Value-Form Theory
Contextual Quote
1.
"The critical import of value-form theory is that it calls into question any political conception based on the affirmation of the proletariat as producer of value. It recognises Marx’s work as an essentially negative critique of capitalist society. In reconstructing the Marxian dialectic of the value-form, it demonstrates how the social life process is subsumed under—or “form-determined” by—the value-form. What characterises such “form-determination” is a perverse priority of the form over its content. Labour does not simply pre-exist its objectification in the capitalist commodity as a positive ground to be liberated in socialism or communism through the alteration of its formal expression. Rather, in a fundamental sense value—as the primary social mediation—pre-exists and thus has a priority over labour."
- Endnotes (2010) [1]
2.
"Value-form theory points, in terms of the notion of revolution that follows from it, in the same direction as communisation. The overcoming of capitalist social relations cannot involve a simple “liberation of labour”; rather, the only “way out” is the suppression of value itself—of the value-form which posits abstract labour as the measure of wealth. Communisation is the destruction of the commodity-form and the simultaneous establishment of immediate social relations between individuals. Value, understood as a total form of social mediation, cannot be got rid of by halves."
- Endnotes, 2010: [2]
Discussion
Pedro Nardelli:
"Money and value-form social force-field
The value-form is a symbolic (abstract) way to shape (concrete) social relations through the exchange of different objects of use, which are then commodified and necessarily monetized. In very simple terms, the basis of social relations in the capitalist mode of production is the value, whose form of appearance is the exchange value, whose substance is the abstract labor, and whose magnitude is the socially necessary (abstract) labor time. A particular commodified object is needed to constitute the Capital as self-valorizing value: a commodity whose essence is to create a surplus value. When used up within the production process, this commodity (living object) transfers a surplus of value to a new commodity. The peculiarity of creating surplus value is obtained by performing labor, a characteristic inherent to the human labor-power.
Aligned with (Holloway, 2022), labor is a specific way of socially organizing human doing to produce commodities. The value of the labor power is equalized to the value of the commodities needed to sustain the laborers’ own laboring capabilities. When the surplus value produced in the labor process is reinvested to maintain or increase the value production, capital relation is established as the capitalization process. As indicated earlier on, we prefer to displace the controversies and debates about Marxian economics including the transformation problem as posed by Farjoun and Machover (2020); Farjoun et al. (2022), and focus on what is widely accepted: money and money-form with all its functions are necessary to the capitalist mode of production. The relation between value and money, surplus-value and profit is not direct, but it is hard to argue that capital can be reproduced without money. When Marx (2008) discards Proudhon’s moneyless vision of socialism, that’s because it removes money while leaving the commodity relations in place. A vision of abolishing capitalist mediations, alongside capitalist social forms, has to move beyond the first steps of the socialist society posed in the Critique of the Gotha Programme.
Returning to the cyber-physical conceptualization, the physical/material production in the capitalist mode of production is necessarily value-producing, and thus, the key attribute of this system is labor-time. The self-developing dynamic of the system is then determined by competition in different sectors, material constraints, tendencies, counter-tendencies, and, of course, class struggles (and other struggles) that, in the last instance, depend on money and its distribution. The “invisible” abstraction of value and its most “visible” face—money—are the universal force-field that organizes our lives nowadays, similar to the Earth gravity field that we are all subject to, which we somehow learn/evolve to handle. The difference is that while the scientific understanding of the gravity field equips us, for instance, to build devices to fly, the scientific knowledge of the capitalist mode of production allows us to see its intrinsic unsustainability.
Holloway (2022) presents a clear summary of the self-developing dynamics of capitalism, which carries crises and subsequent restructuring, which is usually driven by the fear that this mode of production is incapable of being reproduced through the unbinding of the capitalist social binding, which is the value-form. As the title of the compilation of (Holloway, 2019) says: We are the crises of capital. There is an extremely large gap between (i) what is and can be produced in terms of value and (ii) what is measured and predicted by money (especially in the form of fictitious capital); furthermore, this gap is still increasing due to the crises of 2008 and the pandemics. The snowball of easy credit as a way to maintain the dynamism of the self-valorizing value may be ending with the current increase of national interest rates from the USA and Eurozone, which shall cause human suffering with economic recession and/or austerity measures and/or inflation. These effects of credit easiness may lead to further austerity, social convulsion, wars, hunger, and immigration flows in addition to uncertain dynamics of climate change and the possibility of nuclear war. The argument here points to the need to destroy the fundamental forms of the capitalist mode of production. The emergency stop of this train (a nod to both Walter Benjamin and Holloway) that no one controls is the elimination of money and all other possible substitutes that would play the functions of money in capitalism. This negative way of approaching the current state of affairs also poses the question of how to organize a new society on a different ground where the mutual recognition of human dignity becomes constitutive."
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10245294231213141)
Pedro Nardelli on Holloway
Pedro Nardelli:
"Holloway (2022) schematically presents the derivation of the capitalist social forms (or the form-determination chain), constituting then the links in the chain of destruction [that] are difficult to break.
The derivation sequence, as presented in Chapter 19, goes as follows:
(a) if commodity, then value;
(b) if commodity-value, then labor;
(c) if commodity–value–labour, then money;
(d) if commodity–value–labour–money, then identity;
(e) if money, then capital and exploitation;
(f) if capital, then state; and finally
(g) if commodity–value–labour–money–identity–capital–state, then destruction of nature–pandemics–global warming–extinction. In this sense, the logical core of capitalist sociality is constituted with money being the universal social binding, or as the title of Chapter 28 puts Money rules. Money is the serial killer destroying us all.
Holloway’s argument is constructed based on the hope-against the capitalist forms that restrain the overflowing of social practices (or doing, or concrete-labor, or productive human activity), which are always more than the logically imposed constraints byproduct of the social form. By focusing on the immanent antagonisms and on the fact, shown in detail by Paraná (2018), that capital is mostly fictitious (credit money), with a huge gap of what can be actually materially produced, hope can emerge. In summary, the negative of capitalist forms, especially the demonetization of the social relations, is the hope-against capitalism, the concrete utopia against wishful thinking; the struggle is then to be located at social forms and their immanent overflowing, not in the logical links that indicate the chain of destruction.
To go further on this, we provide two supplementary paths to that characterization, one indicating the logical strength of the social forms through structural causality and the other the economic power of Capital. The first is associated with the conceptualization of Althusser (2014), where the capitalist mode of production is a complex whole articulated in dominance. In the text called On the genesis, Althusser (2020) clarifies how his concept of articulation in dominance by economy could be understood via structural causality, which only exists in its effects, similar to the concept of field in physical sciences."
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10245294231213141)