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Riccardo Bellofiore and Nicola Taylor, eds.


The Constitution of Capital: Essays on Volume 1 of Marxs Capital, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004

Riccardo Bellofiore and Roberto Fineschi, eds.


Re-reading Marx: New Perspectives after the Critical Edition, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009

Abstract

The two books under review are both edited collections of essays by some of the
most serious scholars internationally concerned with Marxs method in Capital and
related texts. Essays in both books share an emphasis on the openness of Marxs
texts which were extensively revised both by Marx in his own lifetime and in the
editing performed by Engels. The review engages critically with contributions in both
volumes with respect to value-form approaches to Marxs method. It highlights some
of the differences of approach between the various contributors which are not always
apparent in the texts themselves.

Keywords

method value value-form labour-time money Capital technology

Back in 1967 Roman Rosdolsky could write that Of all the problems in Marxs
economic theory the most neglected has been that of his method, both in
general and specifically, in its relation to Hegel.1 As the variety of contributions
to the two books under review indicates, that claim can no longer be justified.
Indeed as Michael Heinrich notes in his contribution to Re-reading Marx, a
change, stimulated in part by the appearance of Rosdolskys own pioneering
study of the Grundrisse, came in the late 1960s as, With the background of
protests against the US war in Vietnam and the students movement, a new
reading of Marx began in various countries, opposing authoritarian Soviet
socialism as much as Western capitalism.2 However, in the Anglo-Saxon
world in particular, the scope of that debate within the field of Marxist political

1 Rosdolsky 1977, pp. xixii.


2 Bellofiore and Fineschi (eds.) 2009, pp. 723.

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economy was restricted in two ways. Firstly the widespread acceptance of a


Sraffian (also known as neo-Ricardian after the Classical economist David
Ricardo) approach to solving the so-called transformation problem led either
to the abandonment of Marxs labour theory of value as inconsistent and
redundant, or to its reinterpretation as a qualitative value theory of labour
shorn of a measurable quantitative dimension.
The appearance in English in 1972 of the path-breaking Essays on Marxs
Theory of Value by I.I. Rubin, originally published in Russian in 1923, also
contributed to the qualitative approach which came to be labelled as value-
form theory.3 Whilst the neo-Ricardians of the 1970s have for the most part
completely withdrawn from the terrain of Marxist debate, the continuing
influence of Rubins neo-Hegelian emphasis on social forms is very evident in
a number of the essays in these two volumes.
Secondly, there was a lamentable failure to translate other work from a
wide-ranging and philosophically informed European debate into English.
This remains a problem despite the exemplary efforts of those associated with
this journal and its book series. To take just one example, Michael Heinrichs
own introduction to Capital, a bestseller in Germany, has recently appeared
in English thanks to Monthly Review Press.4 However, his methodologically
substantial and controversial Die Wissenschaft vom Wert, the results of which
underpin his introductory text, still awaits translation.5
Even more seriously, as Heinrich would certainly agree, those without German
still lack access to the scholarly work involved in publishing the entire corpus
of Marxs economic manuscripts and notebooks and precise specification
of Engelss extensive editorial work for Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital as part of
the second Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2) or the historical-critical
edition. This project is far broader in scope than the Collected Works published

3 Rubin 1972. It should be noted however that Rubin himself does not disregard or dismiss the
quantitative dimension of socially-necessary labour-time (cf. Rubin 1972, pp. 667). Kicillof
and Starosta 2007, in their hard-hitting critique of Rubin, regard this as merely a sign of theo-
retical incoherence resulting from Rubins desire to preserve his orthodox credentials. But
this is unfair to Rubin who is grappling with a tension which, as Heinrich 1999 argues, can be
found within Marxs own texts. An alternative and more nuanced defence of the materialist
dimension of Marxs analysis can be found in Brown 2008 who attempts ambitiously to com-
bine the insights of both critical realism and systematic dialectics. Brown in turn draws on
Saad-Filho 2002 who, however, strangely critiques Rubin for conflating capitalist production
and simple commodity production a conflation which cannot be found at all in the later
value-form theorists and is also a dubious reading of Rubin.
4 Heinrich 2012.
5 Heinrich 1999.

