From: Christopher Arthur (cjarthur@waitrose.com)
Date: Sat Aug 24 2002 - 16:32:21 EDT
Alfredo's brief characterisation of VF theory is in the public domain, and I am posting a critique. It is only fair then for me to put up publicly a similar brief account. Below is a section from the Introduction to my book The New Dialectic and Marx's Capital (Brill 2002). This should be out in a couple of months. Unfortunately it was the day after I returned the proofs that I received Alfredo's work so no account could be taken of it. Chris Arthur In this book, where the appropriation of Marx¹s Capital is concerned, we draw upon a relatively new tendency in Marxian theory, which puts at the centre of its critique Marx¹s notion of Œvalue form¹. It is necessary then to say something briefly now on value form theory. In value form theory it is the development of the forms of exchange that is seen as the prime determinant of the capitalist economy rather than the content regulated by it; thus some theorists postpone consideration of the labour theory of value until the value form itself has been fully developed. Hegel is an important reference for value form theorists because his logic of categories is well suited to a theory of form and of form-determination. Moreover Hegel¹s systematic dialectical development of categories is directed towards articulating the structure of a totality, showing how it supports itself in and through the interchanges of its inner moments. I argue capital is just such a totality. The most important single influence on the value form approach to Capital was the rediscovery of the masterly exegesis of Marx¹s value theory by I. I. Rubin, namely his Essays on Marx¹s Theory of Value (1923/28).# Rubin stresses that all the material and technical economic processes are accomplished within definite historically specific social forms. Things, such as commodities, are assigned a social role as mediators of production relations. This is how a category such as value must be understood. The value form is the characteristic social form of commodity capitalist relations. He shows that the category of form-determination is often used by Marx to refer to the way things acquire definite social functions. Marx develops increasingly complex form-determinations corresponding to increasingly complex production relations. Closer to the present is a seminal figure in current value form theory namely H.-G. Backhaus. (Unfortunately not much of his work is in English.) The interesting thing about Backhaus is that he came out of Frankfurt school critical theory. So for him the relevance of Marx for empirical research takes second place to the systematic demystification of the objective irrationality of the value form. For him the theory of value is not about deriving prices - a waste of time - but criticising this value form as an inverted crazy apparatus of alienation and fetishism. Much of this book develops such insights. To come right up to date, what is striking about current value form theory is the enormous importance assigned to money. This is especially evident in the work of Reuten and Williams. This is the value form par excellence for them. Because they see it as Œpure transcendental form¹ as they put it, which is imposed on the material side of the economy, they argue that money need have no material bearer, electronic dots will do; they argue that money is the only measure of value, albeit that they continue to regard labour as its source. Both neo-Sraffian theory, and neo-classical theory, fail to grasp the fact that capitalist social relations appear as monetary relations in the first place. It is an essentially monetary system; hence this form must be central to any adequate theory of capital. Now as to my own work presented here. One thing which I see as consequent on value form theory is that, if it is predicated on analysis of exchange forms in the first place, it should not be in too much of a hurry to address the content. It is notorious that Marx dives down from the phenomena of exchange value to labour as the substance of value in the first three pages of Capital and people rightly complain they do not find any proof there. So I argue in several places here that we must first study the development of the value form and only address the labour content when the dialectic of the forms itself requires us to do so (e.g. chapter 5). Finally, let us pre-empt some more or less misplaced criticisms that may be addressed to value form theory. (i) The claim that if value is constituted in exchange, and measured in money, then it cannot be distinguished from price is a common criticism. (These critics do not grasp value as mediator between labour and price, so, when they notice value form theory distances value from labour, they of course jump to the conclusion value is intended to be identical with price.) (ii) Moreover, similar complaints are also made with respect to abstract labour. If this is predicated on the exchange abstraction then how can it be a category of production? (iii) Finally, since the theory necessarily pays most attention to forms, then it is a qualitative analysis. So the complaint is that it cannot handle the problems associated with determining the magnitude of value. Our response to these criticisms is as follows. First of all, when it is said that value is predicated on exchange, it is important to distinguish two sense which might be meant. This is the way Rubin tackles the issue. He points out that in some places Marx seems to assume value and abstract labour must already be given to exchange; and in other places Marx says they presuppose exchange. In resolving this conundrum he says: ŒWe must distinguish exchange as a social form of the process of reproduction from exchange as a particular phase of this process ... alternating with the phase of direct production.¹ So what Rubin emphasises is that, if production is production for exchange, this Œleaves its imprint on the course of the process of production itself¹.# This is why value and abstract labour are forms arising from a process of production oriented to exchange; but if exchange is taken narrowly, in opposition to production, they may be posited as prior to it. This is at one level very obvious. If value and labour are commensurated in exchange, then anyone organising production for exchange is forced to Œprecommensurate¹ (to borrow a term from Reuten), assigning an Œideal value¹ to be tested against actuality in exchange and competition. Of course the producer may not be aware that socially necessary labour time has just changed, but in the long run exchange mediates supposedly autonomous production units so as to constrain them accordingly. In Chapter 3 I argue for a new concept of abstract labour that gives a more definite sense to this idea that production for exchange is form-determined by exchange. I argue that, if production is orientated to value and surplus-value, then the material character of production, and the various concrete labours, are teleologically subsumed by this goal; hence capital counts as an abstract totality, not as the heterogeneous mass of use values in which it happens to embody itself at any given moment, and labours too count as abstract insofar as capital exploits all indifferently. So abstract labour is constituted in the capital relation as well as in commodity exchange. The next accusation is that, simply because the theory stresses that value is actual only under the money-form, therefore no distinction can be drawn between value and empirically given prices. This does not hold water at all. Rubin and the other form theorists insist, not only on the importance of the social form of production generally, but on a careful accounting of the specifically different social forms that interlock in the bourgeois economy, the need to sort them out, and to present them in a definite order. In this approach there is no difficulty in principle in assigning the value category to the most fundamental of these social forms, the capital relation, while allowing that relations between capitals, and with landed property etc., come on the scene subsequently in the chain of relations that are finally embodied in price. Price is a hugely over-determined phenomenon. That should go without saying. Finally, since form is a qualitative notion, is it going to occlude the quantitative problem of assigning magnitudes and the tendencies of these magnitudes to change? It must be admitted that the ŒKonstanz-Sydney¹ group of value form theorists (e.g. M. Eldred, M. Hanlon, L. Klieber, M. Roth) did end up being very skeptical of Œeconomic science¹ if this was supposed to be quantitative. These people cheerfully accept the value form is purely qualitative, because it analyses pure forms, and furthermore just because these forms are pure, any old conjunctural contents are capable of being inscribed within them. So there may be skepticism that any quantitative correlations are feasible. But it can be argued that, while the forms impose themselves on the content, they in turn necessarily have to reflect in their quantitative dimension changes in the content. Rubin argued as follows: ŒThe social equality of labour expenditures in the form of abstract labour is established through the process of exchange. But this does not prevent us from ascertaining a series of quantitative properties, which distinguish labour in terms of its material-technical and its physiological aspects, and which causally influence the quantitative determination of abstract labour before the act of exchange and independent of it.¹# Chris A 17 Bristol Road, Brighton, BN2 1AP, England
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