By George Henderson
Long susceptible to dogmatic confrontation, the query of price in Marx’s thought—what price is, the aim it serves, its software to real-world capitalism—requires renewal if Marx’s paintings is to stay bright. In Value in Marx, George Henderson deals a lucid rereading of Marx that strips worth of its turgid theoretical relief and reframes it as an research into the tensions among social kinfolk and kinds as they're instead of as what they can another way become.
Drawing on Marx’s Capital and Grundrisse, Henderson exhibits how those volumes don't harbor a unmarried conception of worth that equates price to capital. in its place, those books experimentally compose and recompose worth for an international that's greater than capitalist. At stake is how Marx conceives of human freedom, of balanced social preparations, and of regulate over the issues humans produce. Henderson unearths that the boundaries on social turning into, together with the tendency towards alienated lifestyles, hang-out Marx at the same time he appears to be like past the critique of capital to an emancipated society to come.
Can those limits be faced in an artistic, even pleased, means? Can they turn into features of what we hope, instead of being silenced and denied? so long as we persist in analyzing price extensively, following it as an lively and never a shut-down, predetermined characteristic of Marx’s texts, Henderson finally perspectives Marx as responding definitely to those demanding situations and making use of worth as a robust instrument of the political imaginary.
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Additional info for Value in Marx : the Persistence of Value in a More-Than-Capitalist World
Example text
Moreover, the potential for hoards of money, as indeed the potential of money per se as an independent form of value, gives rise to a desire for money for its own sake as a representation of wealth (229–30). Marx is far from clear about why individuals would seek to make this desire a reality. He seems more interested in what happens, what is expressed socially, when money hoards form. In short, this is that “the social power becomes the private power of private persons” (230). The social power referred to is, of course, the social labor embodied in commodities, something money taps into in its being “the equivalent form of value,” that into which can be converted any commodity.
On both counts it could be yes, but this is not a required route. On the contrary, I propose accepting this fissure between value and capital in the first part of Capital so as to find therein the first signs that value has a broader remit. In plain terms, at this juncture in the text the concept of capital is not necessary to round out what Marx is doing with value, since he is up to something else. The pivotal moment is Marx’s development of the commodity fetish, an understanding of which is helped by drawing upon certain elements of the value sketch I just laid out.
Commodities circulate, but their equivalent in money does not appear until some future date. Moreover, the debts contracted each day, and the payments falling due on the same day, are entirely incommensurable magnitudes. (237) To what end? Credit, meant to resolve the contradiction that is latent in simple circulation, instead devolves into irrelevance when crisis, also latent in this form, emerges. On the eve of crisis, the bourgeois, drunk with prosperity and arrogantly certain of himself, has just declared that money is purely an imaginary creation.