To call a thing either a whole or a part is thus for Spinoza merely relative and subjective, fundamentally dependent upon how an object of knowledge is constructed, more or less adequately, as a figure of the understanding. As Macherey summarises in Hegel or Spinoza, ‘For Spinoza, the notion of totality … does not represent the positive existence of a being … but [depends] on the point of view of the understanding that cuts it up in the infinite chain of singular things, by considering it as a whole’. This position, moreover, indicates Spinoza’s fundamental antagonism with Hegelian logic, as the absolute distinction between substance and subject, insofar as the former, by definition for Spinoza absolute and thus indeterminate, can never be figured as a determinate whole.⁷⁶

That said, Spinoza is not propounding the relativism of all judgements. He clearly indicates to Oldenberg an entirely different path to adequate knowledge of any singular thing: beginning from a true idea, it is possible adequately to understand the essential nature of that thing, and then, constructively, to proceed from one adequately constructed idea to another. This synthetic logic proceeds to construct the ‘coherence [cohaerentiam] of parts’ via a cumulative understanding by which ‘the laws or nature of another part adapts itself to the laws or nature of another part’, absent all teleology.⁷⁷ While we cannot know in totality either the infinite determinations of any singular thing (such as the capitalist social form) nor the infinitely infinite determinations of the whole of Nature, the mind can nonetheless proceed constructively, from an adequate knowledge of one true idea, to the (logical) successor with which it additively forms a part of a larger body.⁷⁸

Instead of Arthur’s claim for a negative dialectical knowledge based on the contradiction between any determinate concept such as money or value and the (merely presupposed, imaginary) totality of the capitalist social form in all its infinite determinations, Marx’s argument in Capital, in this view, should be understood to proceed constructively, from the adequate knowledge of one concept (the general form of appearance of any society ‘in which the capitalist mode of production predominates’, the commodity form, the substance of value, etc.) to the next with which it is most closely linked (the passage from use-value to exchange-value, for example). This is precisely to indicate what Macherey only suggests to Althusser: the reference to totality is not simply ‘absolutely unnecessary to the demonstration’, but utterly misleading, in the sense that the concept of totality inherently refers to ‘the complete set of elements of a whole’ (Lalande), a terminally and wholly complete object rather than an inherently infinite construct.⁷⁹ Neither Capital the book nor the capitalist mode of production, the object of knowledge Marx constructs, is subject to the completion of totality, but only the more or less adequate construction of each of its logical steps and their infinitely complex ramifications and network of correspondences, the sum of which do not make up a whole.

A case in point is Marx’s concept of total surplus value: ‘Equal amounts of capital, no matter how they are composed, receive equal shares (aliquot parts) of the totality of surplus-value produced by the total social capital’.⁸⁰ Marx’s analysis here explicitly takes as its object not the investigation of specific individual commodities, as did classical economics, but the total mass of commodities, initially in the first sentence of Capital impressionistically described as an undifferentiated, ‘immense heap’ (ungeheure Warensammlung), and subsequently and with increasing theoretical concretion, as identical subdivisions or ‘aliquot parts’ that constitute the general substance of capital.⁸¹

As Fred Moseley has shown, Marx meticulously constructs this concept across the three volumes of Capital, such that it serves, in Volume III, as the crucial theoretical object that allows Marx to distinguish between profit and surplus value. The concept has no empirical or even quantitative basis or nature, there exists no Fort Knox of total surplus value, but remains from the first page of Capital to the last a purely theoretical object of increasing theoretical complexity. For all the rigor and adequacy of Marx’s construction, ‘the total mass of surplus-value’ remains in Capital an inherently incomplete concept, as Moseley’s 400-page analysis amply demonstrates. In the place of Arthur’s impressionistic gesture to capital as a logical totality, a concept such as total surplus-value, which Marx rigorously, if necessarily incompletely, develops, serves to lucidly distinguish Marx’s theoretical analysis from the inherent contradictions of mainstream economics’ individualist, summative process. From this we might even conclude that Marx’s reference to the ‘totality’ of surplus-value that I cited above is a terminological lapsus, a usage limited to a single instance in the uncorrected 1864 manuscript that Engels reworked into Volume III; instead, Marx in every other case refers to the ‘total mass of surplus-value’, arguably tending to avoid the implication of surplus-value as a complete and closed conceptual set.

Arthur, like Lukács before him, plays the role of the worm in Spinoza’s blood: reassuringly swathed in the balm of absolute knowledge (whether that of the logic of Capital or the theodicy of the proletarian revolution), the point of view of expressive totality bestows the aura of absolute truth via its mere assertion. In The New Dialectic, as it had for Lukács, the subjective hypostatisation of the actually existing concept of capitalism as negative dialectical totality offers a reassuring image, the function of imputed totality magically bestowing on every partial, expressive determination of the whole its necessary and sufficient reason. Affectively, the transcendent monism of totality, whether logical or revolutionary theodicy, serves in this view to repress the anxiety of the knowing subject before its constitutive not-knowing, to repress the necessary incompletion of any object of knowledge. It was not for nothing that Lacan initially founded the singularity of any analysis on this Spinozist epistemology: it is Spinoza who most forcefully refuses the imaginary, regressive figure of totality as guarantee. The Ethics, principle among its many virtues, instead initiates a treatment, offering the subject the means to sustain the anxiety of not-knowing via the progressive amendment of the intellect, in the certainty that the finite human mind is capable of more adequate understanding than such imaginary chimera, even to realise a scientia intuitiva – not of totality – but of the absolute.⁸²

6 The Systematic Dissonance of Capital

Materially, it is quite obvious that Marx’s book Capital is a radically incomplete project. Even Volume I of Capital – the publication of which Marx oversaw through its second, revised German edition and first French translation (1872–75) – remains a work-in-progress; Marx made notes for a further complete revision of it in 1881 (which he never carried out). What we know today as Volume I is a bricolage Engels made of the second German edition of 1872 and the French edition of 1872–75. While the bulk of the first draft of Volume I from 1863 is lost, the first German edition of 1867 as well as Marx’s notes for the 1872 edition and his intended further 1881 revision contain many important formulations and developments of his demonstration (in particular, a radically different presentation of the key first chapter on the value-form), aspects absent from Engels’s posthumous ‘definitive edition’. Volume III, assembled by Engels after Marx’s death, is based upon a single manuscript from 1864–65; it is thus not only theoretically immature compared to Marx’s subsequent work on Volumes I and II, but in fact terminates abruptly with Marx’s comment ‘etc.’, a mere five paragraphs into its twenty-fifth chapter dedicated to what presumably would have been one of the essential results of Marx’s analysis, the concept of ‘Classes’.⁸³

In fact, attention to the totality of Marx’s drafts, notebooks, and letters from 1857 to 1881, gradually becoming available in the definitive MEGA² edition of Marx and Engels’s works, leads Michael Heinrich to draw the distinctly Althusserian conclusion that ‘in a strict sense, a three-volume work “Capital” written by Marx does not really exist. … There is no clear difference between drafts and the final work – we have only differently developed drafts of a shifting, unfinished and incomplete project’.⁸⁴

Given this genetic complexity, it is patently obvious that Marx’s intellectual project of a critique of political economy that we know as Capital does not constitute a totality in any sense of the word, and that the presumption of totality by proponents of Systematic Dialectics such as Arthur and Reuten is a mere article of faith. Their unquestioned certainty underwrites a distinctly theological reading of Capital. This imaginary totality, that of the theoretical object Marx constructed, as well as its materialist basis in the putative totality of actually-existing capitalism, constitutes for this Hegelian school of thought the transcendent instance that bestows meaning on each moment of the (imaginary) whole:

Only on completion of the presentation, [Reuten writes, citing Hegel,] will we know that ‘the truth of the differentiated is its being in unity’. … Once the presentation is complete – and thus when the initial unifying concept [of the commodity] is shown to be inherent in the object-totality, in its full concreteness (γ) – will we have come full circle, confirming the truth of the abstract starting point.⁸⁵

This providential day of theoretical plenitude is one that will never arrive, as Reuten himself knows as well as Althusser or Heinrich: Capital Volume I as we know it, Reuten observes parenthetically, ‘requires further concrete grounding of the moments presented in this sequence (Capital Volumes II and III, as well as the books which Marx had planned but did not even begin to draft)’.⁸⁶ The Hegelian theoretical commitments of this school of Marxology thus lead them – despite their intensive knowledge of the extreme genetic complexity of Marx’s Capital project that makes of it an unequivocally ‘unfinished and incomplete project’ (Heinrich) – to adhere to this Lukácsian-Hegelian theoretical imperative, and to bestow upon Capital the aura of a transcendent, emanant totality. Their analytic pursuit recommences a perpetually-in-process inquest into the theoretical promised land that is Marx’s alleged Hegelian palimpsest, as they fervently continue to invoke ‘the lonely hour of the last instance [that] never comes’.⁸⁷

Similarly, it should be obvious on even the most cursory reading that Marx deploys a multiplicity of demonstrative modalities across the pages of Capital, from Marx’s recurrent recourse to classical modus ponens, if-then propositions,⁸⁸ to imaginary phantasmagorias⁸⁹ and other quite original modes of demonstration Macherey, Althusser, and Balibar identify as the ‘exhaustion’ of concepts (Macherey), the non-dialectical, discrete ‘positioning’ (position) of concepts (Althusser), and the methods Balibar calls ‘comparison’ and ‘results’.⁹⁰ While Chris Arthur does not literally claim that Marx’s demonstration in Capital, unlike that of Hegel’s Logic, proceeds solely via a dialectic of constitutive, negative contradiction and sublation, his unrelenting and unquestioned focus on this mode of demonstration certainly implies such a belief.

Arthur’s exclusively Hegelian understanding of Capital as a substantive, expressive totality – the presentation of which is driven by the contradictory relation of any of its moments with that totality – grounds his presentation of its logic univocally, to the exclusion of any other mode of presentation:

The [logic of Capital] depends upon the presupposition that there is a whole from which a violent abstraction has [initially] been made so as to constitute a simple beginning …; and thus there arises a contradiction between the character of the element in isolation and its meaning as part of the whole. The treatment of this moment as inherently in contradiction with itself, on account of this, is given if it is assumed throughout the dialectical development that the whole remains immanent or implicit in it. This provides the basis for the transitions in the development of the categorial ordering. There is an impulse to provide a solution to a contradiction – a ‘push’ one might say – and there is the need to overcome the deficiency of the category with respect to its fulfilment in the whole.⁹¹

In this fashion, with no more than sporadic, selective textual references, Arthur bases his claim for the negative dialectical logic of Capital upon the priority of its status as an expressive totality: it is only because Capital is presupposed to form a substantive totality that each of its moments, in its incompletion, can be argued to enter into negative contradiction with that supposed-totality, logically propelling its sublation from one moment to the next.

On my reading of New Dialectic, Chris Arthur variously presents three distinct arguments for the consistency of Marx’s logic of the capitalist social form as a totality, none of which is either systematic (to adopt Arthur’s own term) or even directly relevant to showing that ‘Capital [the book and its logic? The concept? The social form?] is closed in form’.⁹² The first of these ‘arguments’ points to the totalising nature of capital, its tendency subsume all things within its logic, and to commodify all things and social relations: ‘If value depends for its reality on the full development of capitalist production, then the concepts of Marx’s first chapter can only have an abstract character, and the argument itself as it advances develops the meanings of these concepts, through grounding them adequately in the comprehended whole’.⁹³ Arthur’s statement seems to confuse its categories, its first clause on the reality of value apparently indicating the real, material subsumption via commodification of means and relations of capitalist production, the second, confusingly addressing ‘the concepts of Marx’s first chapter’.

Were we to assume, for argument, that Arthur rigorously remains at the level of Marx’s logic, and instead means ‘the [concept] of value’ and ‘[Marx’s concept of] the full development of capitalist production’, this obscure claim (even granted all this the reader must still guess at Arthur’s exact meaning) has been more adequately and systematically explicated by Fred Moseley. In Money and Totality, Moseley comprehensively shows that throughout the expanse of Marx’s economic manuscripts he presumes that ‘the means of production in capitalist production are commodities, which have been purchased at the beginning of the circuit of money capital, and which therefore enter the valorisation process with already existing specific prices’.⁹⁴

Even so, while Arthur’s claim may be true that ‘only at the end of the reconstruction of the totality is its truth unfolded’, this is true not because this so-called ‘end’ – a point Arthur never concretely indicates within Marx’s exposition, nor could he, since it does not in fact exist within the incomplete and unfinished three volumes we know as Capital – would realise the putative negative dialectical totality of Capital’s logic of exposition, but only, as Moseley shows, because Marx, like Spinoza in the Ethics’ Scholia, chose to simplify for his readers this aspect of his initial presentation in the second edition of 1872, such that this ‘totality’ represents no more than a mere reductive, summary position.

In contrast to Arthur’s ungrounded claim, Marx explicitly emphasises this situated, subjective, provisional nature of the concept of the circularity of the reproduction of capital as a whole when, in the final paragraph of chapter 23 he indicates that ‘The capitalist process of production, … seen [betrachtet] as a total, connected process, i.e. a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself’.⁹⁵ Coming at the end of Volume I, this position is no doubt infinitely more developed and concrete than the initial, minimal true idea with which Marx began Capital (i.e., that the capitalist mode of production appears [erschient] as a general accumulation of commodities); for all that, it is still a partial, incomplete position, a viewpoint obviously possessing none of the further conceptual determinations to be introduced in Volumes II and III.⁹⁶

The fact that the circuit of money capital constitutes a constant in the capitalist social form, in other words, hardly makes of Marx’s logic or the system itself a totality: the concept of this feedback loop is only one among the throng of dissonant concepts Marx develops, existing alongside quite heterogeneous, but nonetheless crucial concepts such as class struggle, the theory of ground rent, cost price, and a hundred others composing the logical body Marx constructs, step by step, concept by concept, as the finite, dissonant thing without totality that is Capital.

Related to but distinct from this first claim for the logic of Capital as totality is Arthur’s similarly obscure implication that because capital requires not just the valorisation of value (as in the previous argument), but its unceasing accumulation, Marx’s logic thus ‘treat[s] a given whole’, this because ‘it is characteristic [of Capital like the works of Hegel] that it demonstrates how [this given whole] reproduces itself …. The movement winds back upon itself to form a circuit of reproduction of these moments by each other’.⁹⁷ Certainly, Marx shows the necessity of this circularity of reproduction and accompanying linear accumulation; nonetheless, my response is identical: Arthur’s claim is true and just as wholly irrelevant to the status of capital (whether the book or the social form) as totality, as it is only one among innumerable dissonant concepts in Marx’s logical construct.

Finally, the most developed but just as problematic argument Arthur puts forward for capital as totality is, paradoxically, its partial nature. Building on the previous points regarding the generality of value and subsumption, Arthur argues that ‘It is inherent to the concept of capital that it must reproduce and accumulate, and in this it seeks to overcome all obstacles and to make the material reality it engages with conform as perfectly as possible to its requirements’. But this it cannot do, ‘its ideal world of frictionless circulation and growth’ is inevitably dependent upon recalcitrant externalities, namely, living labour and its resistance to subsumption and the objective social demands of the valorisation process.⁹⁸

Arthur makes this interesting and subtle point, one that in fact subverts the general argument of his book, in the context of a wider claim for the comprehensive logical, as opposed to historical, argument of Capital. He asserts for example that the discussion of the historical struggle over the length of the working day in chapter ten of Volume I ‘is strictly illustrative and does not advance the [logical] argument’.⁹⁹ While literally correct, I think Arthur’s position fails to indicate the necessity that governs Marx’s inclusion of this material at this point in his analysis. When Marx writes that between the buyer and seller of the commodity labour power there exists ‘an antinomy, of right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchange’, he clearly indicates a point in his analysis that cannot be decided theoretically, one which, having as always first explicated the theoretical parameters of this struggle (between necessary and surplus labour), requires reference to this historical conflict.¹⁰⁰

Note, however, how Arthur has externalised the category of class struggle from his governing framework of the ‘ideal world of [capital’s] frictionless circulation and growth’: first as merely ‘illustrative’ historical data,¹⁰¹ then as a ‘material reality’¹⁰² that impinges on this ideal logical form (totality). While the data Marx cites may well be merely ‘illustrative’, is it not the case that the presentation of this data nonetheless depends not just upon ‘material reality’, but precisely upon a concept of class struggle, a concept obviously vital and necessarily internal to Marx’s entire critique of political economy, for the data Marx presents to make sense in his argument?