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in English, which does contains a translation of the 18613 manuscript in its


entirety but even that does not include the detailed critical commentary and
notes provided in the MEGA. The later manuscripts and the notebooks (apart
from extracts such as the Mathematical Manuscripts published separately from
the Collected Works by New Park) remain unavailable in English.
One has to warmly welcome, therefore, the appearance of the edited
collection of essays relating to the MEGA or the Critical Edition in the volume
Re-reading Marx. As the editors note in their Introduction, up until now we
have had ...the paradoxical result of a rich international discussion on Marx
that does not take into account the MEGA material, on the one hand, and on
the other a flourishing German debate springing from MEGA2 that does not
deal with the conversation on Marx going on in English.6
Most of the contributors to this volume are also members of what is
known as the International Symposium on Marxian Theory (ISMT). The
papers were originally presented at an ISMT conference in Bergamo, Italy, in
2006 and mainly fall into two categories. There are those presented either by
some of the editorial team for the MEGA2 (Rolf Hecker and Regina Roth) or
by those immersed in the German debates (Roberto Fineschi and Michael
Heinrich) which open up new terrain for those of us unfamiliar with this
material. The second category includes essays by long-standing members of
the ISMT which use the MEGA manuscripts primarily as vehicles to pursue
the diverse research projects and theoretical preoccupations of the authors
(Chris Arthur, Fred Moseley, Patrick Murray, Geert Reuten and Tony Smith).
There are also three more wide-ranging contributions by Roberto Finelli on
The Limits and Uncertainties of Historical Materialism, Riccardo Bellofiore
on A Ghost Turning into a Vampire: The Concept of Capital and Living Labour
and Massimiliano Tomba on From History of Capital to History in Capital. It
is difficult to provide adequate summaries of these last three papers but both
Bellofiore and Tomba touch on very important methodological issues and I
will return to those later.
The other volume under review is the product of an earlier Bergamo
conference of the ISMT group and the list of contributors overlaps extensively
with that of Re-reading Marx. The Constitution of Capital comprises essays
specifically devoted to Volume 1 of Capital, and those acquainted with other
works by the same authors will find some familiar themes being explored
here. Riccardo Bellofiore is again a highly engaged and energetic editor along
with Nicola Taylor. The editors have themselves generated two of the more
provocative contributions in this volume which will receive more extended

6 Bellofiore and Fineschi (eds.) 2009, pp. 12.

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discussion below. Some of the other chapters, notably those of Tony Smith
on Technology and History in Capitalism: Marxian and Neo-Schumpeterian
Perspectives, and Patrick Murray on The Social and Material Transformation
of Production by Capital: Formal and Real Subsumption in Capital Volume 1,
relate closely to their essays in the other collection. For these reasons at least it
is appropriate to review both collections together.

A Map of Differences

Bellofiore and Taylor write in their Introduction that

The authors represented in the current collection broadly adhere to


some version of a social interpretation of the concept of value, albeit
in different ways and to varying degrees...However, all of the authors
reject the heritage of the logical-historical method imposed on Capital by
Engels and the economic reductionism of traditional Marxism and its neo-
Ricardian offshoots. All of the authors insist on the centrality of money for
a correct understanding of Marxian value theory.7

This reviewer certainly shares the general understanding of Marxs method


suggested in that paragraph. However, rather too much is concealed by a
cryptic comment in the subsequent paragraph that [t]he map of differences is
for the reader to discover, within the moving whole of a collective enterprise
where difference and dialogue are an essential means for self-clarification and
mutual progress. Unfortunately the new reader coming to these texts will not
find it at all easy to navigate the map of differences without reference to other
works produced by several of the authors under review. Possibly the differences
between the two editors themselves have contributed to this evasion. On
the one hand Ricardo Bellofiore continues to defend the relevance of the
quantitative as well as the qualitative dimension of a labour theory of value,
a position shared for example with Fred Moseley and Massimiliano Tomba.
In his essay on A Ghost Turning into a Vampire: The Concept of Capital and
Living Labour in the Re-reading Marx collection, Bellofiore notes (correctly in
my view) that ...if the accent on the abstraction of labour is put only on the
exchange in the final market, as most value-form theorists are tempted to do,
the conclusion risks being the total evacuation of labour. In other words, value-
form theory is in danger of abandoning the materiality of the performance of

