Modern or Postmodern?

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Marx's Value Theory: Modern or Postmodern? Robert F. Garnett Jr. Published online: 05 Jan 2009.

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Rethinking MARXISM Volume 8, Number 4 (Winter 1995)

Marx’s Value Theory: Modern or Postmodern? Robert F. Garnett, Jr. Marx’s writings remain irreducibly heterogeneous, enunciating a traditional metaphysics even while uttering-ven while enacting-something else. -Parker (1985,69)

Can postmodern Marxists still learn from Capital? Officially, yes. Few would deny it. Yet privately, many speak and act to the contrary. One reason may lie in the confusion or frustration they feel in seeking to read Capital as a “radical critique of the theoretical pretensions of every philosophical humanism” (Althusser 1977,230) or a systematic “rejection of any presumption that complexities are reducible to simplicities of the cause-effect sort” (Resnick and Wolff 1987, 3). Faced with sharp, recurring divergences between the antihumanist, antiessentialist-in a word, postmodern’discourse they anticipate from Marx and incontrovertibly modernist references such as those in chapter 1 to the substance of value as “expenditure of human labor-power in the physiological sense” (Marx 1977, 137) or to the magnitude of value as a center of gravity which “in the midst of the accidental and everfluctuating exchange relations . . . asserts itself as a regulative law of nature” (168), postmodernist readers may prefer to keep Marx on the shelf and to rely instead on newer, cleaner genres of social theory. Althusser anticipates this problem, worrying aloud about Marx’s lingering essentialisms, particularly in “the theory of fetishism” where “survivals . . . of the influence of Hegel’s thought” leave Marx unduly susceptible to humanist, essentialist (mis)readings (1971, 95 and 93). He warns first-time readers of Capital to “put the whole of Part One aside for the time being and begin your reading with Part Two”


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(81).2Yet precisely because of their unevenness and enduring importance as sites of struggle over the nature(s) and future(s) of Marxism, Althusser instructs fellow theorists nor to sidestep these difficult opening chapters. “Any critical reading [of Capitac],” he argues, “must elucidate the status of the concepts and mode of analysis of the first chapter of Volume One” (Althusser and Balibar 1970, 126). Yet despite his awareness of these difficulties, and despite his close attention to other vexing moments in Capital, Althusser never produced this “critical reading” of Marx’s chapter 1. Instead he presumes to resolve these tensions in a single stroke, declaring the value-theoretic arguments of chapter 1 to be fully consonant with the antihumanist problematic of Capital as a whole (Althusser 1971, 90-91). It is, he grants, a long, highly theoretical and thus “difficult beginning.” But these difficulties arise from theform of Marx’s arguments, not their content. Translation is therefore all that is required. “We ought to rewrite Part One of Capitat,” Althusser suggests, “so that it becomes a ‘beginning’ which is no longer at all ‘difficult,’but rather simple and easy” (1971, 95). Althusser is hardly unique in his emphasis on Marx’s philosophical ambiguities. Yet his reading calls attention to a broader set of issues concerning how these ambiguities are understood under received modem and postmodern readings. In modem readings, Marx’s value theory is cast as an essentialist price theory which “starts from labor in its significance as the constitutive element in human society” (Hilferding 1975,133), thereby enabling its practitioners to delve beneath “the realm of appearance [prices] . . . to the realm of essence [values]” (Sweezy 1975,24). This humanism (Man as homo faber; human labor as “the constitutive element”) and essentialism (labor as essence of value; value as essence of price) are widely understood as the defining elements of Marx’s value theory. Postmodern elements, if recognized at all, are seen as logically separate from the essentialisthumanist core’ of Marx’s “labor theory.” Hodgson, for example, while applauding Marx’s efforts to “[shift] political economy away from its naturalistic foundation” (Hodgson 1982, 11l), argues that “it is not possible to expunge completely the naturalistic traits in Marxian thought without the surgical removal of the labor theory of value” (l13).3 In parallel fashion, many postmodern readings seek and discover a single Marxan antiessentialist, antihumanist Marx-whose chapter 1statements regarding labor, value, and price are seen not as causal or ontological claims but conceptual statements whose object is class exploitation, not labor per se (Wolff, Roberts, and Callari 1982; Elson 1979; Resnick and Wolff 1987; Amariglio and Callari 1989). Here too 1. “Postmodem” here refers to the antiessentialism of Resnick and Wolff (1987) and the antihumanisms of Althusser (1976; 1977) and Foucault (1973). “Modern” refers to the humanisms and essentialisms these theorists describe and criticize. These composite senses of modern and postmodern parallel those adopted by Amariglio (1990) and Ruccio (1991). 2. “If you begin Volume One at the beginning, i.e., with Part 1, either you do not understand it, and give up; or you think you understand it, but that is even more serious, for there is every chance that you will have understood something quite different from what was there to be understood” (Althusser 1971.81). 3. Similar treatments are found in Schumpeter (1954), Robinson (1962), Cutler et al. (1977, 43-44), Lippi (1979, 109-19), Cottrell (1981), and Bowles and Gintis (1981).

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one finds an occasional admission that Marx’s discourse really is not so clear-cut. Resnick and Wolff, for example, explain that


it is, of course, possible to imagine and expect that Althusser or Marx or any other human being could. . . and should be capable of expressing one conceptual framework purely and exclusively across voluminous writings. However, that amounts to . . . searching for the absolute truth (1987, 100).

