Marxism and the Critique of Value

Description

www.mcmprime.com Marxism and the Critique of Value is the first broadly representative book-length collection in English translation of work from the contemporary German-language school of Marxian critical theory known as Wertkritik, or, as we have opted to translate the term, value-critique or the critique of value.1 The critique of value itself is understood in these pages as having begun with Marx, who initiated a theoretical project that was as philosophically radical as its implications were revolutionary; an incomplete project that has been taken up only fitfully by Marxism after Marx.2 In Marx’s critique of political economy, value and other categories attendant on it are shown to be concepts both fundamental to the functioning of capitalism and fundamentally incoherent, riddled with contradictions as pure concepts and productive of crisis as actually existing concepts operative in the day-to-day reproduction of social life under capital. While this “esoteric” Marxian critique has been rediscovered from time to time by post-Marxists who know they’ve found something interesting but don’t quite know which end is the handle, Anglophone Marxism, for reasons that will become clear in the course of this book, has tended to bury this esoteric critique beneath a more redistributionist understanding of Marx, imagining that there could be a positive Marxist science of the economy, a science that would be oriented toward devolving surplus value to the labor that creates it.3 But what if the value relation does not constitute itself in contradiction to labor, but rather encompasses labor as precisely another of its forms of appearance — if labor is, to paraphrase and echo what is perhaps Norbert Trenkle’s most direct challenge to “traditional Marxism,” itself always already a “real abstraction” no less than the commodity form? What then are, for a critical thought still faithful to Marx, the implied forms of revolutionary practice and agency? The introductory remarks that follow are intended principally for readers with little to no previous knowledge of Wertkritik. The nearly universal absence of English translations that has prevailed up until now — over a period of nearly three decades, in effect an entire generation — has resulted in a virtually total absence of Wertkritik from Anglophone critical theory — even as one of those spaces marked “terra incognita” on the maps drawn up by the conquerors and colonizers of the first phases of the capitalist world-system. Given this absence, the need for a minimum of historical and bibliographical information can hardly be more urgent — even as the context would itself demand to be contextualized, ad infinitum. The bulk of this introduction will consist of a series of interpretive summaries of the thirteen texts selected for translation and conforming to a loosely thematic sequence.4 These summaries, making up the most practical segment of the introduction, are intended only to orient the reader toward the esays themselves. The best introduction to Wertkritik as a theoretical orientation is the essay that begins this collection, Norbert Trenkle’s “Value and Crisis: Basic Questions.” There the reader will find a concise presentation of the “what and why” of value-critique (originally presented as a lecture for this purpose in 1998) that would render an elaborate summary of fundamental tenets here superfluous.