7 Bellofiore and Fineschi (eds.) 2009, p. 24; italics in the original.

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labour as relevant only to the analysis of specific concrete labour and not to
the abstract labour which constitutes value.
By contrast Nicola Taylor is unequivocal in her critique of Marx himself
in Volume 1 of Capital. Marx, she claims, ...remained mired throughout
this first book in a Ricardian problematic where labour-time ultimately
determines value magnitudes. Heinrich has a comparable position but puts
more emphasis on Marxs struggle whilst writing Capital to fully break with the
Ricardian problematic in this respect, suggesting that there is a deep tension
within the work between a substantialist theory of value and a fully social
value-form analysis. Arthur and Reuten can to some degree be located as two
of the value-form theorists implicitly criticised in Bellofiores comment.8
The map of differences is, however, more complex than a simple dichotomy
between those who defend Marxs method of presentation, and theory of
value, and those who offer a critique from a value-form perspective. Patrick
Murray, for example, in his brief essay on The Place of The Results of the
Immediate Production Process in Capital (Chapter 10 of the Re-reading Marx
collection) is clearly influenced by Rubin in his stress on social forms. He
shares with Chris Arthur an insistence that Capital is about the capitalist mode
of production from the start and that the law of value only applies where the
capitalist mode of production predominates. Both present a rigorous defence
of Marxs dialectical method and his account of the subsumption of both
labour and machinery under capital (Arthur addresses this in the Re-reading
Marx collection, Murray in his essay in the Constitution of Capital volume).
Arthur, however, wants to argue that capital itself becomes a productive power
having absorbed completely the productive powers of labour. For Arthur

8 Heinrich in Bellofiore and Fineschi (eds.) 2009, p. 92, but at more length in Heinrich 1999.
Reutens position is spelt out more clearly in an earlier collection in the ISMT series (Reuten
1993 and the critical comment by Moseley 2005). How far Reuten agrees with Heinrichs more
elaborate reading of the texts is not apparent from any of the essays available in English, but
there are evident similarities in their respective approaches. As will become apparent below,
whilst I disagree with both on the fundamental question noted above, I have learnt a great
deal from their close reading of the manuscripts and especially Reutens rigorous elucidation
of Marxs deployment of the concepts of tendency and law (Reuten 1997). However, I did
not find his account of Marxs General Rate of Profit Transformation in the Re-reading Marx
volume at all helpful, and disagree with his rejection of Marxs aggregates as conceptually
incompatible (Bellofiore and Fineschi (eds.) 2009, p. 223). I will not pursue that further in
this review as an adequate critique would demand far more space than is available. Fred
Moseleys forthcoming book on the Transformation question should settle this debate for
good, but that is probably wishful thinking on my part.

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capital is in this respect an objective spirit in Hegels sense9 and subsumption


is interpreted as a process whereby capital as a system takes on the properties
of a self-positing Idea although he then has to acknowledge that there is a
limit to this ideality as capital cannot fully incorporate its material foundation.10
Murray by contrast pays more attention to Marxs detailed materialist
examination of the double character of the production process (i.e. producing
both use-values and value) and the historical transformations outlined in
Volume 1 of Capital and does not share Arthurs tendency to subsume Marx
himself into an Hegelian conceptual grid.
Before returning to some of these issues below, it is appropriate to summarise
some of the wealth of insights on offer in the Re-reading Marx volume.
This review will then focus critically on the contributions of Heinrich and Taylor
as those with which I have most significant disagreement. It will then touch on
a rather different debate between Bellofiore and Moseley over the concepts
of money and labour-power. It will prove impossible to do justice to several
other contributions in the collections which deserve praise for their clarity and
rigour such as the critique provided by Martha Campbell of Institutionalist
authors Hodgson and Veblen in her essay The Objectivity of Value versus the
Idea of Habitual Action in The Constitution of Capital collection. But I will
conclude with some praise for Tony Smiths distinctive contribution on the
paradoxes of technological development under capitalism.