Yet for programmatic purposes, even they-like Althusser-prefer a unified, authorial Marx, recognizing modern/postmodem tensions in Marx’s discourse yet “resolving” them by treating the latter as core and the former as logically separate slips or digressions, disallowing their mutually constitutive interplay. Such resolutions have the virtue of preserving Althusser’s “break” thesis-that Marx, from 1845 onward, “broke radically with every theory that based history and politics on an essence of man” (Althusser 1977, 227)4-a theme echoed in the abovecited Althusserian readings and others in which the Marx of Capital is cast as a thoroughgoing antiessentialist. Recalling the near-century of criticism in which Marx’s value theory has been dismissed for its humanism or essentialism, the polemical value of these Althusserian readings is not hard to fathom. Their cost, however, as this essay aims to demonstrate, is that they unwittingly impede postmodern (re)readings of Capital inasmuch as they commit Marxists to fundamentalistsearches for a postmodern Marx or oblige them to repress the enabling roles of modernism in Marx’s intellectual/political project, either of which make it difficult to profitably read the Marx of Capital, chapter 1. Moreover, the eitherior, modern-or-postmodem tendency of these readings make it difficult to challenge, as Marxists, the highly stylized modern/postmodern dualisms that now frame debate on these issues on the U.S. Left and b e y ~ n dThese . ~ simple eithedors should be prime targets for Marxist criticism since, unchallenged, they provide the latest, fashionable grounds on which to dismiss Marxist perspectives, either for being too modern (in the eyes of postmodem avant-gardes) or for not being modem enough (in the eyes of modernist avant-gardes, not least those who still predominate within economics). Yet the lonely hour of postmodern Marxists’ rise to these challenges may be extraordinarily slow to come if they continue to expect M ar x - o r themselves-to speak in a singular, postmodern voice. 4. Althusser finds the first signs of this break in two 1845 texts, neither published in Marx’s lifetime: the Theses on Feuerbach and (with Engels) The German Ideology (both published in Marx and Engels 1988). He therefore takes seriously Marx’s own retrospective description of The German Ideology as an effort by Engels and himself to “settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience” (cited in Tucker 1978, 5). And the principal content of this “conscience,”in Althusser’s judgment-i.e., the philosophical basis of Marx’s pre-1845 theoretical and political practices-was the essentialist humanism of Feuerbach (Althusser 1977, 33-35, 47, and 223). 5. Typical of this recent trend is the recent special issue of Monthly Review, “In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodem Agenda.” See especially the introduction by Wood (1995) and the thoroughly vitriolic essay by Eagleton (1995). Parallel lines of opposition are drawn in recent debates over multiculturalism, the public role of universities, and public funding for the arts (Bloom 1987, Cheney 1988, Aronowitz and Giroux 1991).



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To address these difficulties, postmodern Marxists might begin to explore and develop new readings of Marx, readings that allow the author of Capital to speak in more than one voice. Such readings would value the heterogeneity of Marx’s discourse and so become, in Vivienne Brown’s words, “decanonizing,” “[paying] close attention to the range of voices at work within it rather than attempting to recover a unitary authorial meaning” (Brown 1993, 78). This would generalize Althusser’s theory of the two Mantes, investigating the interaction of Marx’s “early” and “mature” modes of thought throughout all of his writings? Beyond Althusser, such readings might help to inaugurate a new genre of postmodern-Marxist criticism in which texts arejudged not simply as more or less @ost)modern but as modern/postmodern in particular ways, the intellectual or political significance of which is presumed to vary across social/ discursive contexts. To paraphrase Diana Fuss, readers would no longer ask simply “Is this text postmodern (and therefore ‘good’)?” but rather “If this text is postmodern (or modem), where, how, and why does this postmodernism (or modernism) operate? And what are its political and textual effects?” (Fuss 1989, xi). This paper aims to advance this project, building on previous works by Parker (1985 and Forthcoming), Spivak (1987a,1987b), Amariglio and Callari (1989), and Keenan (1993). Marx’s value-theoretic arguments in Capital, chapter 1 will be subjected, pace Althusser, to a “critical reading,” reread as a heterogeneous interweaving of two strands: (1) a modem Marx, scientist and proud heir to the Smith-Ricardo mantle-Man as homo faber, value as self-regulative, “natural law” phenomenonwho never fully awoke from his deterministic dream to “lay bare the laws by which the [capitalist] crises of the world are governed, not only their periodical character, but the exact dates of that periodicity” (Marx 1858, cited in Perelman 1993,82);and (2) a postmodern Marx, ruthless critic of classical economic science-above all, its unthought universalism and utopianism-who aims to denaturalize vahe, to conceive it as a fully social construct, the overdetermined effect of particular economic, political, legal, and cultural processes. If successful, this reading will begin to illuminate the mutually constitutive interplay of these modern and postmodern Marxes and thus-contra those who would silence one or the other by reducing Capital to a purely modern or postmodern discourse-to encourage further study of how each enables and perhaps also disables Marx’s critiques of capitalism and of classical political economy.’ 6. It would also honor and extend Blanchot’s brief but suggestive essay “Marx’s Three Voices,” in which he writes the example of Marx helps us to understand that the voice of writing, a voice of ceaseless struggle, must constantly develop itself and break itself into multiple forms. The communist voice is always at once tacit and violent, political and sage, direct, indirect, total and fragmentary, lengthy and almost instantaneous. Marx does not live comfortably with this plurality of languages, which always collide and disarticulate themselves in him. Even if these languages seem to converge toward the same endpoint, they could not be retranslated into each other, and their heterogeneity . . . the distance that decenters them, renders them non-contemporaneous (Blanchot 1986, 19; original emphasis). 7. Parker (1985) rereads Marx’s use-value/exchange-valuedual in much the same spirit.

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Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1: “The Commodity” An unmistakable theme running throughout this first chapter is Marx’s claim that a commodity-based economy is a particular form of economic and social organization. What becomes noteworthy are the contrasting modern and postmodern meanings Marx ascribes to this particularity. On one hand, he wishes to debunk the notion that commodity production is any sort of natural or inevitable state of affairs, a notion he saw as a key (if not always conscious) underpinning classical labor theories of value. This entails a critique of classical humanism and essentialism and so may be termed a postmodern strand in Marx’s argument. On the other hand, Marx couples this antiuniversalism with a reuniversalizing move through which he condemns the Commodity Form once and for all, casting it not merely as “different” but pejoratively so-deviant, irrational, bizarre. This line of argument may be termed modern inasmuch as it requires Marx to (re)assume essentialist, humanist stances he elsewhere rejects. The following sections investigate the formation and interaction of these two strands across the four sections of Marx’s chapter 1. The Two Factors of the Commodity: Use-Value and Value Marx begins section 1by noting the historic uniqueness of the commodity vis-ivis other forms of social wealth. “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’” (1977, 125). These wealth-objects are unique since they serve not only as use-values (“[things] which through [their] qualities [satisfy] human needs of whatever kind” [125]) but also as exchange-values. The former Marx regards as a property of all man-made wealth-objects, “whatever [their] social form may be” (126). But only under specific social conditions do these objects also become “the material bearers of exchange-value” (126), hence commodities. Value is likewise regarded as a property of wealth-objects particular to “the form of society to be considered here.” But Marx approaches this point indirectly. Recalling first the commodity’s unique exchangeability (“A given commodity . . . is exchanged for other commodities in the most diverse proportions” [127]), Marx observes that any such exchange implies that the quantities exchanged are equal to or “mutually replaceable” by one another as exchange-values (127). Hence “one usevalue is worth just as much as another, provided only that it is present in the appropriate quantity” (127). Marx then infers that the equivalence of heterogeneous usevalues as exchange-values must also signify their further equivalence as bearers of “a common element of identical magnitude” (127). This signified “common element” is of course, for Marx, their value. Marx therefore envisions the capitalist-commodity economy as a vast exchange network in which otherwise incommensurable objects become abstract equivalents



