The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto by Slavoj Zizek

Author:Slavoj Zizek
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781509536122
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2019-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

In other words, ‘abstract labour’ is a value relationship that constitutes itself only in exchange, it is not the substantial property of a commodity independently of its relations with other commodities. For orthodox Marxists, such a relational notion of value is already a compromise with bourgeois political economy, which they dismiss as a monetary theory of value. However, the paradox is that these orthodox Marxists themselves effectively regress to the bourgeois notion of value: they conceive of value as being immanent in the commodity, as its property, and thus naturalize its spectral objectivity, which is the fetishized appearance of its social character.

We are not dealing here with mere theoretical niceties; the precise determination of the status of money has crucial economic–political consequences. If we consider money as a secondary form of expression of value that exists ‘in itself’ in a commodity before its expression – that is, if money is for us a mere secondary resource, a practical means that facilitates exchange – then the door is open to the illusion, succumbed into by left-wing followers of Ricardo, that it would be possible to replace money with simple notes that designate the amount of work done by their bearer and give him or her the right to the corresponding part of the social product – as if, by means of this direct ‘work money’, one could avoid all ‘fetishism’ and ensure that each worker is paid his or her ‘full value’. The point of Marx’s analysis is that this project ignores the formal determinations of money that make fetishism a necessary effect. In other words, when Marx defines exchange value as the mode of appearance of value, one should mobilize here the entire Hegelian weight of the opposition between essence and appearance: essence exists only insofar as it appears, it does not preexist its appearance. In the same way, the value of a commodity is not an intrinsic substantial property that exists independently of that commodity’s appearance in exchange.

This is also why we should abandon the attempts to expand value so that all kinds of labour will be recognized as a source of value. Recall the great feminist demand, in the 1970s, to legalize all housework, from cooking and household maintenance to looking after the children, as productive of value; or contemporary eco-capitalist demands to integrate the ‘free gifts of nature’ into value production by way of trying to determine the costs of water, air, forests, and all other commons. All these proposals are nothing but green-washing and commodification of a space from which a fierce attack upon the hegemony of the capitalist mode of production and its alienated relation to nature can be mounted. In their desire to be just and eliminate, or at least constrain, exploitation, such attempts only enforce an even stronger, all-encompassing commodification. Although they try to be just at the level of content, that is, about what counts as value, they fail to problematize the very form of commodification; and Harvey is right to propose

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