Editing the MEGA

The Introduction to Re-reading Marx contains a very useful section on the


difficult publishing history of the MEGA, a project which is ongoing. The collapse
of the USSR and the unification of Germany led to a withdrawal of funding at
a point when the project was still well short of completion. However, this led
to the internationalisation of the project under the overarching auspices of
the International Marx Engels Foundation (IMES) based in the Netherlands.
The Introduction concludes with a table detailing each of the volumes already
published, proceeding or planned, which is of course already out of date
but still very useful for indicating the scope of the project. There are now 114
volumes planned of actual work by Marx and Engels but each is appearing
with a second book containing the critical apparatus. An earlier article by
Heinrich in Historical Materialism reveals more of the difficulties and scope

9 Bellofiore and Fineschi (eds.) 2009, p. 155.


10 Ibid.

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of this enterprise with respect to the publication of the volumes for Book 3 (or
Volume 3 as we are used to calling it in English) of Capital.11
Of the two contributions by editors of the MEGA, Rolf Hecker focuses
on the extent of Engelss editing work on the manuscripts for Volume 2 of
Capital. Given the frequent criticism of Engels found in other contributions
it is worth noting that Hecker emphasises that Engels is in many cases either
correcting what he terms clear errors in Marxs manuscript or supplementing
shortened passages for the sake of greater clarity.12 But he also notes that the
incompleteness of Marxs manuscripts needs to be taken into account and
that Engels does not explicitly acknowledge in his own published Preface the
extent to which Marx was ...just attempting to formulate new ideas but has
not yet arrived at definite conclusions.13
Regina Roth, the other MEGA editor writing here, takes a more general
approach but focuses in the end on the much more extensive changes Engels
made to the published version of Volume 3 of Capital. Endorsing comments
previously made by both Reuten and Heinrich, she suggests that the cumulative
effect of Engelss editing was to play down the dimensions of the openness of
Marxs analysis. To take just one especially significant example, relating to the
section on the falling rate of profit, Roth observes that

First, Engels strengthened Marxs statement about the rapid breakdown


of capitalist production. In chapter 15 on the Laws internal contradictions,
Engels first transformed Marxs expression zum klappen bringen [to
cause to fold] into the stronger Zusammenbruch [breakdown] and then
moved the phrase that this process would entail the rapid breakdown
of capitalist production to the end of the paragraph which Engels had
entitled general considerations.14

11 Heinrich 2007. Despite some critical observations Heinrich is full of praise for the
editorial apparatus of these volumes. He is however, with good reason, scathing about
the employment of the neo-Ricardian academic economist Bertram Schefold to write
the critical introduction to one volume.
12 Unfortunately there appears to be a serious error in the translation of Heckers essay on
p. 22 which makes nonsense of what would otherwise be an illuminating account of why
Engels introduced the term circulation capital to supplement and amend Marxs use of
the term circulating capital in four different senses in the original manuscript. The error,
as far as I can work it out, is to translate circulation capital as circulating capital on two
occasions, so losing the whole point of the distinction.
13 Bellofiore and Fineschi (eds.) 2009, p. 25.
14 For the English version of this, see Marx 1981, pp. 3545. Note that the context here is not
simply a fall in the rate of profit but the centralisation of capital, and that Marxs final

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Heinrich, the MEGA and a Non-substantialist Theory of Value

Heinrichs own contribution to the Re-reading Marx volume begins with an


exploration of the West German debate on Marxs method in Capital in the
late 1960s and 1970s, which was very much a response to the publication of
both the 18578 manuscript known as the Grundrisse and the section on the
commodity in the very first edition of Capital where the argument in the
appendix on value-form appeared to be more Hegelian than in later editions.
It is interesting to note that Heinrich, unlike some of the other authors
represented in these volumes, notably Arthur, challenges the notion that Marx
was seeking to develop an application of Hegels logic as distinct from using
Hegels insights into the difficulties of presentation of the material.
Heinrichs distancing from the more Hegelian approaches of Backhaus or
Arthur is mentioned only in passing and, despite its significance for the wider
debates, unfortunately not pursued further in this chapter. Instead Heinrich
moves on to discuss the MEGA project and, similarly to Roth, emphasises
the openness of Marxs manuscripts. This is not simply a matter of the
incompleteness of the project, but the ongoing revisions and corrections to
what had already been written, including the various editions of Volume 1 for
which Marx himself was responsible. Indeed Heinrich goes further than Roth
in arguing that the search for the editorial form which the author himself
wanted is like chasing a phantom.15
Heinrich then proceeds to question the reconstruction approach of the
West German writers Backhaus and Reichelt who, following Rosdolsky, regard
the Grundrisse as the decisive text through which to read Marxs method, as
by comparison Capital itself was marked by Marxs efforts to popularise his
presentation. In particular Heinrich insists that subsequent to the 18613
manuscript Marx abandoned his original six-book plan and a second project
of critique was born which became the first draft of Capital (the manuscripts
of 18635),16 the first volume of which would finally be published in 1867.