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for one another.8 He claims that the existence of such an economy requires that the exchange process be “characterized precisely by its abstraction from [the] use-values [of commodities] within the exchange relation” (127). Each commodity, in exchange, must appear not as its particular, physical self but as a generic token or symbol of value, exchangeable “in the most diverse proportions” with other commodities. “As value,” says Marx, “[an object] counts not as itself but as what it is worth” (1970, 240). Much like Smith, Ricardo, and other modem theorists of economic value, Marx does not simply observe this network of symbolic equivalences. He interprets it. He asks: What is the basis of these equivalences? What substance or principle of value might underlie this labyrinthine “text” of market e ~ c h a n g e And ? ~ much like his classical predecessors, Marx looks to labor as the source and measure of exchangeable value. Commodities’ exchangeability derives not from their use-value, he writes, but from their representation of a “value-forming substance,” namely “congealed quantities of homogeneous human labor” or “human labor in the abstract” (1977, 128). This conceptual identification of value with “human labor in the abstract” poses key questions of interpretation regarding Marx’s relationship to classical value theory. In what senses does Marx embrace or refuse the essentialismhumanism of Ricardo or Proudhon? Does he grant their premise that labor is the essence of human-economic life in order to generalize and strengthen these classical theories, as Mandel and others believe?I0 Or, as Keenan (1993), Amariglio and Callari (1989), and others contend, does Marx embrace this premise in a pointedly critical way-as a discursive starting-point from which to expose and challenge the universalist pretenses of classical theory? Or, indeed, might Marx be best understood here as reaching in both directions at once? t Among economists, non-Marxist and Marxist, Mandel-type readings of Marx’s value theory remain overwhelmingly dominant (Gamett 1994, 106-26). And while by no means the onlypossibfe readings, their plausibility is hard to deny, given Marx’s consistent support for them in Capital and elsewhere. In the chapter at hand, for example, having carefully defined “human labor in the abstract” as nonuniversal, socially generated, and strictly irreducible to natural/physical features of “human labor in general,” Marx casts serious doubt upon all of these propositions by employing the language of physical embodiment to describe the manner in which commodities “possess” value: “The magnitude of. . . value [is] measured . . . [by] the labor contained in the article” (1977, 129; emphasis added). 8. This line of interpretation is rigorously pursued by Keenan (1993). 9. I owe this awareness to Keenan (1993, 174) who notes that “Throughout . . . the first chapter.. . Marx suggests that . . exchange is a matter of signification, expression, substitution, and hence something that must be read” (emphasis added). 10. In his Introduction to the Vintage edition of Capital, volume 1, Mandel describes Marx’s theory as “a further development and perfection of the labor theory of value as it emanated from the ‘classical’ school of political economy” (1977, 42).

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Similar statements appear also in section 2. Toward the close of an extended contrast between abstract and concrete labor, Man-as if to summarize the preceding line of argumentdeclares that”


all human labor is an expenditure of human labor-power, in the physiologicnl sense, and it is in this quality of being equal, or abstract, human labor that it forms the value of commodities (1977, 137; emphasis added). Perhaps one could be generous and assume that Marx is here merely paraphrasing or parodying the views of his classical rivals. Yet whatever one presumes “Marx really meant,” the frequent appearance of such statements throughout chapter 1 provides ample support for the view that Marx’s value (abstract labor) concept is nothing more than a humanist assertion of the natural, universal quality of all human labors as such. Still, Marx’s running emphasis on the nonuniversal character of exchange-value and of “human labor in the abstract” suggests a desire to deploy this classical premise in a distinctly unclassical way. This can be seen, for instance, in Marx’s noteworthy deferral of originality to a “remarkable anonymous work of the eighteenth century” for his famous formulation that “What exclusively determines the magnitude of value of any article is . . . the amount of labor socially necessary . . . for its production” (1977,129). By thus posing the measurement of value by socially necessary labortime as an already established proposition, M a n paints it not as his own discovery or conclusion but as a point of departure. In itself, this qualification says little about the aims or methods of Marx’s project. But viewed in combination with parallel statements in section 2 regarding the substance of value-emphasizing that his equation of value with “human labor in the abstract” is not a causal or ontological claim but a strategically selected “point of entry” into classical economic discourse’*-a postmodern or deconstructive agenda begins to become intelligible. This Marx, unlike Mandel’s, adopts classical definitions of the substance and magnitude of value not as wholesale endorsements of their “truth” but as starting points for an analysis that aims to historicize this truth-to name its particular economic, cultural, and political conditions of existence-and thus to undermine its universalist pretensions.

The Dual Character of Labor Section 2 underscores Marx’s contention that the substance of value (abstract-equal labor) is the by-product of historically unique economic and social conditions. Two points are significant in this regard. 11. See also Marx (1977, 134 and 164). 12. In a parallel context, Roberts (1981, 136) interprets Marx’s definition of value, contra BohmBawerk, “not as a syllogistic proof, but as a conceptual statement, as a way of looking ut commodity exchange” (original emphasis).



