Value-Form Theory
Contextual Quote
"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]
Discussion
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)