sentence in the section as translated by Fernbach is: This process would entail the rapid
breakdown of capitalist production if counter-acting tendencies were not constantly at
work alongside this centripetal force, in the direction of decentralisation (p. 355).
15 Bellofiore and Fineschi (eds.) 2009, p. 77.
16 Those manuscripts include the surviving section of the lost first draft of Volume 1,
eventually published in English at the end of the Penguin edition of Volume 1 as the
Results of the Immediate Process of Production and discussed in this collection in an
illuminating contribution by Patrick Murray. Murray notes that the stress in the first
section of the Results on the circularity of Volume 1 brings out the systematic dialectical
character of the presentation that Marx devised in Capital. (Bellofiore and Fineschi (eds.)

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In the process, Heinrich observes, Marx also abandoned the concept of


capital in general which, counterposed to the movement of many capitals,
was pivotal to the structure of the Grundrisse manuscript.17 More contentious
is Heinrichs reiteration of an argument he first made back in 1986 that this was
not simply a switch of terminology but a recognition that the division between
the level of capital in general and the level of competition could not be
sustained in the way it is presented in the Grundrisse.18 Rather Marx developed
a new methodological axis around the relation between the individual capital
and total social capital. The latter category does not abstract from the existence
of competition but rather from the actual movement of competition between
specific concrete capitals or companies/corporations.
Fred Moseley published a critique of Heinrich on this point back in 199519
and reiterates his position in his essay in the Re-reading Marx volume on The
Development of Marxs Theory of the Distribution of Surplus-Value in the
Manuscripts of 186163. Certainly Moseley is a scrupulous reader of Marxs
texts and has much to say of interest as usual. He is correct to argue that in
Capital, Volume 1, Marx is focused on the production of the total surplus-value.
Only later in Volume 3 does he consider its distribution as profit, interest and
rent, each regarded as parts of a given total amount of surplus-value extracted
from the collective labour of workers. This is the fundamental point but not
one with which Heinrich seriously disagrees.
Moseley claims that although Marx does not use the term capital in general
in the later work, he retains essentially the same approach as in the Grundrisse.
This fails to account for the significance of Marxs shift in terminology and in
effect equates the issue of competition with the issue of the distribution of
surplus-value, as is apparent in the outline of Marxs logical structure on the
second page of Moseleys essay. Heinrichs brief footnote in this volume which

2009, p. 174.) It also supports the insistence by Murray and Arthur, with which I agree, that
the whole volume is about the capitalist mode of production from the start (Bellofiore
and Fineschi (eds.) 2009, p. 175). As I have indicated elsewhere, I do not agree with Arthur
that this invalidates any application of value categories to pre-capitalist or transitional
modes of production (Green 2004). Murray, in a footnote, challenges Bidets view that
there is no dialectical transition possible from the commodity circuit to the circuit of
capital, entailing a rupture in the argument (Bidet 2005). My own view is that Bidet
has a point, as evident from Marx himself referring to the historical presuppositions of
the emergence of capital in the very first paragraph of Chapter 4 of Capital (Marx 1976,
p. 247).
17 Marx 1973.
18 Heinrich 1989.
19 Moseley 1995.

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challenges that identification of the two issues could have been elaborated
at more length but does acknowledge that Moseley is correct in his more
fundamental argument about the production and distribution of surplus-value.
Much more problematic is Heinrichs claim that there are ambivalences in
some of the basic notions in Marxs text of Capital, Volume 1, including abstract
labour, value and money. In this section of his essay Heinrich is summarising in
half a dozen pages the central argument of his 400 page long Die Wissenschaft
vom Wert. This is a work which deserves a much more extended treatment than
is possible here, but the thrust of the argument is that there are two discourses
about value theory within Marxs text. One is a substantialist and naturalist
approach which Heinrich considers a residue in Marx of the Classical political-
economy approach of Smith and Ricardo. The other is a social and monetary
approach which represents a real break with that tradition. The formers
presence can be found in Marxs notorious reference to value-creating labour
as labour in the physiological sense.20 The latter can be located both in Marxs
critique of Ricardo for his neglect of the forms of value and in Marxs insistence
that the actual process of abstraction occurs in and through the exchange of
commodities for money.
Heinrich argues, and here he is more influenced by Althusser than by
Rubin, that Marxs scientific revolution required a break with the theoretical
field of Classical political economy. However, this break was not completed all
at once in a perfect way.21 Failure to recognise this has led, for example, to a
misunderstanding of the so-called transformation problem. This, according to
Heinrich, only arises from Marxs persistent use of a Ricardian non-monetary
theory of value in the Volume 3 manuscript (which of course was never revised
for publication) in which critically value is still identified as an attribute
of a single commodity, independent from other commodities and already
determined by production.
It is however possible to agree with Heinrich in rejecting a Ricardian non-
monetary theory of value and any notion of value as an attribute of a single
commodity in isolation, without endorsing some of his other claims.22 One of