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First, Marx clarifies that, in his view, the concept of “human labor in the abstract” refers not to “human labor in general” but to a form of socialized labor unique to modem, commodity-based forms of economy. Like the commodity itself, commodityproducing labor possesses a “dual character”-at once universal (“as the creator of use-values”) and particular (“in so far as it finds its expression in value”) (1977, 131-32). To reinforce the contrast, Marx notes that the “abstract” or value-generating nature of this labor is due not simply to the social division of labor (which exists in all societies) but to the social division of commodify-producing labor wherein otherwise heterogeneous objects and subjects of labor are enabledlforced to act as undifferentiated pieces of the collective laboring body, as abstract-equal quanta of “value.” Second, and equally significant, Marx claims to be “the first to point out and examine critically this twofold nature of the labor contained in commodities” (132). This claim of originality with regard to the substance of value stands in sharp contrast to Marx’s above-cited disclaim of originality with regard to the magnitude of value. Yet similar statements appear consistently throughout Marx’s writings. A few pages beyond section 2, for example, having just noted that classical political economy . . . nowhere distinguishes explicitly . . . between labor as it appears in the value of the product, and the same labor as it appears in the product’s use-value (173, n. 33),

Marx issues his famous declaration that Political Economy has indeed analyzed value and its magnitude, however incompletely . . . But it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed thk particular form (173-74).

What is Marx saying here? What unique insights does he claim to obtain in his own “critical examination” of the “twofold nature of the labor contained in commodities” but not to obtain in his conceptualization of value as “the amount of labor socially necessary . . .for its production”? A standard reading interprets Marx’s achievement as the “precise and explicit” rendering of the vague, implicit value concepts of his classical predecessors (Sweezy 1970’31). Yet this interpretation does not explain the asymmetry of Marx’s two statements, that is, why he would claim originality for his notion of “abstract labor” but not for his equally “precise and explicit” notion of “socially necessary abstract labor.” A more plausible interpretation, il la Amariglio and Callari, is that the “critical examination” Marx claims to undertake is not one that simply affirms the classical notion of abstract labor as “what is common to all productive human activity” (Sweezy 1970,30) but an original effort to treat the very phenomenon of abstract-equal labor itself as an object of analysis (i.e., something to be explained) rather than, as in classical theory, a preordained outgrowth of “human nature.” Marx gestures toward this

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latter interpretation several pages below, claiming “one of the chief failings of classical political economy” to be that


it has never succeeded, by means of its analysis of commodities . . . in discovering the . . . historical and transitory character [of the bourgeois mode of production] . . . If we then make the mistake of treating it as the eternal natural form of social production,we necessarily overlook the specificity of [exchange-value], and consequently of the commodity-form together with its further developments, the money form, the capital form, etc. (1977, 174, n. 34).

This antihumanist trajectory is further extended in section 3, through Marx’s discussion of value as a social construct.

The Value-Form, or Exchange-Value Section 3 highlights two preconditions of value beyond the physical production process: (1) the successful exchange of products and (2) the establishment of humanism (viz., the ideology of all persons as in some sense “equal”) as a form of cultural/intellectua1 common sense. The bulk of this section details the mutual interdependence-indeed, the mutual constitutiondf value and value-form (exchange-value). Again and again, Marx argues that value does not arise from production alone, nor does it reside in the produced objects themselves. “We may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish,” he writes, yet “it remains impossible to grasp it as a thing possessing value” (1977, 138). While labor remains a necessary precondition for value, it only “becomes value in its coagulated state, in objective form’’ (142; emphasis added)-that is, in the objectification of a commodity’s value-bearing properties via its insertion into exchange. Ultimately, then, Marx’s “value-forming substance” is not a physical substance at all but a symbolic one, residing “in the social relation between commodity and commodity . . . in the form of appearance of value” (139). Pushing this last point even further, Marx depicts value as socially constructed in a cultural or ideological sense as well, via the establishment of humanism as a “fixed popular opinion” (1977, 152).13Following a detailed examination of the simple exchange relation (20 yards of linen = 1 coat), Marx digresses to contrast his own view of this relationship with that of Aristotle-“the great investigator who was the first to analyze the value-form.’’ In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle prefigures Marx’s claim that use-values can only be rendered equivalent in exchange if they also share a common qualitative identity. “There can be no exchange without equality,” says Aristotle, “and no equality without commensurability.” Contra Marx, however, Aristotle concludes that “in reality, [it is] impossible that such unlike things can be commensurable” (cited in Marx 1977, 151). 13. Keenan (1993, 171-73). See also Arnariglio and Callari’s related discussion of Marx and the “social constitution of value” (1989).



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Marx then asks, rhetorically: Why is Aristotle unable to see what any modern economist would simply take for granted, that is, that “in the form of commodityvalues, all labor is expressed as equal human labor” and hence the “common element’’ signified in exchange is none other than “equal human labor”? (152). Aristotle is unable to “see” this, Marx suggests, because the modern humanist view of all human labors as abstractly equal was literally inconceivable under the social/ intellectual conditions of the Greek society in which he wrote-a society that was “founded,” Marx observes, “on the labor of slaves [and] hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and of their labor-powers” (152). Only in societies such as those of nineteenth-century England or Europe wherein “the concept of human equality [has] already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion” can this simple exchange relation be understood as a self-evident expression of “the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labor [simply] because . . ,they are human labor” (152).14 In all, Marx’s emphasis throughout this section on the social construction of value evinces a rather nontraditional view of the aims and methods of his value theory. Far from attempting to reduce market prices to quantities of physically embodied labortime, Marx’s effort seems primarily geared towards a (rekharacterization of the commodity economy as one mode of production among others. This agenda is carried still further in section 4 in Marx’s critique of fetishism, though his alternately essentialisthmanist and antiessentialist/antihumanist treatments of this “particularity” in that critique do little to resolve the accumulated tensions between these two tendencies and much to complicate and extend them. The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret In this provocative finale to chapter 1, Marx proposes to go beyond t h preceding analysis of “the peculiar social character of the labor which produces [commodities]” to explain this “peculiar character” (1977,164). He traces these peculiarities to what he terms the “fetishism” of the commodity, a fetishism enacted by individuals in the commodity economy and by classical theorists of the commodity economy. What Marx terms the fetishism of the commodity is, in simplest terms, a blindness to the particularity of the commodity-based form of economy. Marx describes two related forms of this blindness. First, he claims individual buyers and sellers to be prone to a naive empiricism whereby product prices come to be regarded as immutable “facts of life.” He perceptively notes that “as soon as these [prices] have attained a certain stability, they appear to result from the nature of the products” (167), as if they were “the socio-natural properties of these things” rather than “the social characteristics of men’s own labor” (164). In this way, buyers and sellers remain blind 14. Not wishing to portray this “common sense” as simply a product of moral/intellectual enlightenment, Marx hastens to add that such notions of human equality “[become] possible only in a society where the commodity-form is the universal form of the product of labor [and] hence the dominant social relation is the relation between men as possessors of commodities” (1977, 152).