When Arthur writes that ‘The logical form of capital is by no means absolute but totally insufficient to maintain itself and it requires a transition to the domain of reality;’ that ‘while capital has the form of self-realisation it still lacks control over its bearers’; or that ‘the logic of the development can issue only in tendencies, which in truth depend on material premises’,¹⁰³ he unwittingly reveals the nature of the imaginary logical totality he constantly presumes:¹⁰⁴ in contrast to the object of Arthur’s analysis, a purely imaginary logical form purged of class struggle, Marx’s (critical) logic of the capitalist social form integrally and essentially positions the dissonant concepts of class struggle and the recalcitrance of living labour as necessary logical components of his logical system.¹⁰⁵

In contrast to Marx’s critique, in which concepts such as class struggle and the working day form integral, dissonant moments, the ideal system Arthur presents as ‘frictionless’ totality, from which these dissonances have been externalised, is none other than the ideological apology for capitalism that is classical political economy itself (and neoliberalism more generally), precisely the imaginary totality from which class struggle has been magically erased by an ‘invisible hand’. If capital is indeed a totality, it is so only in the imagination of its apologists and benefactors. As Arthur himself is obviously not to be counted among these, one is left to conclude, with Spinoza, that the powerful impression of the univocal Hegelian philosophy of totality has blinded the Marxist analysis of The New Dialectic to the discordant, polyphonous logics of Marx’s theoretical critique.

7 Negation and Contradiction

In the sixth chapter of New Dialectic, Arthur explicates in detail the negative dialectical logic of chapter 32 of Capital Volume I, ‘The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation’. While the previous chapters of New Dialectic only punctually cited and analysed Marx’s text to support Arthur’s interpretive reconstruction of the logic of capital, here, Marx’s sole reference to the Hegelian concept of the ‘negation of the negation’ in the whole of Capital serves Arthur as the occasion actually to cite and closely analyse the logic of this moment in Marx’s demonstration. Beginning with an extensive, two-page citation (to ‘remind ourselves of Marx’s text’), Arthur goes on to construct a detailed, original interpretation of the logic of this passage.

Though the arch-Hegelian figure of the ‘negation of the negation’ amply vindicates Arthur’s decision to analyse this long passage in detail, in other respects the section is an odd choice for a study of ‘systematic dialectic’. For not only have this chapter’s summary, teleological claims, as Arthur himself notes, long been an object of ridicule from Dühring on, but their very formulation is precisely the opposite of the painstaking, systematic dialectic (of whatever type) to be found in the initial chapters of Capital. In the place of the apodictic logic of a rigorous demonstration that moves precisely, step by step, sentence by sentence, to demonstrate the essential nature of the commodity and its forms, of surplus value, of capital, etc., in this concluding chapter of volume one, Marx famously makes sweeping, unfounded claims for the inevitable, unitary movement of history: ‘At a certain stage of development [the precapitalist mode of production] brings into the world the material means of its own destruction …. Its annihilation … forms the pre-history of capital’. With the further development of social productive forces, Marx continues, ‘the monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside it …. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated’.¹⁰⁶

Stuck at the very end of Marx’s thousand-page volume, its penultimate chapter retains the grandiose, undemonstrated logic of an inevitable, automatic collapse of capitalism characteristic of the Grundrisse’s famous ‘Fragment on machines’, claims buttressed not by rigorous demonstration but instead by the unrevised, teleological Hegelianism of Marx’s Grundrisse notebooks that is precisely the object of Arthur’s fascination: ‘Capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation. This is the negation of the negation’.¹⁰⁷ Whether Marx’s grandiose claims do justice to the intricacy of Hegel’s logical demonstrations is doubtful; at the very least, though, their articulation through the Hegelian category of negation constitutes a further instance of my argument in this chapter: that Marx’s process of exposition in Capital follows not one single logical model (Hegelian or otherwise), but deploys a multitude of demonstrative logics.

Despite Arthur’s close attention to the letter and movement of Marx’s text in this passage, its grandiose, telegraphic nature forces him to revert to the process of interpretation (as opposed to textual explication) that guided the previous chapters of New Dialectic. Arthur’s intention, then, is to show that Marx’s deployment of the logic of the negation of negation in this chapter ‘is more than just metaphor or parody’, but instead that its high degree of abstraction in fact constitutes ‘the form of the transition [from one mode of production to another] at the most general level, however highly mediated and contingent is the real process’.¹⁰⁸

Arthur thus proceeds interpretively to reconstruct the logic of the ‘two negations’ Marx indicates in the passage: from pre-capitalist to capitalist social forms, and from the latter to the point at which, in Marx’s words, ‘The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated’. This analysis is predicated on the founding distinction of New Dialectic, i.e., between a traditional historical reading of Capital as describing the passage from simple exchange to the capitalist mode of production, in favour of a ‘structural problematic requiring an account of the “genesis” [of the capitalist social form] in logical terms’.¹⁰⁹ Given the resolutely historical terms in which Marx presents his claims in this chapter (in this, it is of a piece with the entire concluding historical section eight of Capital on so-called primitive accumulation), Arthur’s point seems to be that even here, in what is argumentatively the weakest chapter of the entire book, Capital remains a resolutely, unflaggingly logical work (as opposed to a historical study of capitalism, its antecedents, and successors).

Arthur’s focus is on the source of the original capital to initiate the capitalist production process (this being the topic of section eight of Capital more generally). Here, Marx castigates the ideological faith that the capitalist gets these funds from his own hard labour. This, Marx observes ironically, is ‘the unanimous answer of the spokesmen of political economy. And in fact’, Marx adds slyly, ‘their assumption appears to be the only one consonant with the laws of commodity production’.¹¹⁰ The point of Marx’s irony, as any reader of Capital will know, is that this appearance is not just an ideological justification on the part of the capitalists themselves, but possesses its own necessity, given the theoretical inadequacy of the analysis of the question prior to Marx.

Arthur’s claim then is that Marx’s ensuing rectification of this ideological – though necessary – misapprehension adheres to a negative dialectical logic of ‘the transformation of the laws of exchange, appropriation, and property, into their opposites’.¹¹¹ And indeed, Marx’s language in this passage, which Arthur cites extensively, seems to indicate the automatic transformation characteristic of dialectical sublation:

It is quite evident … that the laws of appropriation … become changed into their direct opposite through their own internal and inexorable dialectic …. The property laws of commodity production must undergo an inversion so that they become laws of capitalist appropriation.¹¹²

This passage incontrovertibly constitutes, as Arthur rightly maintains, an instance of Hegelian negative dialectic that Marx continued to deploy at certain moments in Capital, a movement of sublation that Marx presents as a passive process of transformation that occurs automatically, as more adequate categories sublate previous inadequate, ideological ones in the progression of his argument.

This passage should be compared, however, with the strictly analogous preceding passage from chapter five to six and seven, the very crux of Marx’s critique of classical political economy. There, he shows that the ‘contradictions in the general formula of capital’, i.e., the inability of the classical economists to account for the source of surplus value given the inadequate conceptual terms in which they posed the problem, requires not an automatic sublation of those concepts based on their inner contradictions, one that would retain them in their transformation, but, as Jacques Bidet and Riccardo Bellofiore have both argued, a logical break or leap to another theoretical terrain, one in which Marx’s original concept of labour power – crucially absent from the conceptual framework of classical political economy – can be analysed in its use by its purchaser, the capitalist, to reveal the source of surplus value as the difference between necessary and surplus labour.¹¹³

While the object in question differs, Marx’s basic demonstrative procedure is identical in these two passages: he first shows the necessity governing inadequate, ideological forms of appearance of a phenomenon (respectively, the origin of a capital fund and the source of surplus value), and then offers its more adequate analysis in his own theoretical terms. Despite this superficial similarity, the terms of Marx’s demonstration are radically different, fully constituting two singular modes of logical demonstration in the pages of Capital. In both cases, the transformation in question is a transformation in the adequacy of our understanding of the logic governing the capitalist social form; in both cases, Marx contrasts an initial, inadequate and ideological form of appearance of a phenomenon, with the greater adequacy our understanding can attain thanks to the original concepts he has constructed.

For Arthur, the conclusion to be drawn from chapter 24 is merely that even in this most superficially ‘historical’ analysis, ‘Marx speaks “virtually” [i.e., logically] rather than historically, [which] refutes any interpretation of Capital that equates the systematic presentation of the existing totality with historical stages, as if the first chapter explicated some prior regime of simple commodity production’.¹¹⁴ While Arthur’s defence of the entirely logical status of Capital is in my view correct, the more interesting question, I think, is one that precisely subverts the claims to logical totality (‘the systematic presentation of the existing totality’) that accompany this assertion. A comparison between this passage and the transition from chapter five to six and seven incontrovertibly shows that the unrevised negative dialectical form of presentation in chapter 32 constitutes an epistemological impediment, obscuring Marx’s lucid, apodictic argument behind the foggy automatism and passivity of a putative ‘internal and inexorable [negative] dialectic’.

In its place, Marx’s famous invocation to his readers to solve the riddle that had confounded the greatest minds of classical political economy, ‘Hic Rhodus, hic saltus!’ invokes not the imaginary automatism of a Hegelian dialectic but the real power of the intellect to emend its comprehension of an object through the difficult labour of Marx’s concepts. In comparison with the conceptual gymnastics Arthur must perform to reveal the logical kernel of Marx’s eschatological historicist claims in chapter 24, the blatant superiority of Marx’s process of exposition in chapters five, six, and seven lies in the very simplicity of his presentation of a series of powerfully creative critical concepts: when two commodities are exchanged at their value without cheating, the source of profit cannot be readily discerned; for labour power to be sold as a commodity requires that the labourer own their own person as a free subject, not a slave; upon its sale, the commodity labour power is entirely at the disposition of its owner who has purchased it, the capitalist, who may continue to use it beyond what is necessary for the sustenance and reproduction of the labourer, in order to produce surplus value.

As such, Marx’s presentation in part two of the first volume of Capital discards his earlier reliance on the logical automatisms of a negative dialectic in the Grundrisse and other preparatory manuscripts, directly to invoke the fulsome powers of the human intellect more adequately to understand the object of its analysis (‘Hic Rhodus, hic saltus!’), an invocation analogous to Spinoza’s subjective presentation of the initial definitions of the Ethics. In those opening statements, Spinoza defines each of his founding concepts (causa sui, substance, God, etc.) in resolutely subjective terms, via the concerted repetition of the qualification intelligo [I understand]: ‘By substance I understand that which is in itself and is conceived through itself’ [‘Per substantiam intelligo id, quod in se est, et per se concipitur’].¹¹⁵

Macherey’s illuminating commentary on this crucial dimension of Spinoza’s presentation is worth citing in whole for its resonance with Marx’s method in part two of Capital:

It is important to note that the first statements that confront the reader of the Ethics make an appeal to his capacity to ‘understand’ (intelligere), that is to say, to his ‘intellect’ (intellectus), through which he is called to know things in themselves, as they are really [réellement] and not only as they could be in the abstract. In this manner, [Spinoza’s] philosophical discourse installs itself immediately in the movement [mouvance] of the third genre of knowledge. It is furthermore notable that Spinoza, in these inaugural definitions, conjugates the verb intelligere in the first-person indicative present [‘I understand’], which necessarily associates the formulation of the idea in question in each of these definitions with an activity of effective thought [pensée effective], fully engaged in its affirmation …. It is evident that in constructing in this way the first definitions of the Ethics, Spinoza sought to confer on their expression, and at the same time to the entire sequence of discourse that will be elaborated from them, a personal character, something unusual [décalé] compared to the impersonal form typical of abstract scientific discourse. The reader thus implicitly receives the following message, which amounts to a provocation [défi]: here is what I myself understand, here is how things irrecusably present themselves to my mind, on the model of eternal truths; it is up to you to see whether this thought experiment [expérience] imposes itself on you with the same necessity, or whether you find it possible to understand things otherwise …. Spinoza practices philosophical thought as a free spirit [esprit libre] who elaborates the conditions of a communication with other free spirits.¹¹⁶

Like that of Spinoza, Marx’s audacious challenge ‘Hic Rhodus, hic saltus!’ is an encomium to the infinite powers of the human intellect progressively to emend its capacity for understanding. While Marx’s early subjection to the fascination of Hegel’s negative dialectic remains determinant in certain marginal moments of Capital even in its second revision, such as its thirty-second chapter, nowhere is this progressive emendation more evident than in the revisions Marx operates upon his extraordinary and unparalleled analysis of the concept of the commodity, as he reworked an initial presentation based upon its putative contradiction-based determinations of reflection [Reflexionsbestimmungen], to formulate instead a novel ramified, additive synthetic dialectic for the 1872 and 1875 editions of Capital.

8 Constituting the Commodity

To argue as Arthur does that Marx deploys a Hegelian totality-based logic of negation in a marginal, historicist recoin of Capital such as its thirty-second chapter is in some ways to offer too easy a target for the post-Althusserian reading of Capital I am developing here. Far more consequential would be to show this negative dialectic at work in the crucial initial chapters of Capital, along with its supersession in the course of Marx’s revisions by an alternative mode of apodictic demonstration. ‘Beginnings’, Marx observed in the Preface to the First Edition of Capital, ‘are always difficult in all sciences’.¹¹⁷ This is undoubtedly true not only for the readers of Capital whom Marx cautions in this passage, but for the author himself, who struggled mightily to find the proper mode of demonstration for this crucial initial moment in his argument, and constructed no less than four published versions of his analysis of the value-form (two in the 1867 edition, and two others in the second, 1872 German edition and the 1875 French translation he carefully rewrote), along with an entire manuscript from January 1872 in which he points to the shortcomings of his initial (1867) presentation, in order to revise and emend his analysis in what would become the 1872 edition.¹¹⁸

In fact, as Arash Abazari has shown, Marx’s analysis of the commodity form in the first chapter of the first (1867) edition of Capital ‘is the only place in Marx’s entire oeuvre where he systematically deploys and develops the concept of dialectical contradiction’.¹¹⁹ Abazari argues that Marx’s initial analysis of the commodity form deploys the Hegelian logic of constitutive negation [Reflexionsbestimmungen], comparing Marx’s analysis with Hegel’s discussion in the Logic of the ‘thing’ [das Ding].¹²⁰ Abazari argues that in the Logic, Hegel distinguishes two forms of the contradictory nature of the thing.¹²¹ In the initial logic or doctrine of being, Hegel analyses how the thing constitutes its identity as a positive entity through its negative, contrastive exclusion from other things: salt gains its self-same identity through its negative distinction (difference) from pepper and all other spices, or, in the case of Capital, we could say that capitalism gains its identity through its difference from feudalism and all other modes of production.

