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    Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx
    Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx
    Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx
    Ebook431 pages6 hours

    Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx

    By Frederick Harry Pitts

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    This book critically introduces two compelling contemporary schools of Marxian thought: the New Reading of Marx of Michael Heinrich and Werner Bonefeld, and the postoperaismo of Antonio Negri. Each stake novel claims on Marx’s value theory, the first revisiting key categories of the critique of political economy through Frankfurt School critical theory, the second calling the law of value into crisis with reference to Marx’s rediscovered ‘Fragment on Machines’. Today, ‘postcapitalist’ conceptualisations of a changing workplace excite interest in postoperaist projections of a crisis of measurability sparked by so-called immaterial labour. Using the New Reading of Marx to question this prospectus, Critiquing Capitalism Today clarifies complex debates for newcomers to these cutting-edge currents of critical thought, looking anew at value, money, labour, class and crisis.


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
    Release dateOct 17, 2017
    ISBN9783319626338
    Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx

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      Book preview

      Critiquing Capitalism Today - Frederick Harry Pitts

      Part I

      The New Reading of Marx

      © The Author(s) 2018

      Frederick Harry PittsCritiquing Capitalism TodayMarx, Engels, and Marxismshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62633-8_2

      2. Value, Time and Abstract Labour

      Frederick Harry Pitts¹ 

      (1)

      School of Economics, Finance and Management, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

      2.1 Introduction

      In this chapter I will introduce the central themes of the re-evaluation of Marx’s theory of value conducted within the New Reading of Marx (NRM) . In so doing, I will run against the grain of traditional Marxism by reading labour and time through value rather than seeing the latter spring from the former. In this way we will start with the delineation of value and then seek its relationship with both the concrete and abstract guises of labour and their temporal measure to which workers are subject in the workplace. The relationship of this to the external context of the market , where value is ultimately arbitrated through commodity exchange , will be touched upon to be picked up again in more detail in Chap. 4. I will begin by situating the NRM’s approach to Marx within extant approaches. I will then briefly set out the classical political economists’ debates on value and labour – specifically those of Smith and Ricardo – as a foundation for understanding the significance of Marx’s critique in this regard. Following this, I will give an outline of the core basics of Marx’s theory of value, before turning my attention to the headline innovations of the NRM , posing them against the embodied labour theories of value found in the so-called ‘Ricardian ’ approach of its Marxist forerunners and competitors. This, we shall see, centres on Michael Heinrich’s theorisation of the ‘socialvalidation’ of abstract labour-time as the key principle for explaining how labour can be taken to result in a value-bearing commodity. This validation is harboured in exchange, which changes the way we think about how labour relates to value. Rather than direct labour-time , then, we see that the NRM stresses ‘socially necessary labour-time’ (SNLT), a retrospective abstract social relation between all labours mediated by commodity exchange . We end by considering why, then, if value is ultimately arbitrated in exchange, time is such a central focus of management control, worker resistance and capitalist competition. Drawing on the work of Chris Arthur and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, we can see that the exchange relation that constitutes value holds sway in production as well as circulation , contrary to critics of the NRM who associate it with too ‘circulationist’ a standpoint.

      2.2 Value in the New Reading of Marx

      One might restrict a chapter on the theory of value simply to the presentation of a patchwork of the thoughts of Marx himself on the topic. However, Marx’s work on the question of labour and value contains interlaced ambiguities which lend themselves well to varying interpretations, each with its own arsenal of quotations and passages to confirm its position. In this spirit, this chapter outlines some of the ways in which Marx’s LTOV has been interpreted in the Marxist tradition.

      Following Marx’s advice that one can best understand the ape from the vantage point of its highest stage of development in the human being, Riccardo Bellofiore suggests that such a rule applies equally to reading Marx’s oeuvre: ‘the most developed is the key for the knowledge of the less developed’ (2009, p. 179). As such, in the three volumes of Capital (Marx 1976, 1981, 1992), one gains the greatest sense of the ultimate resolution of his life’s thought. It is upon these texts that the foregoing discussion will be based, although its details and ambiguities will often be paraphrased through the words and ideas of thinkers following Marx. As Alfredo Saad-Filho writes of his own approach to Marx’s work, selected quotations and evidence from Marx’s output are given second place to the presentation and critique of ‘other readings of his works’ which ‘may illuminate certain problems from different angles’ (1997, p. 458). In the context of the internecine struggle between competing conceptions of Marx’s thought, an approach claiming to be presenting his opinions and nothing else would only constitute the taking of one position or another in that struggle. The uncovering of numerous manuscripts, tentative notes and unpublished works have only served to reveal that Marx’s project was a mere ‘fragment’ of what was possible, and has exposed ‘Marxian theory as a radically open project’ (Endnotes 2010). It is this radical openness that allows us to be free of constant reservations based upon what Marx did and did not say on this or that issue, and to move the debate forward into virgin areas of investigation and critique whilst still remaining within in a rich and multifaceted Marxist

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