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to the sociohistorical forces from which particular prices, and indeed the commodity economy itself, have emerged. Beyond this fetishism of market participants, Marx describes a second type of fetishism which he claims to typify classical economic thinking. The blindness here is ideological, a naive universalism whereby the commodity economy is seen as a rational expression of human nature and thus inevitable and necessary, not as one mode of production among others. M a n never fails to acknowledge the classicals’ insights into the workings of ,this particular mode of production. Yet he insists that they be viewed as such, as “valid [only] . . .for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of social production, i.e., commodity production” (168-69). Of course, the historic conditionality of commodity production is precisely what, in Marx’s view, the classicals invariably forget. Value, exchange-value, and abstractequal human labor do not appear to them peculiar or socially contrived but naturalqualities or expressions of Man which “possess the fixed quality of natural forms” (168). The very fact that “labor is expressed in value,” Marx observes, “[appears] to the political economists’ bourgeois consciousness to be as much a self-evident and nature-imposed necessity as productive labor itself” (174-75). Marx deems this “bourgeois consciousness” fetishistic since it precludes recognition of the peculiar, transitory character of commodity production-not merely by treating it as given but by naturalizing it, seeing it as the ultimate, “true” form of economy, uniquely suited to the nature and needs of Man. This explains, says Marx, why “pre-bourgeois forms of the social organization of production” are treated, in the classical mind, “in much the same way as the Fathers of the Church treated pre-Christian religions” (175). This antihumanist move is noteworthy, occurring as it does in the very placethe critique of fetishism-where Capital’s Marx is so widely read as a humanist. But by forging this link between the classical economists’ fetishism and the essentialist humanism of their value theories, Marx offers not a humanist critique-dismissing their universalism as “false consciousness”-but precisely an antihumanist one, linking their naive universalism of the commodity form to an equally naive universalism of Man. At the same time, however, Marx’s arguments here cannot be regarded as simply antihumanist or antiessentialist. On the contrary, a large part of Marx’s case rests upon the essentialist (and arguably humanist) thesis that commodity-based economies possess an inherent economic logic, one Marx elsewhere terms a “law of value” (Marx 1981, 277; Marx and Engels 1962, 461-62), “a secret hidden under the apparent movements in the relative values of commodities” (1977, 168). Moreover, his description of the labor/value relationship under Commodity production as one governed by a “regulative law of nature” (168) suggests that he viewed this law of value as a special case of a general principle, one he describes in his 1868 letter to Kugelmann as the law “of the distribution of the social labor in definite proportions” (Marx and Engels 1962,461). These statements bespeak essentialism in their conception of value (or, in a volume 3 setting, price of production) as a “center of gravity” (Marx 1981, 279), an



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essence underlying “the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange relations between the products” (1977, 168). Marx’s value theory is distinctly classical in this regard, seeking to isolate a subset of factors as the systematic, causal determinants of competitive prices. Readers who ascribe to Marx a strict antiessentialism may deny this, contending that Marx’s approach is antithetical to any notion of equilibrium. Yet such a view is difficult to sustain in the face of Marx’s repeated use of the “center of gravity” approach throughout Capital, as in his volume 3 statement that “The exchange or sale of commodities at their value is the rational, natural law of the equilibrium between them” (1981,289). The above statements also invoke humanism inasmuch as they conceive the economy as a collective laboring subject whose self-reproductive needs give rise to general, indeed “natural,” economic laws. Marx himself occasionally refers to “the collective laborer” in much the same way (Marx 1977,468 and 644). Yet even where the reference remains implicit, as in the “law of nature” passage or the notion of value (or production price) as a center of gravity, it does not seem unjust to impute it to Marx since the very “rationality” of commodities exchanging “at their value” (or production price) lies in the correspondence of these exchange ratios to the reproductive needs of the economy, that is, the collective laboring body.I5 On both counts, Marx seems to reduce all forms of society to a singular economic necessity to “[distribute] social labor in definite proportions.” To be clear, this humanism is not to be understood as individualism, in opposition to wholism or structuralism. Marx’s value theory entails a clearly structuralist mode of causality. Individual production, consumption, and exchange decisions are conceived as the effects of a systemic, structural logic, not vice versa. Still, such a structuralism does not preclude the active presence of a humanist ontology. In Marx’s case, the two seem to go hand in hand: a methodologically structuralist law of value combined with a preanalytic vision of the human condition in which labor is the essential, constitutive, human activity (Garnett 1994, 67-70 and 154-58). Marx extends this essentialist/humanist strand of argument one final step through his depiction of commodity production as a uniquely irrational mode of production. He posits a strict opposition between commodity and noncommodity forms of economy, defining each by the absence (commodity) or presence (noncommodity) of workers’ self-conscious recognition of themselves and their products as subjects and objects of social labor. Of noncommodity feudalism, Marx writes, for example, that Whatever we may think . . . o f . . . such a society, the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labor appear at all events as their own personal relations, and are not disguised as social relations . . . between the products of labor (1977, 170). 15. This structuralist/humanist combination is not unique to Marx. It is characteristic of most economic value theories since Adam Smith, particularly those formalized using general equilibrium methods, where theorists aim to produce general theories of a capitalist or market-based economy-to specify general conditions for the systemic unit (whether harmonious or conflictual) of the economy, the latter conceived as a collective subject or “body economic.”