In such contrastive negation, Abazari observes, ‘there is no contradiction in something. Something excludes other somethings, and, as it were, remains a harmonious ensemble of qualities and quantities’.¹²² While this form of external contradiction is determinant in the first book of Hegel’s Logic, only occasionally and in passing does Marx define the capitalist mode of production in this exclusive manner, through its distinction from feudalism, slavery, or communism; instead, he develops his critique through the analysis of the categories proper and internal to the capitalist social form itself (the commodity, surplus value, competition, etc.).¹²³

In the second Book of the Science of Logic, the ‘doctrine of essence’, however, Hegel shows the object to gain its essential determination not through its contrastive exclusion from other things, but instead through the sublation of such external reflection as the inner, constitutive contradiction that he names the ‘determination of reflection’ [Reflexionsbestimmung].¹²⁴ By this he indicates the inner, contradictory determination of the thing by dyadic categories such as cause and effect or essence and appearance, categories that are in internal relation to the thing they define.¹²⁵ The key point for Hegel is that such inner determinations, unlike those of the doctrine of being, stand in negative contradiction to each other:

The self-subsisting determination of reflection [Reflexionsbestimmung] excludes the other in the same respect as it contains it and is self-subsisting for precisely this reason, in its self-subsistence the determination excludes its own self-subsistence from itself. For this self-subsistence consists in that it contains the determination which is other than it in itself and does not refer to anything external for just this reason; but no less immediately in that it is itself and excludes from itself the determination that negates it. And so it is contradiction [Widerspruch].¹²⁶

This is to argue that the object is not merely a positive entity, its being consisting of a synthetic addition of its various qualities (as shown in Hegel’s doctrine of Being), but constitutes instead, from the perspective of its essence, a negative or contradictory totality: ‘The thing as this totality is contradiction [Das Ding als diese Totalität ist der Widerspruch], … the form in which the matter is determined … and at the same time consisting of sorts of matter that … are at once both self-standing and negated’.¹²⁷

The question in the case of the commodity is thus whether use-value and exchange-value, what Marx calls the two ‘factors’ [Faktoren] of the commodity, simultaneously contain and exclude one another to constitute a contradiction in Hegel’s sense, or, instead, stand in positive ‘opposition’ [Gegensatz] to one another without contradiction. Note carefully Hegel’s contention: ‘[Self-subsistence] contains the determination which is other than it in itself …; but no less immediately … excludes from itself the determination that negates it’. Each determination of reflection, in other words, contains its opposite within itself, which I will argue does not obtain in Marx’s analysis of the commodity. There, in contrast, I will seek to show that the determinations or what Marx calls the ‘factors’ of the commodity such as use- and exchange-value merely stand in positive ‘opposition’ to one another without mutual reflection, precisely as Marx will state in the revised versions of this analysis.

In Hegel’s recuperation of the concept of contradiction, the object – in its essential, constitutive nature rather than its mere external being – is ‘the absolute contradiction [der absolute Widerspruch]’ of form and matter.¹²⁸ While this position famously constitutes the originality of Hegel’s reconstruction of logic as a negative, contradiction-based dialectic,¹²⁹ it is far from clear that Marx adopts and, above all, holds to this same logic of the determinations of reflection in his analysis of the concept of the commodity.

9 From Dialectical Contradiction to Additive Synthesis

What Abazari does show convincingly is that in the analysis of the concept of the commodity in the first edition of Capital, Marx systematically adopts this Hegelian logic of constitutive negation [Reflexionsbestimmung], the commodity, that is to say, as it has commonly been understood in traditional Marxism ‘as the contradictory unity of use-value and exchange-value’.¹³⁰ It is not merely the case that Marx initially adopts the Hegelian vocabulary of externalisation, contradiction [Widerspruch], the determinations of reflection [Reflexionsbestimmung], and essence and appearance in the first chapter of the 1867 edition.¹³¹ Abazari argues more generally that in Marx’s analysis of the value-form:

The simple form of value, for Marx, is constituted by a contradiction; since, first, the exchange-value of A is contained in the use-value of B, and yet, since the two commodities are necessarily two distinct things, the exchange-value of A is excluded by the use-value of B. The relation is contradictory, since it is composed of two moments that contain, and yet exclude, each other.¹³²

This, then, is the familiar claim for the ‘contradictory’ nature of use- and exchange-value in the commodity, but does it hold up when measured against the actual terminology and argument to be found in Marx’s demonstration in the 1872 edition of Capital?

It is important to distinguish this first chapter of the 1867 edition that founds Abazari’s claim, the argument of which, Marx warns his reader, will ‘present the greatest difficulty’, from what Marx calls the ‘supplementary, more didactic exposition of the form of value’ that he added as an appendix to that same first edition, at the request of Engels and Kugelmann.¹³³ The latter material then formed the basis of Marx’s 1872 revision of this chapter. In that 1867 appendix – Marx tells the reader in his Postface to the second edition – the process of exposition ‘[was] completely revised’. While the 1867 appendix thus already begins the tendential elimination of this Hegelian vocabulary, a process that will culminate in the 1872 and 1875 editions, a systematic comparison of the five versions of this chapter shows that this tendency is both uneven and incomplete, such that none of Marx’s varied analyses of the value form can be considered as definitive.¹³⁴

The revision manuscript that Marx drafted in December 1871-January 1872,¹³⁵ for example, develops the social, communal nature of value-objectivity to a degree unparalleled in any of the three published versions of his analysis,¹³⁶ while the 1875 French translation by Joseph Roy, which Marx personally and extensively revised, inserts, for example, a negative dialectical passage absent from both the 1867 and 1872 German editions: ‘Les contradictions que renferme la forme équivalente exige maintenant un examen plus approfondie’.¹³⁷ Similarly, the 1872 edition, while abandoning the vocabulary and logic of contradiction [Widerspruch] in its body text, nonetheless inserts a note observing that ‘determinations of reflection [Reflexionsbestimmungen] of this kind [i.e., in the analysis of the value form] are altogether very curious’.¹³⁸

Given this complexity and unevenness between Marx’s various presentations of the value form, it is notable that Marx already distinguishes in 1867 between his materialist derivation of the form of value as ‘an external material in which labour objectifies [vergegenständlichen] itself … as determinate labour [bestimmten Arbeit]’, and Hegelian idealism, in which, he observes ironically, ‘it is only the ‘concept’ [Begriff] in Hegel’s sense that manages to objectify itself without external material’.¹³⁹ Marx’s 1867 critique of Hegelian idealism is thus precociously analogous to that which Badiou will develop of Frege in Being and Event: thought cannot imperiously determine being, but must remain subject to a materialist determination.¹⁴⁰

Heinrich observes, however, that this position nonetheless remains a mere negative critique; it will only be with the further revision in the 1872 version of this chapter that Marx would develop the conceptual means to distinguish the ‘chimerical’ objectivity of the commodity form from the tangible value form. According to Heinrich’s reading,

both in chapter 1 of the first edition and in [Marx’s 1872] revision manuscript, Marx seems unsure about how exactly to present the relation between the ‘purely chimerical’ objectivity of value and its tangible form of existence in the shape of another commodity. It’s clear that this relation is not to be grasped in the manner of Hegel’s philosophy. In fact, Marx first found an adequate solution [only] in Capital’s second edition. There, he distinguishes between two levels of investigation: (1) The examination of the exchange relation between two commodities [as …] value-objectivity, which cannot be grasped in the case of the individual commodity; (2) The examination of the value-relation between two commodities, which already assumes the result of the analysis of the exchange relation in level (1).¹⁴¹

Here we have one of the clearest examples of the furtive and uneven tendency of development across the multiple versions of Marx’s exposition of the value form, from an initial rejection of Hegelian idealist, negative dialectic that still lacks the means replace this with a positive demonstration, to Marx’s further development by 1872 of what Heinrich and Fred Moseley agree is an additive synthetic method of presentation without negation, one that clearly distinguishes between and synthetically proceeds from an analysis of what Heinrich identifies as the ‘exchange relation’ to that of the ‘value relation’, and Moseley, from the substance and magnitude of value in the first two sections of chapter 1, to its necessary form of appearance in the third.¹⁴²

Abazari, in contrast, finds Marx’s 1872 insertion of the footnote 22 referring to the ‘Determinations of reflection [Reflexionsbestimmungen]’ in the value-form to be certain proof of a continued reliance on Hegelian logic. In comparison with the body of the text, from which the concept of contradiction is strictly absent, I believe, in contrast, that the insertion of this new footnote in 1872 is rather an example of Marx falling back on an old and familiar category to inadequately indicate a new, post-Hegelian process he is in the process of inventing, an original form of additive, synthetic dialectic.

This would then be another example of what Althusser identified as the symptomatic tendency of a novel theory in its deployment to run ahead of subjective recognition of its novelty:

This is what Marx tells us. And there is no apparent reason not to take him at his word …. [And yet,] at certain moments, in certain symptomatic points, this silence [i.e., the absence of a proper name for a novel concept or procedure Marx has invented] emerges as such in the discourse and forces it against its will to produce real theoretical lapses, in brief blank flashes, invisible in the light of the proof: words [such as Reflexionsbestimmungen] that hang in mid-air although they seem to be inserted into the necessity of the thought, judgements which close irreversibly with a false obviousness the space of which seemed to be opening before reason …. Marx has not thought what he is doing to the letter.¹⁴³

It would be incongruous to condemn Marx’s failure to find the time to name and theorise the novel process of exposition he develops in Capital, as Althusser observes more generally, for ‘no one can be convicted for not saying everything at once. But his too hurried readers can be attacked for not having heard this silence’.¹⁴⁴ Althusser’s more general claim holds as well for this putative obviousness of the constitutive contradiction between use- and exchange-value, i.e., that it indicates precisely such a ‘point at which the theoretical incompleteness of Marx’s judgement of himself has produced the most serious misunderstandings’.¹⁴⁵ To determine whether in fact Capital continues to rely on the Hegelian logic of determinate reflection requires actually to follow Marx’s demonstration line by line in the first chapter of Capital, asking furthermore whether the elimination of the category of contradiction and its replacement by that of opposition indicates a fundamental change in the nature of Marx’s demonstration.

10 Toward an Additive Demonstration, Without Contradiction

While the word Widerspruch (contradiction) does not appear at all in Chapter 1 of the 1872 edition, Marx comes to prioritise in its place the concept of Gegensatz (opposition) to indicate the precise nature of the relation of use- and exchange-value in the concept of the commodity. The word Gegensatz (which is only used 4 times in the 1867 version of Chapter 1) appears some twenty-five times in Chapter 1 (1872), as Marx’s term of preference to indicate the relation of use-value and value: i.e., ‘The simple form of value of a commodity is the simple form of appearance of the opposition [Gegensatz] between use-value and value which is contained within the commodity’.¹⁴⁶

Gegensatz, synonymous with the German Opposition, does indeed indicate something quite different from Hegelian contradiction and determinations of reflection: the relation of extreme difference, diversity, or contrast between two things, in other words, an intensive positive distinction without contradiction.¹⁴⁷ While this etymological distinction seems merely suggestive, it in fact clearly and succinctly indicates for Marx a profound and longstanding theoretical distinction, between Hegelian logical negation and Marx’s own development of a positive, materialist mode of demonstration, a distinction that originates in his intensive engagement with Hegelian and Aristotelean logic in the period 1839–1842.

Briefly put, in the period 1839–1841, Marx initially studied Hegelian and Aristotelean logic not only to prepare his highly original deployment of Hegelian logic in his dissertation, but intending as well, as Charles Barbour has shown, to compose a never-completed Hegelian rebuttal to the leading proponent of Aristotelean logic of the time, Adolf Trendelenburg. Trendelenburg was famous in philosophical circles for his 1833 critical edition of Aristotle’s De Anima, and this likely motivated Marx’s decision to initiate a competing translation of De Anima, as well as his explicit critiques of Trendelenburg in the dissertation.

It was, however, Trendelenburg’s highly influential 1840 critique of Hegelian logic, Logische Untersuchungen, that was the primary focus of Marx’s theoretical ire in March 1841, when he hatched a plan with Bruno Bauer to compose a Hegelian rebuttal to Trendelenburg in the journal the two projected, to be entitled Annals of Atheism.¹⁴⁸ While Marx’s initial intent in 1839–1841 was to defend Hegelian logic against Trendelenburg, on at least one count, the latter’s learned exposition of Aristotelean logic and critique of Hegelian dialectics seems to have hit home, and to have provided for this brilliant and learned young reader of Aristotle a signal theoretical distinction between Hegelian idealist and scientific materialist methods of logical demonstration.

In Logische Untersuchungen, Trendelenburg vehemently criticizes Hegel for confusing quite basic Aristotelean logical principles, primary among which in Trendelenburg’s judgment is Hegel’s failure to grasp the fundamental distinction Aristotle makes between what Trendelenburg calls ‘logical negation’ and ‘real opposition [Gegensatz].’¹⁴⁹ If Marx had not already gleaned this theoretical distinction from his reading of Aristotle, it would have been impossible to overlook its primacy in Trendelenburg’s critique. It is, moreover, this distinction between Hegelian ‘logical negation’ and Aristotelean, materialist ‘real opposition’ that, I wish to argue, becomes a fundamental theoretical distinction for Marx, from his 1843 ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ through his revisions to Capital three decades later.

When Marx first came to critique Hegelian logic in the 1843 “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” he reproached Hegel throughout for his logical idealism, for his derivation, that is to say, of the empirical existence of the orders of the state – sovereign, executive, legislative, and the Estates – from their logical Idea. This process inevitably leads, Marx argues, to an uncritical defence of the status quo:

Hegel’s purpose is to narrate the life-history of abstract substance, of the Idea, and in such a history human activity etc. necessarily appears as the activity and product of something other than itself; he therefore represents the essence of man as an imaginary detail instead of allowing it to function in terms of its real human existence. This leads him to … the inevitable result that an empirical existent [eine empirische Existenz] is uncritically enthroned as the real truth of the Idea. For Hegel’s task is not to discover the truth of empirical existence but to discover the empirical existence of the truth.¹⁵⁰

Marx instead calls for an opposing materialist-scientific method, one that would arrive at “the truth of empirical existence” through the critical analysis of real, actually-existing entities (in this case, the orders of the state).

Marx’s primary critique of Hegel in this early text, however, is Hegel’s representation of the orders of the state as existing in a negative dialectical relation to one another, such that they derive their identity and legitimacy through their mutual, negative dialectical relations to one another, the contradictions of each order resolving those of the others. This, Marx argues, is to treat actual differences between real, actually-existing entities, what Marx calls “real extremes,” as mere logical differences that harmoniously sublate one another’s contradictions.¹⁵¹

It is precisely here that Marx deploys Trendelenburg’s distinction between “logical negation” and “real opposition,” distinguishing the materialist method he calls for – as the analysis of real “opposition” or “extremes” – from the logical idealism of Hegel’s negative dialectic of Reflexionsbestimmungen:

It is remarkable that Hegel could have reduced this absurd process of mediation to its abstract, logical and hence ultimate undistorted form, while at the same time enthroning it as the speculative mystery of logic [spekulatives Mysterium der Logik], as the scheme of reason, the rational mode of deduction par excellence. Real extremes cannot be mediated precisely because they are real extremes. Nor do they require mediation, for their natures are wholly opposed [sie sind entgegengesezten Wesens].¹⁵²

It is precisely this theoretical distinction, first developed in the “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” that will govern Marx’s variable recourse throughout his drafting and revisions to Capital to these two modes of theoretical demonstration: the logical idealism of Hegelian negative dialectical “contradiction” [Widerspruch] versus the materialist analysis of the real order of existence that takes each thing in its real “opposition” [Gegensatz] to others.