20 Marx 1976, p. 137.


21 Bellofiore and Fineschi (eds.) 2009, p. 90.
22 The issue of value as an attribute of a single commodity is helpfully addressed by
Murray, who, referencing the Results chapter, insists that the commodity as a product
of capital...counts not as an individual but only as an aliquot part of the mass of
commodities. The commodity with which Capital begins is a product of Capital but
as Murray notes cannot be treated as such until the prerequisite categories have been
developed (Bellofiore and Fineschi (eds.) 2009, p. 176, with reference to Marx 1976,

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these, which is reiterated in Nicola Taylors contribution to the other volume


under review, is as follows:

After the distinction between concrete and abstract labour we should


also make the distinction between concrete and abstract labour-time
which Marx failed to do explicitly. What is measured by clocks is always
concrete labour-time: the time period spent on certain concrete labour.
Abstract labour needs abstract labour-time as a measurement, but this
abstract labour-time is a social result, which cannot be measured by a
clock, so the only possible measurement is money.23

The last sentence reveals one of the fundamental differences between Heinrich
along with some of the other value-form theorists and Marxs own account.
Indeed it is hard to know what to make of a reference to an abstract time which
cannot be measured by a clock. What Marx actually says in the first section of
Chapter 3 of Volume 1, referenced by Heinrich and, as we will see below, by
several other contributors, is that

It is not money that renders the commodities commensurable. Quite


the contrary. Because all commodities, as values, are objectified human
labour, and therefore in themselves commensurable, their values can be
communally measured in one and the same specific commodity, and this
commodity can be converted into the common measure of their values,
that is into money. Money as a measure of value is the necessary form of
appearance of the measure of value which is immanent in commodities,
namely labour-time.24

Heinrich might well want to insist that Marx should have added abstract to
that final labour-time but in fact the appropriate adjectival phrase would
be socially-necessary if one was required and this has a different reference
from abstract labour. This is a distinction which is rarely acknowledged in the
literature.25 Abstract labour (a term which, as Reuten has noted, rarely appears

p. 954). Heinrich might respond that this does not apply in the Volume 3 manuscript
section on the Transformation but this seems unlikely as that is a product of the same
period as the Results chapter (the manuscripts of 18635).
23 Bellofiore and Fineschi (eds.) 2009, p. 91.
24 Marx 1976, p. 188.
25 One exception is Likitkijsomboon 1995, but he takes the distinction between abstract
and social labour in a different direction from my brief outline here.

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in Marx after the first three chapters of Volume 1)26 refers to the common
property of the many different types of labour (fishing, weaving, mining
etc.) which are related to each other only through the medium of exchange
of commodities for money. In a world of generalised commodity production,
which is presupposed as Marx indicates in the first sentence of Chapter 1, this
implies that production is subordinated to the demands of the market place
and that for the seller what counts is the monetary measure of value. So one
can agree with Heinrich that practically abstract labour (as Patrick Murray
prefers to call it as one of his two senses of the term abstract labour)27 is
inseparable from the existence of money.
Socially-necessary labour-time on the other hand is a concept that appears
repeatedly throughout Marxs analysis of the production of surplus-value in
Parts 4 and 5 of Volume 1. In all those instances it refers to the comparison of
performances of the same type of labour in distinct units of production with
differences for example in the available technologies or productive forces (e.g.
fishing boats with different motor capacities or types of net but all competing
for the same market in fish). Heinrich fails to recognise that clock-time, as we
have all experienced it, can be used for the measurement and comparison of
the productivity of the different units engaged in producing the same type of
commodity, even though the determination of the weighted average socially-
necessary labour-time is essentially social and mediated via the market, or the
sphere of circulation.28
The law of value is about how the changes in socially-necessary labour-time
act as the underlying regulators of the exchange-values or monetary prices
of those commodities. That is not a simple process and will depend on the
conditions of competition which in turn, as Marx later notes in Volume 3, are
affected by fluctuations of market demand which affect the degree to which
the most productive units determine the market-value. In Volume 1, however,
Marx explicitly sets aside that level of determination and assumes that
changes in productivity directly determine the value of commodities.29 Those