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Of course, Marx is not indifferent among the various possible forms of noncommodity economy. He declares his own preferred form to be production by “an association of free men” in which


the social relations of the individual producers, both towards their labor and the products of their labor, [would be] transparent in their simplicity, in production as well a s in distribution (172).

Yet he is equally eager to draw the commodityhoncommodity line, to demarcate the “enigmatic,” “mysterious,” “fetishistic” character of commodity production from the natural “transparency” of all noncommodity forms. Here, as Althusser forewarns, it is difficult to read Marx as anything but a Feuerbachian-Hegelian humanist, casting his envisioned “association of free men” as the origin and telos of human history and commodity production as a penultimate stage in which the self-conscious unity of the social laboring body, forever present in-itself, cannot yet be realized for-itselfa social (re)production process “without a Subject” (Althusser 1971, 121).16 To summarize: What remains clear throughout chapter 1is Marx’s insistence upon the particular, nonuniversal nature of the commodity economy. What remains unclear is the significance he wishes to ascribe to this ‘‘exceptional” character. To the degree that Marx’s arguments invoke humanism and essentialism, his analysis seems to portray the commodity economy as an historic exception with an essence, that is, an inherently irrational mode of production, constituted as such by its repression of Man’s nature and needs. On the other hand, to the degree that his arguments raise principled challenges to essentialism and humanism, Marx’s depiction of the commodity economy might instead be characterized as that of a historic exception without an essence-that is, as one of infinitely many possible, equally “exceptional” or overdetermined ways of performing, appropriating, and distributing social labor-time.17

Modern and Postmodern? The burden of this essay is to show that both modem and postmodern elements are in play in Marx’s chapter 1;that these two tendencies, despite their apparent conflict, function as a unity in Marx’s thought; and that this unity, as such, merits fur16. Cutler et al. (1977) likewise observe that Marx’s theory of fetishism “supposes the possibility of the presence of the subject’s essence to itself, its products and interactions then taking an unmediated form. Contrasted to ‘reified’ social relations are those in which social life is pure intersubjectivitythe social division of labor is the product of conscious communal decision” (77). 17. Althusser (1977) defines overdetermination in precisely this sense, asking “after all, are we not always in exceptional situations?” (104) and answering in the affirmative, naming overdetermination as the “new rule” under which “the exception . . . discovers in itself the rule . . . and the old ‘exceptions’ must be regarded as methodologically simple examples of the new rule” (106; original emphasis).


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ther attention from contemporary readers and rethinkers of Marxism. A conscious target of these arguments is the common, quasi-religious equation of postmodernism with anti- or nonmodernism-postmodernism as a separatestyle, philosophy, or social structure, exclusive of and opposed to the modem. As such thinking now permeates most discussions of postmodernism, these discussions are increasingly reduced to name-calling battles between those “for” and those “against,” lending credence to Huyssen’s observation that In much of the postmodern debate, a very conventional thought pattern has asserted itself. Either it is said that postmodernismis continuous with modernism, in which case the whole debate opposing the two is specious; or it is claimed that there is a radical rupture, a break with modernism, which is then evaluated in either positive or negative terms (1990, 235-36).

As already suggested, postmodern Marxists should be wary of this faddish either/ or-ism, particularly if it leads them to suppress or ignore the modernist dimensions of Capital or of Marxist theoretical practice generally. To imagine M a n or ourselves as “purely” postmodern in this sense risks blindness to the positive, enabling roles of humanism and essentialism in Marxist intellectuaVpolitica1projects. Moreover, it risks blindness to a vitaldifferentia specifica in Marx’s method of critique, that is, the sense in which Marx aims not simply to oppose or transcend capitalism or classical political economy but to reveal their (self-) contradictory character, much as Foucault’s critique of the modem episteme “is less one of offering an alternative epistemology . . . than of showing empirically that the social, medical, and human sciences did not improve the human condition in the way that was theoretically intended” (Hoy 1988, 23). An alternative view of Marx’s modern/postmodern status is offekd by the “postmodern moments” approach initially conceived by Amariglio (1990) and recently extended by Amariglio and Ruccio (1995), Burczak (1994), and Garnett (1994). Heeding Lyotard’s definition of postmodern as “part ofthe modem . . . not modernism at its end” (Lyotard 1984,79), these writers refuse to cast postmodernism as a self-contained intellectual system. They see it instead as a diverse, dispersed heterodoxy through which “the primary conceptual values that . . . have served as the ‘metanarrative’ of modernist science are bracketed and called into question” (Amariglio’andRuccio 1995,339). It follows, on this view, that postmodern instances or moments can be found throughout the history of modem economics, even in the works of writers who knew or spoke nothing of postmodernism per se yet whose writings are deemed transgressive, exceeding or disrupting modernist protocols and so placing them de fact0 into question. A guiding theme of this approach is summarized in the dual significance of the term “postmodern moment,” signifying not only the antiessentialist or antihumanist trajectory of a text or author but also the limits of these trajectories, that is, their failure to extend as far or as consistently as contemporary postmodernists would like. Rereading Keynes’s notion of uncertain agent knowledge, for example, Amariglio


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and Ruccio pinpoint several ways in which this notion is “inconsistent with and ultimately cannot be ‘controlled’ by the modernist protocols within which [it was] produced” (Amariglio and Ruccio 1995,337). Yet they also show Keynes’s quelling of these irruptions through his anthropomorphic re(in)statements of uncertainty as a “fact of nature” and of agent choice under uncertainty as a generalizable “problem” to be “solved” (354-55). Similarly, Burczak claims close affinities between postmodernism and Hayek’s “hermeneutic” conception of the individual and view of market competition as an open-ended “discovery process” (Burczak 1994,3651). Yet these moves, however deessentializing, are still only moments in Hayek’s thought, forever halted and contained by the teleological presumption that “free-market competition will always produce full employment” (55). And, as outlined above, one can detect an analogous mixture in Marx as well, a deessentializing deconstruction of classical value categories and a reessentializing invocation of humanist metanarrative. By these criteria, Marx, Keynes, and Hayek all qualify as postmodern, not for their absolute escapes from modernity but for challenging and thus rendering conscious and contestable some of the “primary conceptual values” of modem economic science. Interestingly, this reading of Marx’s postmodernism closely parallels Althusser’s sense of Marx’s antihumanism as “recognition and knowledge of humanism . . . as an ideology” (Althusser 1977,230). In Althusser’s words, Marx’s critique of humanism becomes not simply a refutation of it as illusory or untrue but an attempt to comprehend the social conditions and consequences of its existence as a “system of representations” (230). In Althusser’s words,18 Marx’s theoretical anti-humanism does not suppress anything in the historical existence of humanism . . . By relating it to its conditions of existence, [Marx] recognizes a necessity for humanism as an idedogy, a conditional necessity (1977,230-31).