In light of Marx’s reading of Trendelenburg and his argument in the “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” my claim is straightforward: when decades later Marx came to draft and subsequently revise the various sections of Capital, it would be this nominal distinction between “contradiction” and “opposition” that would serve to clearly indicate to an informed reader the distinction between two theoretical procedures of analysis and demonstration. It is a theoretical doublet that allowed Marx succinctly to realise in his various revisions, in part, the task he had given himself in the Grundrisse: the systematic elimination of the impression that the various categories of his analysis are derived from the Idea of the capitalist social form, rather than scientifically constructed from his analysis of a real thing, a society typified by the accumulation and exchange of commodities.¹⁵³

If now we return to reading Capital to the letter, we do in fact find that what Marx demonstrates in his analysis of the commodity is an “opposition” rather than a Hegelian “contradiction” between use- and exchange-value.¹⁵⁴ Indeed, Marx begins his demonstration by introducing each dimension of the commodity positively, as what he calls ‘factors’ [Faktoren] or attributes. There is no derivation of use-value or exchange-value in the opening paragraphs of Capital; instead, they are simply additively posed or ‘positioned’, as Althusser will say, one after another: ‘The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind … The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value’. And then, in his fifth paragraph, with neither transition nor derivation of any kind, Marx immediately poses the second factor of the commodity: ‘Exchange-value appears first of all as the quantitative relation, the proportion, in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kind’.¹⁵⁵

If we abstract from Marx’s intervening analysis of the characteristics of these two factors or attributes of the commodity (satisfying a human need, having both quality and quantity, etc.), we are left with two positive, underived propositions:

1. The commodity has the attribute (‘factor’) use-value.

2. The commodity has the attribute (‘factor’) exchange-value.¹⁵⁶

In the relation between Marx’s initial proposition that the ‘individual commodity’ constitutes the ‘elementary form’ [Elementarform] of the capitalist mode of production and the additive introduction of these two attributes in the four succeeding paragraphs,¹⁵⁷ there is no trace of any deduction or inference whatsoever, to say nothing of a putative negative dialectical sublation such as is to be found in the first lines of Hegel’s Science of Logic (Being|Nothing→Becoming).¹⁵⁸ At the same time, this additive positioning of concepts is no a priori formalist or abstract axiomatic exercise, but comprises a properly materialist critique, thanks to the necessary determination of this starting point – the true idea that we as subjects of capitalism always already possess of its nature (as general commodification).¹⁵⁹ Marx has determined precisely these as the attributes of the commodity, thanks to his painstaking research or ‘enquiry’ [Forschungsweise] prior to the elaboration of his reproduction [Darstellungsweise] of the capitalist real in the attribute of thought.¹⁶⁰

What I am calling Marx’s additive synthetic method is essentially a development, on my part, of Althusser’s abstract assertion that Marx’s exposition proceeds via the ‘positioning’ [la position] of one concept after a preceding one has been adequately analysed. ‘Marx’s thought’, he writes in the Avant-propos au livre de G. Duménil, ‘proceeds by the positioning [la position] of concepts, inaugurating the exploration (analysis) of the theoretical space opened and closed by this positioning, followed by the positioning of a new concept, thus enlarging the theoretical field, and so forth, to the point of constituting theoretical fields of extreme complexity’.¹⁶¹ This thesis of the additive positioning of concepts, Althusser observes, ‘excludes all appearance of an auto-production of the concept (and a fortiori of the real by the concept) in Hegelian fashion, [versus] the intervention at a given moment of the exposition of the key concepts around which is organised the constitution and exploration of the theoretical field in its multiple combinations’.¹⁶²

It’s notable in particular how by this late moment in Althusser’s reflection, his analysis of la position proceeds in purely additive fashion, from Marx’s initial research [Forschungsweise] to its demonstration, and within the latter, from one concept to the next, never referring to a putative totality or whole (as does Arthur or as Althusser himself had in the first edition of Reading Capital) that would govern and guarantee the truth of this exposition (as opposed to the crudely suppressed paragraphs in the second edition of Reading Capital that were the object of Macherey’s 1966 critique). This additive procedure that Althusser describes, I would add, thus coheres perfectly with Spinoza’s critique of totality in his 1665 letter to Oldenburg, despite its telegraphic nature in this late moment of Althusser’s thought.

While the variegated analysis of exchange-value and that of the even more complex value relation characteristic of these two attributes will occupy Marx in the rest of chapter one, his three-paragraph analysis of the concept of use-value in the first two pages of Capital starkly illustrates Macherey and Althusser’s claim that Marx’s demonstration proceeds sequentially, via the ‘exhaustive’ (Macherey) analysis of each concept; a given concept’s essential nature having been thoroughly analysed at the corresponding level of abstraction, all without logical contradiction, Marx can then presuppose that analysis as a given, and move to the next level of abstraction as what Althusser calls an additive positioning.

Now, if this were all there were to Marx’s process of exposition, the case for the tendential suppression of Aufhebung in Capital would be closed; indeed, Macherey has it easy on this score by only considering the first five pages of Chapter 1 in his brief contribution to Reading Capital. That said, Marx’s process of exposition throughout Capital, if we look beyond Althusser’s elliptical assertions and Macherey’s brief analysis, is indeed impelled not by contradictory reflections of determinations [Reflexionsbestimmungen], but instead due to what Marx variously calls the ‘insufficiency’ [Unzulägliche], ‘defects’ [Mängel] or ‘peculiarities’ [Eigentümlichkeit] of a concept, terms that indicate its various inadequacies at that level of abstraction.

Indeed, the real and telling complexities can be said to begin in the third section of the first chapter, precisely the section, that is, that Abazari, and, indeed, Marx himself in footnote 22, identify as the locus of various Reflexionsbestimmungen. It is in this section 1.3 that Marx examines not use-value, exchange-value, and what Heinrich identifies as the basic exchange relation of commodities in abstraction from their value form, but – at this subsequent degree of concretion – the value relation, the complex interrelation of use- and exchange-value in the analysis of the value form, which necessarily culminates in the general equivalent and money form.¹⁶³

Close attention to Marx’s analysis of the value form in this section unequivocally shows that he additively builds upon his analysis of the exchange relation in the preceding two sections, without those demonstrations being superseded or invalidated. In the initial moment of his demonstration (sections 1.1–1.2), Marx first analysed the exchange relation between two commodities, from which he concluded that they must share a ‘common element’, value, the substance of which he shows to be abstract labour. In section 1.3, he then proceeds to the analysis of the form of value, as the section title clearly indicates: ‘The Value-form, or Exchange-Value’. In this logical progression from sections 1.1 and 1.2 to section 1.3 – the latter arguably one of the most crucial demonstrations of Capital – there is not a trace of negative dialectical, contradiction-based Hegelian logic determining the development of these categories.

Instead, Marx deploys an original process of logical demonstration that I am calling additive synthesis. The demonstration is additive, in the sense that Marx’s analysis of the value relation presupposes his prior adequate and complete demonstration of the exchange relation, the analysis of the value relation constituting a subsequent degree of concretion relative to the initial high level of abstraction of section one.¹⁶⁴ This additive mode of positive dialectic in Part One of Capital confirms Jacques Bidet’s abstract assertion, in his review of Arthur’s New Dialectic, that there is no Hegelian, contradiction-based ‘fluidity’ of Marx’s concepts in the movement from one part or section to another (as Arthur asserts):

It is not the concept that changes [from one section to another]; rather, there is a change of concept, through conceptual determinations …. The ‘theory of value’ [in Part One of Capital] is in no way transformed by the theory of surplus-value [in Part Two], which, on the contrary, expressly presupposes it, unchanged, in the pure and perfect form that Marx has given it in his exposition in Part One.¹⁶⁵

In the first chapter of Capital that I discuss here, Marx implements a purely additive synthetic method, in which the process of logical synthesis operates in a fashion analogous to that which Macherey identifies in his commentary on Spinoza’s method. Basing his comments on Spinoza’s Preface to the Principles of the Philosophy of Descartes, the only site at which Spinoza reflected on method, Macherey observes that for Spinoza, ‘synthesis [as opposed to Cartesian analysis] is the method of formal exposition that allows for the presentation of truths [that have been previously discovered and analysed in the research process] in a demonstrative form that proceeds from the known to the known …. Synthesis proceeds from the knowledge of causes to that of their effects, in conformity with the real order of things’.¹⁶⁶ For both Spinoza and Marx, such additive demonstration, as a science of causes without superfluous reference to a putative totality or whole, constitutes the adequate modality of a materialist demonstration, the synthetic reproduction of the real order of things in the attribute of thought.

This synthetic mode of demonstration [Macherey continues],

mentally reproduces … the order in which things effectively are and produce one another [sont et se font] …. Synthesis concomitantly expresses the productivity of the real [as] a form of discourse, the organisation of which, which is to say its necessary progression, adheres to that of the causal process, and reproduces the order of the real as it is in itself, leading to understanding as if from the interior of things, as they are and as they develop [telles qu’elles sont et telles qu’elles se font], following the rational movement that leads from causes to effects, rather than the inverse.¹⁶⁷

Synthetic demonstration, in this view, constitutes a rigorous form of materialist demonstration, an organisation of discourse whose object is to make visible what Macherey calls ‘the syntax of the real’ in its effective constitution and ‘intrinsic intelligibility’.¹⁶⁸ Spurning all constraint and guarantees, all formal obligation and teleology, this mode of demonstration, one that I am arguing is shared by Marx and Spinoza as a science of causes, invites the reader to follow the logic of the real, step by necessary step, as a materialist ‘restitution of the texture of the real in the form of the order of ideas’.¹⁶⁹ Marx suggests nothing less by his otherwise strange self-quotation from the 1859 Introduction, that he inserts in the first sentence of Capital, as if to say: ‘This, reader, is what I have come to understand as the effective constitution of the real order of things and relations of value in the capitalist social form: follow my reasoning carefully, and judge for yourself if this is the case’.¹⁷⁰

Let’s look at Marx’s analysis of the value relation more carefully. In Marx’s initial analysis of the exchange relation in sections 1.1–1.2, he determined that the value of commodities – a ‘residue’ obtained by abstracting entirely from their characteristics as use-values – has no material form at that level of abstraction, and thus cannot exist as a sensuous singular thing, but instead constitutes a mere ‘spectral objectivity’.¹⁷¹ This first stage of analysis showed that the substance of the commodity’s value is abstract labour, but did so in abstraction from its phenomenal manifestation in any determinate form whatsoever.

The substance of this value, abstract labour, will only obtain objective, material form, and thus actual existence, as opposed to this mere spectral objectivity, when Marx’s logical demonstration investigates the concrete social relation of one commodity to another, and it is to the nature of this relation that Marx turns in section 1.3.¹⁷² At stake in this section, the development of which will culminate in Marx’s unprecedented demonstration of the logical (as opposed to historical) genesis and necessity of the money form, is a problem that had previously remained at best a riddle, and at worst entirely invisible, in the history of political economy: while it is obvious to anyone that money allows for the exchange of commodities, this does not at all explain how it is that money possesses this strange power, and why it must necessarily be so in any society governed by commodity relations: only Marx’s logical genesis of the money form can answer this question.¹⁷³

My point here is simply to show that each logical step in Marx’s demonstration fully preserves the findings that precede it, and, as opposed to any alleged negative dialectical Aufhebung, proceeds instead through a positive, additive logic of implication. Marx begins this analysis in section 1.3a by constructing the value relation in its most abstract form, one that is ‘simple’ (it investigates only two commodities), ‘isolated’ (bearing no relationship to commodities other than these two he has chosen), and ‘accidental’ (because any two commodities could be chosen as examples of this abstract relation).¹⁷⁴ This simple isolated and accidental form of the value relation, he next specifies, possesses two ‘poles’ [Pole] that coexist and allow for this relation, mutually determining and barring one another, all without contradiction, precisely as the poles of a compass coexist in their opposing, non-contradictory difference to define North and South.

Marx first recalls the results of his prior analysis of the exchange relation, which involved the exchange of two commodities of equal value such that both commodities identically and symmetrically shared a ‘common element’ (value).¹⁷⁵ In marked contrast, when Marx now turns to the analysis of the form of expression of value, that value relationship is by no means symmetrical. Instead, the first commodity (linen) is said by Marx to actively expresses its value in the second commodity (coat), while the second commodity remains passive, serving as the material expression of something else, the value of the first. Marx names these two forms the ‘relative’ and the ‘equivalent’ form of value. Like the two attributes of the commodity that Marx introduced in the first pages of Capital, Marx here observes that these two forms of value bear two non-contradictory aspects or attributes: they are 1. mutually dependent, each requiring the existence of the other, as well as being 2. mutually exclusive, such that a given commodity can only play the role of one of these two forms at a time.¹⁷⁶

Having presented these attributes, in section 1.3.2, Marx next proceeds to analyse the first of these two forms of value, the relative. Though Marx’s initial analysis of the exchange relation has shown that the value of any and all commodities can be reduced to an identical unit (abstract labour), in now analysing the form that this value must take, he proceeds to investigate the particularities of these differential roles (relative and equivalent forms of value), explicitly calling attention to the difference between these two levels of his analysis:

If we say that, as values, commodities are simply congealed quantities of human labour [i.e., the principal finding of his initial analysis of the exchange relation], our analysis reduces them, it is true, to the level of an abstraction, value, but does not give them a form of value distinct from their natural forms. It is otherwise in the value relation of one commodity to another. The first commodity’s value character emerges here through its own relation to the second commodity.¹⁷⁷

While it is the case that as values, at the level of the exchange relation, commodities are what Marx describes as ‘congealed’ abstract human labour, this common unit, since it possesses not an ‘atom of matter’,¹⁷⁸ cannot be apprehended in the sensuous, actually existing form of a singular, isolated commodity.¹⁷⁹

Now, however, additively building upon this prior determination of an initial ‘value-abstraction’, Marx proceeds to show that when considered at the higher level of logical concretion of the value relation, the value of the commodity that plays the relative role in this relation (linen) does in fact acquire the material expression of its value in and through the equivalent form possessed by the second, actually existing commodity (coat), a material form necessarily different from its own (the value of linen cannot be expressed in linen).¹⁸⁰ From this demonstration, Marx draws a simple, minimal inference: that ‘the value of the commodity linen is therefore expressed by the physical body of the commodity coat, the value of one by the use-value of the other’.¹⁸¹ This then leads him to offer a summary statement of this stage of his analysis:

Commodity A, then, in entering into a relation with commodity B as an object of value, as a materialisation of human labour, makes the use-value B into the material through which its own value is expressed.¹⁸²

This completed, in the next step of his analysis, in section 1.3.2.ii, Marx introduces the quantitative aspect of this value relation from which he had abstracted to this point (‘The quantitative determinacy of the relative form of value’). As a material expression or actually existing embodiment of value, in contrast to the nonexistent ‘spectral’ nature of value when considered in the exchange relation, this value form must furthermore be ‘quantitatively determined’ as a determinate ‘magnitude’.¹⁸³ This being the case, Marx proceeds to consider the four logically possible variations of the relative value of the two commodities in question in this basic form of the value relation: either the value of one or the other changes, while the second remains constant, or both change in identical proportions, or both change in different proportions.¹⁸⁴

Having enumerated these cases, Marx next turns to examine the nature of the equivalent form of value in a passage that clearly indicates the additive, non-contradictory nature of his demonstration:

The commodity linen brings to view its own existence as a value through the fact that the coat can be equated with the linen although it has not assumed a form of value distinct from its own physical form. The coat is directly exchangeable with the linen; in this way the linen in fact expresses its own existence as a value. The equivalent form of a commodity, accordingly, is the form in which it is directly exchangeable with other commodities.¹⁸⁵

While the first sentence summarises Marx’s analysis of the value form to this point, the second and third add to this a new proposition: the actually existing, material form of the linen expresses the coat’s direct ‘exchangeability’ with it, such that the equivalent form ‘is the form in which it is directly exchangeable with other commodities’, which is to say, that it requires no mediation (of another commodity) for the exchange process to occur.¹⁸⁶

Marx next indicates three ‘peculiarities’ [Eigentümlichkeiten] (none of which constitute ‘contradictions’) of the equivalent form, in which he stresses the necessity that governs this form, such that the appearance of the value of the linen in the form of the coat requires and can only occur within this value-relation:

The natural form of the commodity becomes its value-form. But, note well, this substitution only occurs in the case of a commodity B (coat, or maize, or iron, etc.) when some other commodity A (linen etc.) enters into a value-relation with it, and then only within the limits of this relation. Since a commodity cannot be related to itself as equivalent, and therefore cannot make its own physical shape into the expression of its own value, it must be related to another commodity as equivalent, and therefore must make the physical shape of another commodity into its own value-form.¹⁸⁷

Here again we find Marx stressing the systematic necessity that governs the value relation between two commodities: since no commodity can express its value in its own material form, it must relate to another, materially distinct commodity as its equivalent, the actually existing material form of its value. The linen (in Marx’s example) must take the physical form of the equivalent commodity (coat) as the form of its value, since the value of linen cannot be expressed in linen. This, Marx shows, is the real, necessary, and positive form of the value relation, involving no contradiction whatsoever between use- and exchange-value, but only a peculiarity that he insightfully notes, one that allows for the value relation materially to exist.

