Kommentar zu Hegel und Marx, Chapter 23
What Does Not Hold
Whoever takes up the tools should know which pieces in the box are unusable. Four of these carry consequences serious enough that they must be named individually.
The substance of value. The idea that value is a quantity of objectified labor time lodged within the commodity explains some things and fails at too many others. A painting sells for millions that a mediocre painter, working the same amount of time, could not have produced any differently. The same medication costs a multiple in one country of what it costs in another, given identical production costs. A plot of land by the sea costs a multiple of an equally sized plot inland, though no one produced the land. Ricardo treated such cases as rare goods and excluded them; Marx followed him in this. In today’s economy they are the rule: software, patents, brands, networks, platforms — wherever legally constructed scarcity determines the price, the substance account fails to apply.
What remains once one lets it go is more than what one gives up. Value is then not a thing residing in objects, but a legally constituted form in which productive contributions are translated into relations of appropriation. Marx’s actual cognitive aim — to show how appropriation comes about under conditions of formal equality and free contract — remains untouched by this. The substance was his instrument for this question, not the question itself. The three steps that take its place appear in [[kapitalismus-einfuehrung:6]], [[kapitalismus-einfuehrung:10]], and [[kapitalismus-einfuehrung:10a]]: the derivation of exchange value from legally secured positions of appropriation, the question of the origin of the surplus, and the separation of the question of production from the question of justice, from which it follows that no title of ownership arises for anyone from a contribution to production.
The theory of money. Marx took money to be a particular commodity that serves as universal equivalent, and had gold in mind. This had historical justification as long as currencies were backed by it. Since that backing was abolished, the world monetary system functions without it; had the metal been essential, the system would have had to collapse. Money is a legal relation — a circulating promissory note whose validity derives from the fact that taxes must be paid in it. Georg Friedrich Knapp recognized this early on and called money a creature of the legal order. This has consequences for how the tools are used: even the medium of the movement from money to more money is made, and could be otherwise.
The revolutionary subject. Marx expected that the industrial working class would arrive, through its position in the process of production, at insight and at the capacity for collective action. This expectation has not been fulfilled in that form. The upheavals did not take place in the industrial centers he had in view. But the problem does not lie in the empirical facts alone; it lies in the form of thought itself. That form grasps change as the deed of a group determinable in advance. Whoever thinks this way looks for the subject and overlooks that the order is carried out by everyone who works within it.
The assumption of false consciousness. From the determination of consciousness as a sublimate of the relations of production, part of the tradition has drawn the principle that all thought is ideology and must be unmasked as such. This has a consequence rarely noticed. Whoever seeks the standard of critique in the damaged interests of those affected presupposes that these interests lie clearly before us. But if the relations are such that they reach into needs themselves — and the analysis of consumption shows that they do — then the standard itself stands in need of explanation. Which interests? The ones found as given, already shaped? Or the ones people would have if they had examined their own ends? Whoever passes over this question takes preferences as given — and thereby stands on the same ground as the economics he criticizes.
To this is added a methodological consequence that bears directly on the use of tools. Whoever places the assumption of ideology first has determined in advance what cannot contradict him: a good argument from the other side is then not counter-evidence but more refined ideology. This suspends the very examination for whose sake one uses tools in the first place.
One should add the six methodological propositions from Part III. They are not false claims about the world, but self-descriptions of a procedure that works differently than they say. Whoever takes them for the method receives a standpoint instead of an investigation.