On this view, the antiuniversalist tendency displayed throughout chapter 1 may be seen as Marx’s attempt to reveal and challenge classical value theory-and classical political economy generally-as a species of humanist ideology. Again, this is not to suggest, as Althusser does elsewhere, Marx’s escape from essentialism or humanism but to underscore his sustained (self-)critical efforts to rethink them. That these efforts held no minor place in Marx’s thought is suggested by several features of his larger life-work: (1) his early critiques of Feuerbach’s essentialist humanism, particularly its presupposition of a “human essence . . . inherent in each single individual” whose presence “naturally unites the many individu18. Althusser leaves open the possibility of Marxist redeployments of humanism, provided they remain subject to antihumanist (self-)criticism:“When (eventually) a Marxist policy of humanist ideology, that is, a political attitude to humanism, is achieved . . . this policy will only have been possible on the absolute condition that it is based on Marxist philosophy, and a precondition for this is theoretical anti-humanism” (1977, 231; original emphasis).



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als” in society;19 (2) his related vision of human nature as a variably constituted consequence of the evolving social conditions under which human beings (re)produce their collective existence (Arthur 1988,21); (3) his critiques (alone and with Engels) of the humanist idealism of leading radical thinkers (Proudhon, Stirner, Hess, Owen, and other “True Socialists”) who viewed socialism or communism as the liberation of an already constituted collective economic subject and hence revolutionary struggle as little more than a “demand that society be made fit for ‘Man,’ that i s . . . adequate to ‘human nature’” (Arthur 1988, 33);20and (4) his systematic efforts to “deconstruct” these left-utopian visions of Man and society, as well as those of Smith, Ricardo, and others, via class analyses of past and present social formations.21 At the same time, however, Marx’s project appears to be equally grounded in the modernist aims and presumptions displayed in Capital, chapter 1. Recalling the numerous rewritings through which Marx struggled to better engage his audiences in this opening chapter, modifying his text again and again “to make it more intelligible to the reader” (Marx 1977, 105),22his juxtaposition of communal production (rational, transparent) and commodity production (mysterious, irrational) appears less the result of a philosophical slip than of a conscious, rhetorical/political desire to read commodity productionprophetically-analytically, morally, self-critically, and hopefully (West 1993,3-6)-pointing beyond what exists to what could exist under certain transformations of prevailing social relations, to evoke a feeling in readers “that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change” (Marx 1977, 93). One such memorable appeal appears in the closing pages of section 4, where Marx declares the historic moment of communal transformation to be at hand. For the first time in human history, Marx writes, there exists “equality in the full sense between different types of labor,” not just morally or ethically but economically ah well. 19. Marx, cited in Tucker (1978, 145, original emphasis). In The Essence of Christianity and other texts, Ludwig Feuerbach criticizes Man’s abdication of sovereignty to God-concepts of Man’s own creation. In Marx’s view, Feuerbach merely inverts the God/Man relationship: positing Man as a Godlike origin and ascribing a fixed, timeless essence to him as such (Marx and Engels 1988, 122). 20. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels (1988) write: “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which establishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence” (56-57; original emphasis). 21. These points echo Amariglio and Callari’s (1989) claim that “Marx began his elaboration of a capitalist social formation by attacking the classical conception of class relations at its strongest point . . . where the concept of labor was used to construct a concept of value . . . which had as its effect the eternalization of capitalist class relations” (45, n. 17) as well as Marx’s own numerous post-1844 descriptions of society as a class-divided totality in which each class’s conditions of existence are complexly and contradictorily linked to others’ (e.g., the ongoing complicity of productive laborers in resecuring the conditions of their own exploitation). 22. In the 1867 Preface to the first German edition of Capital, Marx claims to have “popularized the passages concerning the substance of value and the magnitude of value as much as possible” (1977, 89), only then to announce in the 1873 Postface to the second edition a further, wholesale reworking of this chapter including “considerable attention” to the section on fetishism (1977, 94).

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The ancient Asiatic, Classical-antique, and other such modes of production are much more simple and transparent than those of bourgeois society. But they are founded either upon the immaturity of man as an individual . . . or on direct relations of dominance or servitude. They are conditioned by a low level of development of the productive powers of labor and correspondingly limited relations between man and nature (1977,173).

With its technological advances and legal/political establishment of humanism as a “fixed popular opinion,” says Marx, modem commodity production has finally overcome these historic obstacles: the “low level of development of the productive powers of labor” and the “immaturity of man as an individual.” With these conditions present, the only barriers to man’s economic destiny-that is, production by an association of free men-are the fetters and fetishism of commodity production. And these barriers, these “religious reflections of the real world,” can. . .vanish only when the practical relations of everyday life between man and man, and man and nature, generally present themselves to him in a transparent and rational form. The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life-process, i.e., the process of material production, until it becomes production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control (173; emphasis added).