Next, following his famous excursus on Aristotle’s socially determined incapacity to grasp the nature of the value relation,¹⁸⁸ Marx summarises his qualitative and quantitative analysis of the simple form of the value relation, to which he adds the important terminological clarification that the two factors or attributes of the commodity introduced at the beginning of chapter one should, strictly speaking, have been identified as use-value and ‘value’ (rather than exchange-value), since exchange-value is merely the ‘form of manifestation’ of value, not something a given commodity possesses in and of itself. Instead, Marx specifies, ‘the commodity never has this form when looked at in isolation, but only when it is in a value-relation or an exchange relation with a second commodity of a different kind’.¹⁸⁹ As Heinrich specifies, ‘A commodity “is” something double: use-value and an object of value. But it is not exchange-value; it has exchange-value, when another commodity expresses its value’.¹⁹⁰ While it may seem that Marx is splitting hairs, the point is important in the context of my argument (and I will argue it applies analogously in Moseley’s dispute with Heinrich), since it clearly indicates a key conceptual and logical difference from the 1867 edition, where Marx did not yet clearly distinguish between value and exchange-value.

Even more crucial is the next step in Marx’s argument, and in fact the interpretation of this passage condenses and radicalises my entire argument for Marx’s additive, positive dialectical method. Here is Marx’s observation, which I cite in full:

The internal opposition [innere Gegensatz] between use-value and value, hidden within the commodity, is therefore represented on the surface by an external opposition [äusseren Gegensatz], i.e. by a relation between two commodities such that the one commodity, whose own value is supposed to be expressed, counts directly only as a use-value, whereas the other commodity, in which that value is to be expressed, counts directly only as exchange-value. Hence the simple form of value of a commodity is the simple form of appearance of the opposition [Gegensatzes] between use-value and value which is contained within the commodity.¹⁹¹

Here, perhaps more than anywhere else in the first chapter of Capital, we would expect to find a statement of the ‘contradictory’ nature of use-value and exchange-value. Instead, Marx does not simply refuse outright the Hegelian terminology of contradiction [Widerspruch]; what’s more, he clearly and otherwise defines the nature of this relation – both within the single commodity possessing its two attributes of use-value and value when initially analysed at the level of the exchange relation, and now, at the level of the value relation – as an opposition [Gegensatz].

As I have throughout this book, let me pause to invoke the lucidly contrasting definitions André Lalande offers for these two concepts:

• ‘Contradiction’ [D. Widerspruch]: the relation existing between the affirmation and the negation of a same element of knowledge, in particular, between two terms, one of which is the negation of the other, such as A and not-A.

• ‘Opposition’ [D. Gegensatz, Opposition]: the relation of two contrary objects placed facing one another in contrast or distinction.¹⁹²

The crucial difference between Hegelian contradiction and the ‘opposition’ of use-value and exchange-value in Marx’s analysis is that while the former indicates the simultaneous affirmation and negation of ‘a same element’ or object (A and not-A), opposition indicates the contrast or distinction between two different objects.

As a point of contrast, take for example Hegel’s famous beginning to the Science of Logic. Hegel here unequivocally indicates a relation of contradiction, as ‘A and not-A’, as opposed to Marx’s indication by the concept of ‘opposition’ a relation of contrast, a determination without any implication whatsoever that use-value and exchange-value are in any sense the same thing. In other words, for Hegel, a thing (‘Being, pure being – without further determination’), through the necessity governing its essential nature as this phrase defines it (‘without determination’), reveals its selfsame identity to be, ‘in fact nothing, pure nothingness’, i.e., all at once one and the same thing, both A and not-A, both being and nothingness, in what constitutes a real contradiction in the full sense of the word.¹⁹³

In marked contrast to Hegel’s analysis of Being, Nothing, and Becoming, at no point does Marx ever state or imply that use-value and exchange-value are in any sense the same thing (A and not-A). Instead, he goes to painstaking logical detail to precisely formulate the nature of the differential relation of these two always distinct concepts, and in the case of both the exchange and value relations, and he defines this relation as an opposition. He introduces this concept in the passage I have cited above to indicate at once the dependent and necessary nature of these two distinct attributes of the commodity form, as well as the important distinction that in the more abstract exchange relation, the differential opposition of use-value and exchange-value is internal to (‘hidden within’, Marx says) any given, individual commodity, while in the value relation between the relative and equivalent forms of the commodity, the differential opposition finds its ‘representation’ on the surface (as the forms of appearance of the value relation), as an ‘external opposition’.

This differential opposition of use-value and exchange-value, Marx has shown, is neither contradictory nor contingent. Instead, in each logical form, it is emphatically and logically necessary, he shows, for this very distinction (as A and B rather than A and not-A) to exist such that commodity and commodity relations may themselves exist (and Marx has begun Capital by defining societies in which the capitalist mode of production predominates, his object of investigation, as the general existence (appearance) of commodities and commodified relations).

In fact, these two contrasting starting points of Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s Capital could not be more radically opposed, though each thinker at the same time fully comprehends and calls attention to the difficulty and crucial nature of the beginning of any scientific analysis.¹⁹⁴ For the one, a word, a notion, Being, conceived and defined as a maximum of abstraction, as ‘without content’. For the other, a (maximally abstract but positive) definition of capitalism as the general accumulation of commodities, one that is quite the opposite of nothing (it is an ‘ungeheure Waarensammlung’); instead, having come to this definition and starting point by necessity through his materialist enquiry, Marx’s beginning indicates something very concrete, full of positive implications that remain to be concretised.

The negative dialectical dice are loaded if one picks a notion with no determinate content to start with: then of course this ‘thing’ without content will of necessity immediately reveal itself as a contradiction, as the negation of itself, as nothing, as A and not-A.¹⁹⁵ On the one hand, a logic that begins with a logical contradiction and develops this into an entire science of negative dialectical logic, on the other, a critique of a real social form, one that begins in materialist fashion in media res, with an abstract definition of this determinate mode of production to initiate an increasingly concrete analysis via the logic of ramified additive synthesis and implication.

To prepare the necessary logical passage to the expanded and then general equivalent forms of value, Marx simply indicates that the simple form of the value relation he has analysed to this point in section 1.3 possesses an ‘insufficiency’ [Blick] (as opposed to a Widerspruch) relative to the general equivalent and price-form.¹⁹⁶ This is to say that while Marx’s analysis of the simple form is fully coherent and non-contradictory, that simple form is nonetheless logically deficient or inadequate, in the sense that the forms of value (relative and equivalent) inhering between only two commodities cannot account for the general exchange and accumulation of commodities, the defining feature of capitalism for Marx at its most general and abstract level. Simply because linen expresses its value in the form of actually existing coats, it cannot therefore be directly exchanged, in this form of relation, for any other commodity than coats.

In other words, the simple value relation of two commodities cannot express the relation of any given commodity to all other commodities, which, Marx logically assumes from his point of departure, is nonetheless essential in a social form determined by general commodification. Capitalism is not defined by the exchange of two or even a small set of commodities, but by the general commodification and exchange of all things of value, and thus the demonstration of the form of value must proceed adequately to account for the level of generality of exchange this specific social form requires.

Marx’s analysis of the value form therefore progresses sequentially to investigate the ‘expanded’ and ‘general’ forms, indicating along the way both the necessity of each as well as various ‘defects’ [Mängeln] of the former, here again proceeding additively to indicate the (logical) development of the (non-contradictory) Gegensatze that positively, if inadequately, constitute each ‘pole’ of the value form: from the symmetrical, and thus ‘unfixed’ simple form to its subsequent fixation in one commodity set aside as the general equivalent form.¹⁹⁷ I leave to the reader to follow the development of this additive logic in the remainder of chapter 1, to turn now to the dispute between Heinrich and Moseley over the substance of value in Capital.

11 When Does Socially Necessary Labour Exist?

In the previous section I have based my own anti-Hegelian argument upon Heinrich’s distinction between the exchange and value relations in the first chapter of Capital.¹⁹⁸ Heinrich’s reading has not gone uncriticised, however: Robert Kurz, Barbara Lietz and Winfried Schwarz, and Fred Moseley have all disputed Heinrich’s contention (as they read him) that value is only created through the exchange of commodities, or, to cite Heinrich himself, that ‘Abstract human labour, as the substance of commodities’ value, does not emerge on the basis of the individual commodity but is based on the exchange relation between commodities’.¹⁹⁹ Heinrich’s critics argue instead that Marx clearly and repeatedly indicates that, as Moseley puts the matter, ‘each commodity is assumed [by Marx] to possess a common property, the “substance” of value (objectified abstract human labour) in definite quantities … determined in production, independently of exchange’.²⁰⁰ Moseley’s value realism, as I would call it, thus stands opposed to Heinrich’s relational understanding of the substance of value: ‘Commodities’, Heinrich summarises, ‘have value-objectivity only in the social relation of one commodity to another’.²⁰¹ In turning to this debate over the substance of value, I wish to argue against Heinrich’s critics, that Marx’s analysis of the substance of value is not uniform and unchanging, but instead undergoes an important process of auto-critique. This critique – while revising Marx’s initial Hegelian position that an existing but imperceptible essence or substance of value must appear through its dialectical sublation as exchange-value – remains obscure, since Marx only clearly articulated it in long-unpublished revision notes for the second edition of Capital.

In my view this dispute between Heinrich and Moseley has resulted in a persistent dialogue des sourds in large part due to the failure by Moseley in particular to clearly formulate the terms of their disagreement, relying instead on a hodgepodge of vague, unexamined terms either imputed to or taken directly from Marx. The commodity is repeatedly claimed by Moseley to ‘possess’, ‘contain’, or ‘have’ value, a value which is said to ‘emerge’, ‘congeal’, ‘exist’, ‘be’, or ‘become’ as a result of the production process. All of these varied expressions can in my view be reduced to a single, theoretically clear (though false) claim on Moseley’s part: that value exists already in the production process of any single commodity, that, as Moseley writes, ‘the value of the coat … does exist by itself’, or as Lietz and Schwarz write, ‘value exists as a form-determination … in production, where it arises’.²⁰²

We should cut this Gordian knot simply by holding here as well to Marx’s Spinozist distinction between a nonexistent thought-construct [Gedankenkonkretum] and actually existing singular things. My interest in addressing this question is not merely to break through this protracted dispute on the origin of value between Heinrich and his opponents; my principal claim is that Marx eventually articulated this clear distinction between the nonexistent abstraction of a thought-construct such as value and that of actually existing, sensuous things such as singular commodities and their price forms, but only in the little-known 1872 Ergänzungen Und Veränderungen preparatory manuscript and in a single, but crucial sentence added only to the 1875 French translation. It was only in these obscure passages that he managed fully to escape the Hegelian hermeneutics of revelation still prevalent in the discussion of the substance of value in the 1867 and 1872 editions of Capital.

These earlier texts do in fact suffer from a conceptualisation of the substance of value as a hermeneutic, in which a latent, formless yet putatively existent essence, simultaneously claimed to be ‘congealed’ in the commodity yet ‘spectral’, is said to acquire its sensuous form in a moment of sublation. While Marx overcame this mystical Hegelian logic of incarnation by 1875, it nonetheless continues to haunt Moseley’s otherwise sober analysis into the present. I will first recall the purely theoretical status of abstraction in Capital, before discussing the implication of this on the debate over the substance of value.

That Capital is an abstract theoretical construction of the capitalist social form, and not a historical study of capitalism (as Kautsky argued in Karl Marx: Oekonomische Lehren) is a point on which Heinrich and Moseley (as well as Althusser and Chris Arthur) all agree. As Heinrich points out,

such a conception [as Kautsky’s] baldly contradicts Marx’s claims in the Preface to the first volume. There, he emphasises that the work deals with ‘theoretical developments’, and that the text makes reference to conditions in England only as an ‘illustration’ of such developments.²⁰³

Not only is Capital a ‘theoretical’ study in its entirety; Marx famously identifies for his reader in the Preface to the First Edition the fundamental tool he deploys for this analysis of the capitalist social form: abstraction. ‘In the analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace both’.²⁰⁴ Abstraction, as Lalande comments, ‘isolates by thought that which cannot be isolated in representation’.²⁰⁵ The point is simple, but far-reaching and, indeed, eminently Althusserian: abstraction is fundamentally opposed to the representation of an empirical object. Instead, abstraction indicates the sui generis construction of a non-existent thought object, what Marx called in the 1857 Introduction a Gedankenkonkretum.

Marx was no doubt familiar with Hegel’s anti-empiricist appraisal of abstraction in the Encyclopedia: ‘Ordinary consciousness deals with sensory representations which crisscross and get entangled. In the act of abstraction, however, the mind is concentrated on a single point and, by this means, the habit is acquired of preoccupying oneself with the interiority [of things]’. He emphatically rejected, however, Hegel’s ensuing condescending judgement of Aristotelean ἀφαίϱεσις [abstraction] as no more than training wheels for the mind till it learns to practice true, i.e. negative dialectical, thought: ‘To occupy oneself with this kind of formal logic is no doubt useful. It clears the head, as they say. One learns to concentrate’.²⁰⁶

Instead, Marx explicitly deployed ‘the power of abstraction’ as the fundamental tool for his entire critique of political economy, such that Heinrich can devote an entire Appendix of his How to Read Capital to the multiple ‘Levels of Abstraction and the Course of Argument in the First Seven Chapters of Capital’.²⁰⁷ What’s more, this understanding of abstraction as the construction of nonexistent Gedankenkonkretumen constitutes, since the very beginning of his research in 1857 when Marx first articulated this basic epistemological position, a further confirmation of Althusser’s assertion that Marx rejects Hegel’s model of abstraction as the representational extraction of a kernel of truth from an object (Hegel’s ‘preoccupying oneself with the interiority of things’), to instead undertake the fabrication of nonexistent concepts.²⁰⁸ Heinrich repeatedly emphasises this very Althusserian point in his reading of Capital, the subtlety of which is quite surprisingly absent in Moseley’s rebuttal: ‘The object of inquiry, the ‘commodity’, is not simply drawn from experience. Instead, it is constructed, by means of abstraction’.²⁰⁹

While throughout this book I have repeatedly emphasised this Spinozist-Althusserian distinction between the object of thought and real, actually existing things, the point I wish to make here in appraising Moseley and Heinrich’s debate over the substance of value is simply that the concept of existence should be taken in its rigorous definition as ‘the fact of being independently of knowledge, [as] actually presented in [sensuous] perception’,²¹⁰ in other words, as the distinction between nonexistent thought objects and actually existing singular things in sensuous extension. If this is the case, one must conclude that as concepts, none of the original Gedankenkonkretumen that Marx constructs in Capital, concepts such as use-value, exchange-value, and value, relative and absolute surplus value, and the like, actually exists.²¹¹

At the same time, some of those nonexistent concepts are also sensuously manifest as singular existing things. The nonexistent concept of concrete labour, for example, also exists as the actual physical activity, the physiological labour, involved in producing any singular commodity, a real coat or yard of linen. Similarly, the nonexistent concept of exchange-value also exists in sensuous form, for example as the singular price of any given commodity (as a price on a tag), i.e., as the material form of appearance of the value of that actually existing commodity.

