Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason by Werner Bonefeld

Author:Werner Bonefeld [Bonefeld, Werner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Ideologies, Social Science, General, Sociology, Political Science, Essays, Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism
ISBN: 9781441161390
Google: w3JPAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: A&C Black
Published: 2014-05-08T21:15:12+00:00

Value form and abstract labour

About the double character of labour

The distinction made by Kicillof and Starosta between generic materiality and social form is ordinarily discussed by the classical Marxist tradition in terms of a separation between first nature and second nature, that is, the historically specific relations of production and the trans-historical forces of production. This account presumes that the capitalist social forms can be traced back to some natural basis, which subsists through distinct modes of production as the historically overdetermined forms of natural necessity. In distinction, the critical theory tradition argues that the capitalist economic categories are socially constituted. They manifest the laws of necessity of the capitalistically constituted forms of social relations.

What does this hold in relation to labour? In relation to use-value producing concrete labour, its social constitution is easily understood, despite the fact that use-values ‘constitute the material content of wealth, whatever its social form may be’. Use-values are the ‘basis of social progress’. The increase ‘in the quantity of use-values constitutes an increase of material wealth’.53 Furthermore, although ‘hunger is hunger . . . the hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife and a fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth.’54 For the capitalist to produce commodities, he has to produce use-values for others, ‘social use-values’.55 That is, use-value is ‘historically-specific [in] character’.56 Use value in general cannot be produced, has no material existence and does not satisfy human needs. Man has needs only as concrete Man, and concrete Man is Man in her definite social relations. In the actual relations of capitalist life, concrete use-values are produced to facilitate the valorization of value, that is, the use-value producing labour creates material wealth that obtains as a mere depository of exchange value.

Socially necessary labour time and the time it took to produce this or that commodity do not necessarily coincide. ‘Only socially necessary labour time counts towards the creation of value.’57 Socially necessary labour time thus determines whether the labour expended on the production of a particular use value is socially valid, and whether therefore the ‘social use-value’ represents value in exchange, and if it does not, it has no value, and what has no value is discarded. The point of departure is therefore not individual production and associated notions of abstract labour as some substance that is ‘embodied’ in commodities. Value is a social category and the point of departure is thus ‘socially determined individual production’.58 Marx thus argues that

since the producers do not come into social contact until they exchange the products of their labour, the specific social characteristics of their private labours appear only within this exchange. In other words, the labour of the individual manifests itself as an element of the total labour of society only through the relations which the act of exchange establishes between the products, and, through their mediation, between producers. To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are, i.

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