Marx’s aim here is clearly not just to philosophize but to politicize, to elicit and mobilize readers’ imaginations, hopes, and energies for social change. This is not to say that Marx’s postmodern “philosophizing” is rhetorically impotent or apolitical. The point is that, consciously or not, Marx deploys modem and postmodem modes of thought together. Any success or failure that one might attribute to Marx’s discourse in these opening chapters of Capital must therefore be understood, from this perspective, as the combined effect of at least two intellectual persona. On reflection, then, Marx’s nominally opposed modem and postmodem orientations seem to complement one anotherDach adding a dimension that, if removed, would alter the nature and purpose of the discourse. The antihumanist/antiessentialist critique of classical value theory helps open the door for Marx’s Big Story about capitalism. Without them, Capital would differ little from the 1844 Manuscripts-a critical, even revolutionary, economics but one that would take the unity of the collective economic subject (“society”) for granted and thus remain unable to recognize the class divisions and conflicts at play in the constitution of all such “unities.” Conversely, Marx’s Big Stories about capitalism and a classless postcapitalism (his “association of free men”) lend much to his postmodern debunking of classical economic theory. One can only wonder, absent these rhetorically compelling moments, how far a strictly antihumanist, antiessentialist narrative might have carried Marx politically, and whether or to what degree it would have lacked the force necessary to enlist others in his revolutionary enterprise.= 23. While differently argued, this complements Hodgson’s recent observation that “anti-utopian discourses-notably those of Marx and Hayek-have often presumed or ended up suggesting a utopia of their own” (1995, 197).



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On this interpretation, the Marx of Capital chapter 1 seems to have it-and perhaps to want it-both ways: a value theory full of deterministic laws and unreserved anthropologies together with a trenchant critique of such theory. From this ambivalent, inside out position, Marx seems intent on both deploying and destroying the liberatory pretenses of Smith and Ricardo’s procapitalist economics, Stirner and Proudhon’s prosocialist economics, and, not least, his own erstwhile procommunist economics, all of which, by the mid-l850s, he had come to see as debilitatingly utopian, all wishfully underestimating the class barriers standing in the way of their various communal visions. The desires to contest this bourgeois utopianism and to fashion a compelling, revolutionary (meta)narrative-and to wage both battles on the terrain of economic discourse-thus appear, in Marx’s case, as two sides of the same discursive coin, modem and postmodern.

Towards a New Postmodern-Marxist Criticism The preceding discussion highlights the difficulties awaiting postmodern Marxist readers who expect Capital to provide a strictly antiessentialist, antihumanist discourse. To remove this interpretative obstacle, postmodern Marxists may do well to move beyond generic celebrations of all postmodern moments towards a new genre of criticism in which texts are judged not simply as more or less postmodern but as modern/postmodern in particular contexts with particular effects. Were such a postmodem-Marxist criticism to be developed, it would mark a significant breakthrough in the postmodern economics literature where generic standards of postmodern-ness continue to serve as the primary basis for textual evaluation and criticism, tacitly presuming that all modem and postmodem momenb are created equal-the former uniformly reactionary; the latter uniformly progressive and liberating-regardless of the texts or social-discursive contexts in which they appear.” For Marxists, this latter premise deflects many important questions concerning the roles of modem and postmodern elements in Marx and in their own theoretical practices. Might Marxists profit from further study of the various rhetorical, philosophical, and political imperatives at work in Marx’s discourses in Capital? For which audiences and for what purposes might Marx’s modern/postmodern tensions be deemed productive or useful? Further, if Derrida is right that there is “a necessary dependency of all destructive discourses . . . [to] inhabit the structures they demolish” (Derrida 1978, 194; cited in Arac 1986, xxvi), might the rhetorical/political effectivity of Marxist discourses require-or in any event (relproduce-these modern/ postmodern ambivalences? 24. Amariglio (1990, 40) evaluates the modernist “retreats” of Frank Knight, Keynes, and G. L. S. Shackle by comparing their respective treatments of epistemic uncertainty against the all-purpose standard of “a thoroughly postmodern epistemology,” much as Burczak (1994,56) posits a “fully postmodem economics” to assess the significance of modem and postmodern moments in Hayek.


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On each of these accounts, postmodern Marxists have much still to learn from Capital. Marx’s modem strands bear a rich and checkered legacy which received histories have only begun to tell. To name but one example, Marx’s stereotyping and categorical condemnation of commodity production is doubtless to blame, in part, for some of the more regrettable theoretical, economic, and political tendencies in twentieth-century Marxism.25At the same time, many positive effects might also be traced to these same modernist elements (e.g., hopes for a better world and the convictions to fight for them which many have derived, in part, from the very absolutism and determinism of Marxism), specification of which would (re)cast them not simply as lapses or failures in Marxist discourse but as “failures” that remain, even today, among the preconditions for Marxism’s critical successes. Yet such readings will become possible only when postmodern Marxists cease to ascribe a priori meanings and effectivities to modem or postmodern modes of discourse. Until then, the idealist temptation to see particular discourses as always and everywhere politically correct may exercise a more forceful hold than many of us care to examine. And the longer this continues, the more likely that those who have labored so diligently to revive and rethink Marx in the light of postmodernism may find themselves struggling to read Marx at all. I would like to thank Enid Arvidson, Alan Jarvis, Steve Mansfield, Ric Mclntyre, Andrew Parker, Stephen Resnick, Bruce Roberts, John Roche, Alfiredo Saad-Filho, Blair Sandler, and Richard Wolfffor their helpful comments and suggestions.

References Althusser, L. 1971. Lenin andf‘hilosophy. Trans. B. Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press. . 1976. Essays in Self-criticism. Trans. G . Lock. London: New Left Books. . 1977. For Marx. Trans. B. Brewster. London: New Left Books. Althusser, L. and Balibar, E. 1970.Reading Capital. Trans. B. Brewster. London: New Left Books. Amariglio, J. 1990. “Economics as a Postmodern Discourse.” In Economics as Discourse: AnAnalysis of the Language ofEconomists, ed. W .J. Samuels, 15-46.Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Amariglio, J. and Callari, A. 1989. “Marxian Value Theory and the Problem of the Subject: The Role of Commodity Fetishism.” Rethinking Marxism 2 (3): 3140. Amariglio, J. and Ruccio, D. F. 1995. “Keynes, Postmodernism, Uncertainty.” In Keynes, Knowledge, and Uncertainty, eds. J. Hillard and S. Dow, 336-358. London: Edward Elgar, Ltd. 25. Among other things, it seems to have enabled later Marxists (most notably Stalin) to imagine commodity production itself to be their chief object of struggle. This allowed struggles for socialism or communism to be defined by Marxists as struggles against private property and markets (Resnick and Wolff 1993) and for these same Marxists to presume that elimination of these conditions would guarantee the emergence of a classless society (Lock 1976, 13-14).



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