The form of value as exchange-value thus constitutes at once a nonexistent abstraction in thought (a concept), as well as indicating actually existing real abstractions to be found in the material world of commodity exchange.²¹² It is precisely this distinction, between the non-existent thought abstraction, Marx’s Gedankenkonkretum, and the actually existing real abstractions of the manifest, material price-forms of value, that is entirely missing from Moseley and Heinrich’s debate.

Now, Moseley and Heinrich, astute, seasoned readers of Capital that they are, both agree that Marx derives the concept of the substance of value (abstract human labour) as an abstraction from the sensuous, tangible qualities of any singular, actually existing instance of concrete labour, in other words, as a concept that Marx constructs in his analysis.²¹³ Marx summarises this point quite clearly in the Ergänzungen:

The magnitude of value represents a specific quantity of labour, but this quantity is not the coincidental quantity of labour that A or B expend in the production of a commodity. It is socially determined, the labour socially necessary for the production of a thing. … Equality in the full sense between different kinds of labour can be arrived at only if we abstract from their real inequality, if we reduce them to the characteristic they have in common, that of being the expenditure of human labour-power, of human labour in the abstract.²¹⁴

Yet while being fully aware of this point, Moseley nonetheless repeatedly reaffirms the real existence of the substance of value in any single, isolated commodity: ‘The value of the coat cannot be grasped by itself, but it does exist by itself, [as] the values of all commodities (including the linen) exist by themselves’.²¹⁵ If we take existence in the strict sense, however, to mean any real, sensuous thing, sensible to us via what Spinoza calls the attribute of extension, then it is clear that Marx’s abstraction constructs a nonexistent concept: lacking a form of appearance or value-form, there is no actually existing ‘human labour in the abstract’ or ‘identical human labour-power’; these phrases indicate instead a conceptual construct without sensuous reality. In the attribute of sensuous extension, there are only singular acts of concrete labour.²¹⁶

The next step in Marx’s argument that both Heinrich and Moseley retrace is to construct, in terms that follow directly from this initial abstraction, the concept of the quantity of the substance of value in any commodity as such. One of Marx’s great advances over the classical labour theory of value is to have understood that this quantity cannot consist in the actual concrete time it took to make any single existing commodity. Marx makes the point simply and memorably in Capital:

It might seem that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour expended to produce it, it would be the more valuable the more unskilful and lazy the worker who produced it, because he would need more time to complete the article. However, the labour that forms the substance of value is equal human labour, the expenditure of identical human labour-power.²¹⁷

This ‘equal human labour’ is an abstraction from actually existing concrete acts of labour, and as such, it cannot exist in space and time without a form of appearance, which Marx will only introduce as a further degree of concretisation in the third section of chapter one.²¹⁸ While Moseley indeed ‘agree[s] with Heinrich that value is “shown” or “revealed” only in exchange’, he immediately adds the mistaken proviso that ‘the revelation of value in exchange presupposes an already existing value … created in production and revealed in exchange’.²¹⁹

In repeatedly taking this position against Heinrich throughout Marx’s Theory of Value, Moseley is arguably misled by taking Marx too literally, citing Marx’s published formulations without sufficiently taking into account Marx’s own auto-critique in the Ergänzungen. Unfortunately, Marx only clearly formulates this obvious point – that concepts as abstractions do not exist in the strict sense of the word – in the Ergänzungen, such that numerous descriptions of the quantity of the substance of value read as if Marx were referring to the actual labour time that went into the production of any single commodity. In other words, reading Marx to the letter, Moseley is arguably misled by a problematic lack of clarity already present in Marx’s analysis, prior to his self-criticism in the Ergänzungen, as when Marx writes for example that ‘The value of a commodity … varies directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productivity, of the labour which finds its realisation within the commodity. … A given quantity of any commodity contains a definite quantity of human labour’.²²⁰

Moseley then reproduces in turn this same ambiguity inherent in the 1867 and 1872 editions of Capital: ‘Note that the magnitude of value is a distinct quantity of objectified labour contained in each commodity and thus is an intrinsic property of each commodity’.²²¹ Moseley places particular emphasis on Marx’s definition of the magnitude of value of any commodity as, in Moseley’s words, ‘the quantity of objectified labour-time contained in the commodity, measured in hours, days, etc.’.²²² Despite Moseley’s recurrent denials that he considers the substance of value to pre-exist in any single commodity in isolation,²²³ he repeatedly takes Marx’s initial ambiguity literally.

Rather than stating clearly and simply that the scientific object he has constructed – abstract human labour – is, as its name indicates, an abstract concept without spatio-temporal existence, Marx presents his finding in a vivid and unforgettable image, one that seems to confuse even Heinrich. Without a value form, Marx argues, the concept of the substance of value – abstract human labour measured as socially necessary labour time – takes on a disembodied existence, an oxymoron that Heinrich struggles to puzzle through:

Marx describes what remains of the products of labour after abstracting from their use-value, the ‘residue’, as a ‘phantom-like’ [or ‘spectral’, gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit] objectivity. … This objectivity can no longer be grasped by the senses. If we associate it with weight, color, form, or any other quality, we always come back to use-value – but we’ve just abstracted from use-value! Thus, the objectivity is present but is as intangible as a ghost; hence it is a ‘spectral objectivity’.²²⁴

Now, the one advantage of Marx’s image is to clearly indicate what it means to believe in the existence of an object without sensuous qualities, as Moseley apparently does: it is to believe in phantoms and spectres. Marx’s initial formulation in the 1867 and 1872 editions of Capital of an ‘objectivity’ that can, as Heinrich writes, ‘no longer be grasped by the senses’, is needlessly confusing. And in fact, this does confuse Moseley, who, despite his repeated denials that he is not speaking of a single commodity in isolation, constantly reiterates that any commodity ‘possesses’ a quantity of the substance of value, as if this were the case for any actually existing commodity in isolation from all others.²²⁵ This leads Moseley confusingly to claim, for example, that ‘the unobservable equal human labour that exists in production appears for the first time in exchange’.²²⁶

Moseley’s critique of Heinrich suffers from a failure clearly to distinguish the nonexistence of Marx’s conceptual abstractions from actually existing phenomena such as real, singular commodities, the concrete labour that produced them, and the actually existing price form of their value.²²⁷ To be sure, a certain quantity of value actually exists in the production process of any singular commodity, for example as the commodified inputs the capitalist purchases for the production process, whether in the form of constant (machinery and raw materials) or variable capital (labor power).²²⁸ These actually existing values, however, are merely transmitted as such to the commodity in the production process; at issue in this debate as I read it is instead whether a newly produced surplus value obtained via the exploitation of labor power already comes to exist in the production process. Extrapolating on Heinrich’s reading to Marx’s discussion of the working day and unpaid work hours in chapter 10 of Capital, we should say that what exists in the production process on this score are only unpaid hours of real, concrete labor expended to produce any given commodity; for these to exist as surplus value requires, Heinrich rightly argues, that they take a value form and go on to achieve their social validation through commodity exchange.

Heinrich, while more consistently asserting that value only comes to ‘emerge’ or exist in the exchange relation,²²⁹ nonetheless does not formulate this distinction between nonexistent abstractions and actually existing singular things as a theoretical position. Instead, focusing on Marx’s image of the ‘phantom-like’ nature of the substance of value, he seeks to puzzle through this conundrum by asserting that already in the first two sections of chapter 1, Marx implicitly analyses the commodity in an ‘exchange relation’. ‘Only based on the exchange relation’ Heinrich argues, ‘can Marx say that there is an abstraction from the use-value of the commodity, and then go on to draw further conclusions’.²³⁰

Moseley argues at length that Heinrich autonomously imputes the concept of the ‘exchange relation’ to the first two sections of chapter one in order to make sense of the intangibility of abstract human labour, when Marx in these initial sections only speaks of the concept of the commodity as such in isolation.²³¹

Heinrich presents no textual evidence in this appendix [where he defines his concept of exchange relation] to support his interpretation of exchange relation in Chapter 1, except the one sentence from Marx’s ‘Marginal Notes on Wagner’, which mentions only the commodity and does not mention an act of exchange at all. … Heinrich’s very unusual interpretation of ‘exchange relation’ as an abstraction from two acts of exchange between commodities and money on the market is just asserted by [him] with no explicit textual evidence.²³²

What Moseley convincingly shows, in my view, is that Heinrich needlessly introduces a conceptual conflation absent from Marx’s presentation: it is only in section 1.3.2 on ‘The Relative Form of Value’ that Marx will analyse the relation between two commodities as what Heinrich calls their ‘value relation’, in which ‘the coat [in Marx’s example] counts as the form of existence of value’ of the linen.²³³ Prior to this, Marx analyses the concept of the commodity in abstraction from its relation to other commodities.

What Moseley does not and cannot show, however, is how Marx’s ‘phantom-like’ concept of abstract human labour can exist without a form of appearance. This instead is a mere faith-based assertion in his otherwise scrupulous argument. Moseley arrives at this untenable position because of his uniformly Hegelian reading of Marx’s argument, assuming without discussion that an abstract concept can exist prior to its incarnation in a material form.²³⁴ ‘Essence’, Hegel famously asserted without proof, ‘must appear’, a position to which Moseley subscribes without reserve.²³⁵

To be sure, Moseley adopts this position underwritten by Marx’s own phrases in the first two editions of Capital, such as the following particularly unclear assertion:

In the production of linen, a particular quantum of human labour exists in having been expended. The linen’s value is the merely objective reflection of the labour so expended, but it is not reflected in the body of the linen. It reveals itself (i.e., acquires a sensual expression) by its value-relationship to the coat.²³⁶

Marx’s language implies that he is speaking of the private, concrete ‘quantum of human labour’ expended in making an actually existing length of linen, but we know this cannot be the case (or else the existing length of linen’s value would automatically be greater the longer it had taken to produce it), and that instead Marx must be speaking of an abstraction, abstract human labour. His language nonetheless clearly reveals the theoretical result of this muddle: a mystical logic of revelation, in which the unseen but ‘existing’ spirit (phantom, spectre) becomes incarnate, sublated in a material object (not bread or wine, in this case, but coat).

It is precisely the accomplishment of Marx’s exercise in self-clarification in the Ergänzungen notebook to have worked through this point of mystified theoretical confusion, to have abandoned his previous Hegelian hermeneutic of revelation and incarnation, but without, unfortunately, having sufficiently rewritten his manuscript to reflect this theoretical development:

The coat and the linen as values, each for itself, were reduced [in the first section of chapter 1] to objectifications of human labour as such. But this reduction forgot that neither is in and of itself value-objectivity [Werthgegenständlichkeit]; they are this only in so far as this objectivity is held in common [gemeinsam] by them. Outside of their relationship with each other – the relationship in which they count as equal – neither coat nor linen possess value-objectivity or objectivity as congelations of human labour per se. They only possess this social objectivity as a social relationship (in a social relationship).²³⁷

Marx only managed to insert a single but crucial sentence into the 1875 French edition that reflects this auto-critique, while letting stand without clarification sentences such as that cited above (‘In the production of linen, a particular quantum of human labour exists in having been expended’), sentences that continue to confuse astute readers such as Moseley into the present.

That new sentence – the meaning of which in the Ergänzungen Heinrich and Moseley disagree on (neither Moseley nor Heinrich discuss the actual published French rendition) – marks a crucial amendment to Marx’s argument, but one that Marx fails explicitly to flag as a general position in his text, even in its more expansive French articulation:

L’égalité de travaux qui diffèrent toto cœlo les uns des autres ne peut consister que dans une abstraction de leur inégalité réelle, que dans la réduction à leur caractère commun de dépense de force humaine, de travail humain en général, et c’est l’échange seul qui opère cette réduction en mettant en présence les uns des autres sur un pied d’égalité les produits des travaux les plus divers.

The equality of labours that differ entirely one from another can only consist in an abstraction from their real inequality, only in the reduction of their common character as an expenditure of human force, of human labour in general, and it is exchange alone that operates this reduction, by placing the most diverse products of labour in the presence of one another as equals [in value].²³⁸

While Heinrich correctly reads Marx’s ‘opère’ [vollszieht sich, ‘carried out’ in the German Ergänzungen] to mean that ‘the abstraction of equal human labour only exists in exchange’, Moseley instead perversely seeks to force the phrase ‘to be consistent with [Marx’s] earlier paragraphs’ (i.e., precisely the text Marx seeks to correct here) paragraphs that putatively state that, in Moseley’s words, ‘equal human labour exists in production’.²³⁹

In fact, however, Marx’s clarification is not yet clear enough: when Marx writes in the French edition that ‘The equality of labours that differ entirely one from another can only consist in an abstraction from their real inequality’, he should have added the obvious implication of this, i.e., that this ‘abstraction from their real inequality’ results in, precisely and self-evidently, an abstraction, the nonexistent concept of abstract human labour. To clarify the theoretical obscurity that confounds Moseley, and given that his difficult, highly abstract presentation in Chapter 1 relies upon singular examples (coats, linen) to help the reader grasp his argument, Marx should have inserted in his text an analogous clarification to his extremely important note on the difference between value and exchange-value, which he only came to present clearly in the 1872 edition: ‘Once we know this, our manner of speaking does no harm; it serves, rather, as an abbreviation’.²⁴⁰ Once we know that the abstraction of equal human labour only exists as a real abstraction in the exchange relation via its value-form, and is until then a nonexistent concept, our manner of speaking – for example that ‘In the production of linen, a particular quantum of human labour exists in having been expended’ – does no harm.

12 The Raw Materials of Marx’s Additive Synthetic Method

As he repeatedly rewrote the first chapters of Capital – from the simplified Appendix of the 1867 edition, to the second, 1872 edition and its accompanying preparatory notebooks, to his corrections of Roy’s 1875 French translation – in the explicit intention to clarify and improve the process of exposition in those initial chapters, Marx in fact gradually abandoned the negative dialectic of totality that predominates in his initial scientific works. While from the 1841 dissertation through the Grundrisse, and as late as the 1867 edition of Capital, this negative dialectical mode of exposition still plays an important role, I have argued that in the process of rewriting, Marx developed an additive synthetic process of exposition, in which the Hegelian logic of totality, contradiction and determinations of reflection [Reflexionsbestimmung] play no further role.

