Critique of Value

Description

Mediations:

"The critique of value 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. In Marx’s critique of political economy, value itself and other fundamental 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 dossier, 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?"

(https://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/editors-note-vol-27-no-1)

More information

• Dossier: Marxism and the Critique of Value. Mediations, Volume 27, Nos. 1-2

URL = https://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/editors-note-vol-27-no-1

"This special double issue of Mediations is the third in the ongoing series of dossiers devoted to the publication of important works of Marxist theory from national, regional, and historical zones and times neglected by our own de facto Western Marxist and largely metropolitan theoretical canon. Previous dossier issues of Mediations focused on contemporary Marxist theory from Brazil (23.1, Fall 2007) and then on a range of Marxist work both from and pertaining to South Africa (24.1, Fall 2008). This dossier is the first broadly representative 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."