There is no evidence that Marx consciously undertook this process as the invention of a novel materialist dialectical method; instead, he continued to pay homage to the centrality of Hegel’s logic in his own formation, most famously in the Postface to the 1872 edition where he celebrates ‘that mighty thinker’ in the face of the ‘ill-humoured, arrogant and mediocre epigones who … take pleasure in treating Hegel in the same way as the good Moses Mendelssohn treated Spinoza …, namely, as a “dead dog” ’.²⁴¹ This transformation in Marx’s process of exposition instead involved a practical development, in the form of the reconceptualisation, clarification, and rewriting of these crucial initial chapters, most visibly for example in Marx’s preparatory notebook for the 1872 edition entitled Ergänzungen und Veränderungen zum ersten Band des Kapitals (Additions and Changes to the First Volume of Capital).²⁴² Since Marx made no systematic statement or reflection on this process, it must be reconstructed immanently from Marx’s text, as I have tried to do here.

What’s more, for all his customary polemical conviction, Marx’s two well-known statements on his relation to Hegelian dialectic in the 1872 Postface are quite ambiguous. On the one hand, he famously asserts that due to ‘the mystification [Mystifikation] which the dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands … it must be inverted [umstülpen], in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell’, a process of mere inversion that, Althusser famously argued, were it true, would have left intact the principal Hegelian logical categories (negation, contradiction, Aufhebung, etc.).²⁴³

Instead, in Reading Capital, Althusser merely asserts what I have here tried to demonstrate: that Marx’s claim fails to do justice to the real transformations manifest in the process of exposition concretely deployed in the second and all subsequent editions of Capital, as what Althusser rightly calls ‘the apodictic character of the order of [Marx’s] theoretical discourse’.²⁴⁴ At the same time, a few lines before that famous statement, Marx does in fact seem to go much further in that very direction, asserting unequivocally (though without presenting any evidence that would indicate more precisely his meaning) that ‘My dialectical method is, in its foundations [Grundlage], not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly opposite [direktes Gegenteil] to it’.²⁴⁵

If by 1872, in the practical process of revision, Marx had transformed his mode of exposition in the opening chapters of Capital into what I have termed a method of additive synthesis,²⁴⁶ without ever committing to paper the systematic analysis of his understanding of method that he never found time to write, he seems to have done so spontaneously, amply drawing on the resources of his own genius to construct an original process of materialist critique. That said, here I wish to indicate a number of theoretical resources in Marx’s theoretical toolkit that necessarily played decisive roles in this process.

The first of these has long been overlooked in Marx studies. In Heinrich’s judgement, however, Marx’s thorough training in law and legal argumentation was decisive for his intellectual formation:

Marx’s knowledge of law left behind clear traces in his work. Directly legal arguments are found in a few of his articles for the Rheinische Zeitung, [and] his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right from 1843 and some passages in Capital also demonstrate Marx’s legal knowledge. And last but not least, in February of 1849 in Cologne, Marx successfully pleaded before the court twice when the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was charged with insulting a magistrate and in a further trial for inciting rebellion.²⁴⁷

This is relevant in the present context because this training gave Marx what Heinrich describes as ‘a reasonably solid (theoretical) training in law’, one that in addition to his study of logic with Georg Andreas Gabler, for which he unsurprisingly received a mark of ‘extremely diligent’, would necessarily have grounded him in the subcategory of positive logic that is legal argumentation.²⁴⁸

Etienne Balibar argues even more strongly that though ‘there remains a remarkable blindness in the detailed commentaries on Marx’s Capital to the issue of juridical forms and the function of law in Marx’s analysis’, in fact, ‘juridical form is key to the understanding of Marx’s reasoning’.²⁴⁹ Balibar shows that the category of legal subject as property owner is crucial to the entire demonstrative arc of Capital, from the initial analysis of exchange in chapter Two, to that of the wage form, and finally that of the accumulation of capital in chapter 24, such that there exists ‘a homology of the juridical form with the value form’, in the sense that without the category of legal person the process of valorisation cannot proceed.²⁵⁰

Second, Günther Schmidt has argued that given Marx’s extensive knowledge of the works of Aristotle – including the Physics, Metaphysics, and On Generation and Corruption, to the point of having translated in 1841 sections of On the Soul – he in fact originally intended to write his doctoral dissertation as a comparison of Epicurus not with Democritus, but with Aristotle himself.²⁵¹ While there is no direct evidence that Marx studied Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics, the works in which Aristotle literally invented logic as a domain of scientific, philosophical reflection, there is every reason to suppose that given his training in logic, Marx was familiar with these canonical works as well. In any case, Aristotle’s positive logic pervades at every moment the philosophical works that Marx knew intimately, such as the Physics and Metaphysics. Marx’s respect for Aristotle is, moreover, a constant of his intellectual universe, to the point that in Capital he will unequivocally name the inventor of the Peripatetic School, ‘the great investigator who was the first to analyse the value-form, like so many other forms of thought, society and nature, … the greatest thinker of Antiquity’.²⁵²

Finally – and here the question of influence is both significantly more obscure but equally crucial to the argument of this book as a whole – there is the problem of Spinoza and Marx.²⁵³ Compared to his extensive engagement with thinkers such as Epicurus, Aristotle, Feuerbach, or Hegel, Marx has little to say about Spinoza, all of it rather superficial and in passing (though always positive and admirative). In its generality, Marx’s one theoretically substantive citation of the author of the Ethics, in a footnote to Capital, (‘These gentlemen [the vulgar economists] would do well to ponder occasionally over Spinoza’s “Determinatio est nagatio” ’) most likely relays Hegel’s misrepresentation of Spinoza rather than a substantive engagement with Spinoza himself, repeating Hegel’s erroneous word order rather than the original (‘determinatio est negatio’ rather than Spinoza’s ‘determinatio negatio est’).²⁵⁴ For Marx in this footnote, the phrase ‘Determinatio est negatio’ is taken to refer in general to ‘Hegelian “contradiction”, which [Marx continues] is the source of all dialectics’, something quite different than its limited application in Spinoza’s letter to Jelles.²⁵⁵

It would seem that Marx’s other principal reference to Spinoza (‘In opposition [Gegensatz] to Spinoza, [vulgar economics] believes that “ignorance is a sufficient reason” [die Unwissenheit ein hinreichender Grund ist]’) is, if anything, even less promising in its vagueness.²⁵⁶ I wish in conclusion, however, to pause to consider this phrase that does not seem to have merited the attention of previous commentators on Marx’s relation to Spinoza. It is my conviction that taken in context, and given the importance Marx seems to attribute to it judging from the phrase’s repetition from his 1841 dissertation through the 1872 edition of Capital, this seemingly cliched, even throwaway catchphrase in fact indicates, as a sort of signpost or marker, precisely the additive synthetic epistemological process that brings Marx’s revisions to Capital in proximity to Spinoza’s apodictic, positive logic.

13 On Ignorance and Common Notions

In the existing literature on Spinoza’s possible influence on Marx, the focus has remained unrelentingly limited to questions of the critique of religion and miracles, freedom of speech, and the autonomy of the political. Bernardo Bianchi remains squarely within this field of interpretation, noting only that ‘After 1844, Marx drifts away from Spinoza as well as … the problems relating to the autonomy of the political’.²⁵⁷ No commentator to my knowledge has reflected on the epistemological implications of the statement that ‘ignorance is no argument’, though there is unanimous consensus that the source of this phrase in the first volume of Capital is the Appendix to Ethics IP36.²⁵⁸

On at least three occasions spanning his intellectual production, from the 1841 dissertation to the final revisions of Capital, Marx cites Spinoza’s phrase that ‘ignorance is no argument’.²⁵⁹ In The German Ideology, Marx briefly cites the phrase to indicate Max Stirner’s ignorance of real human suffering, but in the case of Marx’s 1841 dissertation, On the Difference between Democritean and Epicurean Physics, Rubel suggests a far more consequential, epistemological dimension, one that I will argue is carried over, amplified, and clarified when Marx repeats it in Capital. While Marx’s lost Appendix to the Dissertation, judging by the Notes that have survived, addressed potentially Spinozist themes related to the TTP such as ‘On Individual Immortality’, ‘The Theology of Epicurus’ and ‘The Relationship of Man to God’, in the second chapter, Marx writes that ‘Spinoza says that ignorance is no argument’ in order to reject the platitudes of commentators who ‘attributed no qualities to the atoms’ based merely on their inability to ‘reconcile the qualities of the atom with its concept’, in other words, based merely on the inadequacy of their own thought.²⁶⁰

Rubel’s commentary on this reference to Spinoza is suggestive, if hesitant. He argues that this seemingly offhand reference to Spinoza in fact indexifies the dissertation’s fundamentally Spinozist epistemology:

One is tempted to speak of a Spinozist reading of Epicurus on Marx’s part; at both the level of atomist physics as well as its ethics, the [dissertation’s] concepts of reason, the sensible [sensibilité], consciousness and superstition all contribute to the conception of a ‘materialism’ that is not without connection to the rationalism defined by Spinoza in relation to the ‘second genre of knowledge’.²⁶¹

Marx’s dissertation in its surviving form is divided between the theoretical anti-empiricism of its first part, a position coherent with both Spinoza and Hegel,²⁶² and the purely Hegelian negative dialectic of its second section.²⁶³ In the former, Marx articulates the fundamental distinction between Democritus’ empiricism and the purely conceptual orientation of Epicurus. Setting off across the Mediterranean world in an endless search for knowledge, Democritus, Marx observes, ‘is driven into empirical observation [empirische Beobachtung]. Dissatisfied with philosophy, he throws himself into the arms of empirical knowledge [empirischen Wissen]’. Democritus ‘applies himself to empirical natural science [empirische Naturwissenschaft] and to positive knowledge, and represents the unrest of observation, experimenting, ubiquitous learning [überall lernenden], ranging over the wide, wide world’. Marx’s Epicurus, in contrast, ‘scorns the empirical [verachtet die Empirie]; embodied in him are the serenity of thought satisfied in itself, the self-sufficiency that draws its knowledge ex principio interno’.²⁶⁴

Epicurus’ position amounts to the refusal of all supernatural or miraculous explanations of causality, all teleologies of divine intent, and asserts instead the adequacy of a physics-based, ‘atomistic’ account of nature. ‘The atom is perceived only through reason’, Marx flatly observes.²⁶⁵ There are no sensations of atoms from which to construct their concept; instead, Epicurus’ philosophical project seeks to articulate the rational order of nature, beginning from the purely theoretical, anti-empiricist concept of the atom and the void, to culminate in a materialist cosmology. Marx’s Epicurus squarely locates the production of knowledge within scientific reflection – as opposed to the extraction of truth from empirical observation so characteristic of Democritus – as the positive construction of an adequate intellection of the real. This position, despite its rudimentary development in the dissertation, nonetheless indicates a purely Spinozist materialist position, in which the real order of nature finds conceptual articulation in the attribute of thought; Marx’s reading of the TTP and Ethics in preparation for the dissertation in all certainty contributed to the articulation of this epistemological position.

The Spinozist theoretical anti-empiricism of Marx’s first chapter stands in marked contrast, however, to the negative dialectical logic of its succeeding sections, the latter deploying a none-too-subtle application of Hegel’s logic of Reflexionsbestimmung to the Epicurean theory of the atom. If Democritus’ assertion of the necessarily, eternally linear fall of atoms through the void describes for Marx a realm of pure necessity, Epicurus’ introduction of the concept of their clinamen or swerve, in Marx’s reading, introduces negation not as the mere external definition of the atom as not-void, but internally, as the negative unity of its becoming-other, its swerve the theoretical basis of self-consciousness and the freedom of human action:

The mode of being which [the atom] has to negate [negiren] is the straight line. The immediate negation [unmittelbare Negation] of this motion is another motion, which … is the declination from the straight line …. Epicurus objectifies the contradiction [Widerspruch] in the concept of the atom between essence and existence …. In Epicurus atomistics with all its contradictions [Widersprüchen] has been carried through and completed as the natural science of self-consciousness [Selbstbewusstseins].²⁶⁶

Here, the Hegelian logic of the determinations of reflection that would remain a constant in Marx’s thought through the first edition of Capital already offers the young Marx the theoretical means to develop an original reinterpretation of Epicurus’ materialism. The contrast with Marx’s return to Spinoza in chapter 11 of Capital, as we shall see in a moment, could not be greater.

That said, Rubel’s hesitant, passing mention of the importance for the young Marx of Spinoza’s ‘second genre of knowledge’, that of common notions [notiones communes], puts us on the trail of the true and penetrating significance of Spinoza for Marx’s process of exposition, the final piece in the puzzle of what I am calling in this book Capital’s Spinozist epistemology. For while in the dissertation this Spinozism remains superficial, if determinant in Marx’s argument, by the time of its reappearance in Capital, the reference to Spinoza, in the context of Marx’s argument in chapter 11, precisely and exactingly indicates what Rubel could only vaguely infer from the 1841 dissertation and its accompanying notebooks: a full-fledged theoretical reconstruction and deployment on Marx’s part of what Spinoza called general or common notions, notions that Marx names the ‘law of motion’ of the capitalist social form. In other words, taken in the context in which it appears in the eleventh chapter of Capital (‘The Rate and Mass of Surplus-Value’), in saying that ‘ignorance is not a sufficient reason’ Marx is not merely pointing to the ‘ignorance’ of the classical political economists he criticises, but does so in the context of his contrasting positive elaboration of an adequate mode of knowledge: specifically, the concept of the ‘law’ of the rate and mass of surplus value that it is the remit of chapter 11 to formulate.

14 Marx’s Spinozist Theory of Knowledge

‘Ignorance is not a sufficient reason’. For reasons he never explains, it is this unassuming insight of Spinoza’s, gleaned from his readings and notes in 1841, that permanently stuck in Marx’s mind. When Marx repeats this reference to Spinoza three decades later, in chapter 11 of Capital Volume I, he tellingly does so in the immediate context of a critique of the illusions and misapprehensions of the classical economists regarding the nature of surplus value.²⁶⁷ Immediately following his eminently clear and concise statement of the general ‘law’ (Gesetz) governing the ‘Rate and Mass of Surplus-Value’ (henceforth ‘LRMSV’) in the first three pages of the chapter, Marx notes that ‘This law clearly contradicts all experience based on immediate appearances’.²⁶⁸ This is necessarily the case, he argues, because, as ‘everyone knows’, the amount of profit made from a commodity by ‘a cotton spinner’ or ‘a baker’ does not vary according to the relative amounts of variable and constant capital either has invested to produce their cotton or bread, but only according to the general cost of ‘inputs’ (in mainstream economic jargon) relative to their market price.²⁶⁹

While Marx can assume that ‘everyone knows’ this is the case from their lived experience of commodity production and exchange, this ready familiarity nonetheless directly contradicts the law Marx has just before stated; at this point in his exposition, however, he has not yet explained the real and necessary distinction between surplus value and profit, and Marx will continue to hold their difference in abstraction and to assume instead that the two coincide until many hundreds of pages later, when he will explicate the dynamics and laws governing competition in Volume III via concepts such as cost price and average rate of profit.²⁷⁰

Here, Marx simply indicates that the authors of ‘classical economics’ are just as subject to this empiricist illusion as ‘everyone’, and necessarily so: in the absence of an adequate theory of value and its necessary concepts such as Marx has developed to this point in his exposition in chapter 11, classical economics can only ‘hold instinctively to this law, although it has never formulated it, because it is a necessary consequence of the law of value’.²⁷¹ In other words, the only difference between ‘everyone’ and classical economics is that while the former simply observes and follows what is empirically the case, the latter experiences this same fact as a theoretical contradiction that it cannot solve: having posited labour as the source of value, but lacking concepts such as labour power and socially necessary labour time, classical economics embroiled itself in insoluble contradictions trying to explain, for example, how it can then be the case that a commodity is not ‘more valuable the more unskilful and lazy the worker who produced it, because he would need more time to complete the article’.²⁷²

Lacking adequate theoretical concepts, ‘vulgar economics’ can only make ‘violent [as opposed to scientifically adequate] abstractions’; condemned to its empiricist illusions, it ‘must rely … on mere semblance as opposed to the law which regulates and determines the phenomena’.²⁷³ One could hardly imagine a more perfectly Spinozist critique of the necessarily illusory and inadequate nature of empirical, sensuous experience, and it is indeed precisely at this point that Marx then inserts his reference to Spinoza.

The obvious conclusion is not merely that chapter 11 of Capital is explicitly constructed as a perfectly Spinozist critique of the necessity governing the illusions of empiricist, ideological forms of knowledge such as those of ‘vulgar economics’, but furthermore, that Marx offers in contrast an equally perfect demonstration in the immediately preceding paragraphs of what should necessarily take its place to constitute a properly scientific, adequate analysis of a concept such as the rate and mass of surplus value: ‘the law that regulates and determines the phenomena’, or, in Spinozist terms, its common notion.

Marx thus begins his analysis of this law, in the first paragraph of chapter 11, by reminding his reader that ‘In this chapter, as hitherto, the value of labour-power … is assumed to be a given, constant magnitude’.²⁷⁴ Superficially, this reminder simply prompts the reader to recall the abstract concept (the value of labour power) that allowed Marx, in chapter 7, to distinguish between necessary and surplus labour, and thus to indicate the source of surplus value in the production process. More importantly, however, this proviso also squarely replaces Marx’s forthcoming analysis of the LRMSV in the purely theoretical domain of thought; the law of the rate and mass of surplus value is, in other words, not an empirical, sensuous thing, but unambiguously a Gedankenkonkretum.

I say replaces because Marx must here forcibly return his reader to the high level of abstraction of the first nine chapters of Capital following the extensive empirical illustration of these concepts in chapter 10 (‘The Working Day’); equally, however, this initial prompt must be kept in mind in what follows, because it clearly indicates that the initial presentation of this law stands in utter distinction from the empiricism of both ‘everyone’ and the classical economists he will then excoriate midway through the chapter in the passage discussed above.

This point should not be forgotten when Marx immediately, in the second paragraph, launches into a discussion of ‘the worker’ and ‘the capitalist’, offering as well specific numerical quantities of work time (‘6 hours a day’) and its monetary expression as a specific value (‘3 shillings’) to calculate a ‘specific mass of surplus-value’.²⁷⁵ How are ‘the worker’ and ‘the capitalist’ different, a casual reader might ask, from the ‘baker’ or ‘cotton spinner’ whose empiricist point of view he will condemn just after presenting this law? In fact, it will shortly become clear – when Marx directly scales his analysis from a single labour process to the ‘total capital of a society’ (‘for example … the social working day of ten million hours’) – that they inhabit utterly distinct theoretical realms: the baker and spinner actually existing, singular examples of productive labourers with their distinct points of view and lived experiences of the production and exchange processes, the ‘worker’ and ‘capitalist’ mere theoretical, abstract markers or stand-ins, imagistic ciphers of an abstract thought construct that Marx will call ‘aliquot parts’ of a whole that can be directly scaled up or down at will.²⁷⁶ Marx thus proceeds, in his third paragraph, to scale his analysis from aliquot, representative figures of the individual worker and capitalist, to address ‘the total value of all the labour-powers the capitalist employs simultaneously’.²⁷⁷

Marx next examines factors governing the variation on this simple formula for the production of surplus value: when variable capital invested diminishes or increases, and when the corresponding rate of surplus value increases or diminishes, the total mass of surplus value produced will directly vary according to these given proportions.²⁷⁸ These variations, Marx insists, nonetheless remain governed by absolute ‘limits, which cannot be overcome’, in the form of both limits to the working day (24 hours) and to reductions in the number of workers employed (to the theoretical and potentially real limit of zero).²⁷⁹

All of this combines, in Marx’s various simple, algebraic examples, to indicate the ‘self-evident’ nature of the LRMSV: ‘With a given rate of surplus-value, and a given value of labour-power, therefore, the masses of surplus-value produced vary directly as the amounts of the variable capitals advanced’.²⁸⁰ Though Marx’s exposition in volume I to this point has focused on the relative division of capital into its constant and variable forms, ‘the law just laid down is not affected by this’. This is the case since it is only the element of variable capital, by definition and whatever its relative quantity to constant capital employed in production, that effects ‘the valorisation process performed by the labour-powers which set the means of production in motion’.²⁸¹

This final observation thus allows Marx to summarise in natural language the LRMSV in its simplest form: ‘The masses of value and of surplus-value produced by different capitals – the value of labour-power being given and its degree of exploitation being equal – vary directly as the amounts of the variable components of these capitals, i.e. the parts which have been turned into living labour-power’.²⁸² Having done so, Marx turns to his critique of both the common sense of ‘everyone’ as well as the necessary contradictions governing the ‘vulgar economists’ discussed above.

Now, the epistemological point I wish to make about Marx’s algebraically simple LRMSV is that on at least eight counts, Marx’s law constitutes a perfect example of what Spinoza called a common notion, i.e., general concepts or formulae that are, in contrast to imaginary ideas, Spinoza insists, always and in all cases necessarily adequate. It is quite extraordinary, I think, that both Spinoza, in propositions 37, 38, and 39 of Ethics II, and Marx in Capital chapter 11:

1. Reject empirical knowledge as radically and necessarily inadequate;

2. Propose in its place an abstract science of nonexistent things (res singulares non existentes) without sensuous determination;²⁸³

3. Emphasise the absolute scalability of this knowledge between aliquot part and whole;

4. Understand this form of knowledge as relational and proportional as opposed to the observation-based study of actually existing singular things;

5. Articulate this form of knowledge as a process of formalisation that models reality through the power of abstraction …

6. To produce a necessarily and universally adequate mode of knowledge …

7. The nature of which follows a necessary genesis that gradually transitions from the inadequacy of imaginary, empirical knowledge to the adequacy of the general, in order to …

8. Constitute the paradigm of a political epistemology as epistemological commons

In his analysis of Spinoza’s exposition of the concept of ‘notions common to all humans’ [notiones omnibus hominibus communes], Macherey initially emphasises the same distinction Marx makes, described above, between the inadequacy of empirical observations and a general notion: while the former are produced ‘by the chance encounters of bodies, [common notions] differ fundamentally from those produced by the mechanisms of perception and imagination, under conditions subject to infinite variations, which prevents their meaning, always elaborated in a determinate context, in the here and now, to be extended beyond the moment of their appearance’.²⁸⁴ In contrast, Macherey argues that such notions common to all humans by their very nature escape from ‘the instability inherent in opinions’ insofar as they possess a fixed and determinant form that allows for their deployment ‘by all in common’.²⁸⁵

What then is the nature of such common notions? For Spinoza, the crucial distinction between the inadequate, imaginary ideas we necessarily form from sense impressions, and common notions, is that the latter are ideas not about any given, actually existing singular thing (such as coats and linen or bakers and cotton spinners, among Marx’s examples), but about certain qualities common to all things in general. In the wake of Galileo, who died in 1642, Spinoza’s privileged example in these propositions is that of physical bodies as such, universally existing in space and following the general laws that govern their relations. If it is the case that ‘all bodies agree in certain things’²⁸⁶ – i.e., that aside from their particular existences, they possess common characteristics, which is to say their extension – then they therefore have in common that ‘they are determinations of extension, and are universally and identically subject to the same laws of movement and rest’.²⁸⁷

For Spinoza, this common nature is what allows for the development of a general science of bodies, one that is founded on purely mathematical principles. The essential characteristic of this scientific understanding of the physical, material world, Macherey observes, is that it does not ‘take into consideration the existence of any specific body in particular, and is thus completely abstract’.²⁸⁸ This immediately recalls Marx’s famous defence of the powers of abstraction for the analysis and critique of political economy: ‘In the analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace both’.²⁸⁹ Like Marx’s scientific critique of political economy (‘The ultimate aim of this work [i.e., Capital, is] to reveal the economic law of motion of modern society’), Spinoza’s ‘science’, as Macherey reads him, ‘determines figures of regularity that, despite the perpetual variations impressed on [actually existing, singular] bodies due to the fact that they exist en acte, constitute the manifestation of a permanence regarding which laws can be formulated independently of the existence of any particular body’.²⁹⁰

Spinoza further specifies a characteristic of common notions, one that applies not only to physical bodies in extension, but to all actually existing singular things as such: these common characteristics apply equally and absolutely to the part and whole [quod aeque in parte ac in toto est], and are, Macherey stresses, completely independent of any distinction between part and whole, precisely in terms of the scalability that Marx stresses in the example of the LRMSV: when considering aliquot, representative parts of a whole such as the total mass of surplus value rather than actually existing labourers such as bakers and cotton spinners and their lived experience, the law governing the rate and mass of surplus value holds absolutely.

This is necessarily the case, since a common notion such as Marx’s LRMSV represents not actually existing singular things, but relations and proportions, the nature of which, Macherey notes, ‘remains identical in every dimension [ordres de grandeur], as long as the rule that defines these relations is sustained’. As such, a common notion informs by this equivalence all ‘composed and composing’ things, which, in their entirety and universally, constitute relational systems as singular structures of causality that through formalisation come to nonexist, and do so independently of the particular conditions of existence of singular existing things (such as, for Marx, the particular characteristics of baking bread or spinning cotton).²⁹¹

Now, the astute reader will have noted that in my initial presentation of chapter 11 of Capital, I skipped over what is perhaps the most striking confirmation of my argument that the LRMSV is a Spinozist common notion: Marx’s graphic formula summarising the law itself in schematic form:²⁹²

View Expanded

I did so because Marx’s introduction of this formula – though it adds no further information to his presentation of the LRMSV – not only synthesises in schematic form this common notion, but, what is more, its specific history across the various editions of Capital can stand as a final confirmation of my proposition that Marx tendentially supresses his initial reliance on the Hegelian logic of determinations of reflection and contradiction for a properly Spinozist additive synthetic method.

In fact, this schematic reduction and formalisation of the LRMSV, along with the paragraphs directly preceding and following it, is absent from both the 1867 and 1872 editions of Capital.²⁹³ Retained by Engels in the 1890 ‘definitive’ edition of Capital, Marx in fact only inserted this formula, along with a number of abbreviations and clarifications, in his revisions to Roy’s 1875 French translation. In the third paragraph, for example, he added a second sentence that more clearly states, at a high degree of abstraction, the additive and scalable nature of variable capital: ‘Sa valeur [that of the variable capital employed] égale la valeur moyenne d’une force de travail multipliée par le nombre de ces forces individuelles ; la grandeur du capital variable est donc proportionnelle au nombre des ouvriers employés’.²⁹⁴ Immediately following the formula, Marx further emphasises the purely abstract nature of the values it represents: ‘We assume throughout, not only that the value of an average labour-power is constant, but that the workers employed by a capitalist are reduced to average workers’.²⁹⁵ The overall tendency of Marx’s final, 1875 revisions to the first paragraphs of this chapter are clear: simplifying its presentation, while above all emphasising the scalability of his propositions as well as their purely abstract character.

Now, I find it quite extraordinary that in his proof to EIIP37, Spinoza characterises the abstract, general nature of the properties common to all things (i.e., their common notions) by an abstract variable, ‘B’, precisely as does Marx in the formula he inserts between the fourth and fifth paragraphs of Chapter 11.²⁹⁶ Common notions apprehend not actually existing singular things but relations, in effect constructing an atemporal formal model of the real. The ethical and political result of this process of abstraction, Macherey observes, is to multiply the powers of the intellect adequately to grasp the essential, relational nature of all things:

It is as though the intellect … surpassed itself, escaping from the limitations of its particular situation as the idea of a particular thing as a body in action, which is how it ordinarily perceives all other things. Instead, [through the development of common notions] it is led to form ideas that are not themselves ideas of particular things, but [nonexistent] ideas, the object of which is the relations among things.²⁹⁷

In fact, Spinoza argues, common notions, though they do not grasp the essential nature of singular things (this he reserves to the third, ‘intuitive’ form of knowledge), are nonetheless necessarily and universally adequate, and as such constitute an instance of the political epistemology with which this book as a whole is concerned.

‘Those things that are common to all things and are equally in the part as in the whole can be conceived only adequately’.²⁹⁸ Aside from the laws governing the movement and rest of physical bodies, Spinoza also refers to axioms as common notions, in the sense that they hold for ‘all things that are’ [omnia que sunt].²⁹⁹ When the apparatus of thought moves in this fashion away from the empirical consideration of various actually existing things, to construct instead ideas whose object is the purely abstract relations between things, Macherey observes,

It moves to a new mode of operation [régime de fonctionnement], one that makes it see the things it apprehends in a completely new fashion: no longer via contingent encounters tied to the existence in act of bodies, but from a completely disincarnated point of view …. Relating to no specific thing in particular, such an idea, by its nature, can indicate or consider no other thing than that of which it is the idea: it can only be a clear and distinct idea, the transparency of which cannot be corrupted by opacity. It is, therefore, an idea ‘that is for us absolute or adequate and perfect’ [quae in nobis est absoluta sive adequate et perfecta].³⁰⁰

Common notions are absolute and complete ideas, precisely in the sense that schematisation (via the introduction of variables, A or B, to replace all reference to actually existing singular things) affords the passage from our inadequate ideas about the actually existing, empirical things we perceive (like Marx’s bakers and cotton spinners) to our conception of universally and eternally valid relations (such as Marx’s LRMSV).

This political epistemology of common notions is grounded in what Macherey terms ‘a dynamic of rational knowledge’, via the perfecting and emendation of the capacity to grasp the real by means of ideas, in which the intellect is led ‘from the activity of [sensuous] perception, in which it is at its most passive, to that of conception, in which it is the most active … passing from the particular to the general through a progressive process of abstraction’.³⁰¹

The common notion as such thus possesses an inherent ethical and political dimension: ideas that express properties common to all things are as such necessarily ‘common to all humans’, Macherey comments, ‘which is to say that they compose a common knowledge that can be universally shared’. This common knowledge, accessible to all humans and necessarily identically conceived by all who follow this democratic path, thus constitutes ‘the condition for a mental community among all people …. In so far as people form common notions that are necessarily adequate, they are actually united, and constitute as such a single intellect and a single body’.³⁰² Macherey insists above all on the real actuality of this intellectual commons of theoretical practice: ‘In the intellect of man, whoever he or she may be, there always exist common notions [such as, I suggested above, a minimal idea of the nature of capitalism such as Marx expresses in the first sentence of Capital] through which can be established the forms of their union with other people, which is to say, with the maximum possible others, and tendentially, with all’.³⁰³

If this political dimension of theoretical practice holds for a universal understanding of the law of gravity or logical axioms, in Spinoza’s examples, how much more then is this true of Marx’s critique of political economy in Capital, in which the reader is swept up by Marx’s bracing rhetorical devices and compelling argument, to develop for herself a dynamic of increasingly adequate knowledge of the nature of capitalism, to grasp its essential nature in the fullest complexity of its systematic dynamic, to pierce the ideological untruth of its mere forms of appearance, and to join Marx in the construction, at the highest pitch of an active knowledge, of nothing less than a universal theoretical commons, a communism of the active intellect, as the necessary and adequate prolegomenon to the real ‘death of capital’ with which this book began.