26 Reuten 2005. See also the critical response of Moseley 2005 who is correct in his defence
of the quantitative dimension of Marxs theory but who shares the general conflation of
the abstract-labour concept with socially-necessary labour-time which I question below.
27 Murray 2000.
28 An excellent survey of the Transformation problem by Anders Ekeland (Ekeland 2012),
influenced by Kliman 2007 but moving beyond Klimans focus on the consistency
question, notes that the question of how the weighted average is determined over time
could do with much more investigation.
29 Marx 1981, pp. 27980. See Kincaid 2007 for an account of the significance of the law of
value in Marx and an emphasis on how it is not a static concept and makes its presence

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chapters of Volume 1 which value-form theorists tend to ignore, the chapters


on the Working Day, Machinery and The Production of Absolute and Relative
Surplus-Value, are replete with examples invoking clock-time.
We cannot even begin to grasp what Marx is getting at here unless we clearly
differentiate between value and exchange-value, between the value contained
within the commodity as a social substance (or what Kliman terms intrinsic
value)30 and the money received in exchange. The money also represents
value (and as such need not be a commodity, as Heinrich rightly insists) and
is a claim on the total social labour performed in society. But the total social
labour-time should not be abstractly separated from the specific labour-time
of actual workers as if the latter were merely to do with concrete labour as
Reuten, for example, suggests.31 Marx also frequently refers to the individual
value as distinct from the social value in the later passages in Volume 1 where
he wants to contrast individual capitals of differing levels of productivity
engaged in competition with each other. Heinrich mistakenly seems to think
that Marx is referring to individual commodities in isolation from each other
when he is explicitly discussing individual capitals (or firms) competing in the
market.32

felt in a simultaneous and multi-dimensional way at all stages in the circuit of capital.
There are very important insights here made in the context of a criticism of Fine and
Saad-Filho for their productivism. But whilst Kincaid is right to criticise Fine and Saad-
Filho for their neglect of Marxs analysis of the value-form and money in the first three
chapters of Capital, he himself was seduced by Heinrichs interpretation and understated
as a result the determining role over time of changes in labour productivity and the
accompanying tendency for the organic composition of capital to rise.
30 Kliman 2000.
31 Reuten 2005. Reutens essay in The Constitution of Capital collection attempts a formalistic
reconstruction of Marxs sections on productive forces, intensity of labour and capital
accumulation, themes which are otherwise neglected by all other contributors apart from
Patrick Murray and Tony Smith. But Reutens own value-form interpretation presented
elsewhere seems to entail that any such formalisation is vitiated by the impossibility
of quantitative measurement of socially-necessary labour-time. That said, Reuten is, as
usual, interesting on levels of abstraction and correct to insist in his conclusion that any
theory of the economic cycle based on Volume 1 alone must be incomplete (p. 296).
32 Marx 1976, p. 530. This to my mind is decisive textual support for interpreting the
analysis of value in Capital, Volume 1, as three-dimensional (the performance of labour
in individual units of production, referred to in this translation as individual value,
the social value governed by socially-necessary labour-time and the exchange-value or
price in money). This also emerges in Chapter 10 of Volume 3 with the section on Market
Values and Market Prices. If neo-Ricardians collapse value into the performance of
labour, and value-form theories dissolve value into exchange-value, both end up with a

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Heinrich is right to insist that value is the expression of a certain connection


of production and circulation. But what sort of connection remains the matter
in contention as far as many of the value-form theorists are concerned. We
need to be very careful in our choice of words (in English and in German) if
we are to grasp the complexities and subtlety of Marxs concepts. Heinrich, for
example, highlights, quite rightly, Marxs metaphors such as the phantom-like
objectivity of labour as the substance of value and counterposes these to any
notion of embodiment of labour in a physical sense as in the neo-Ricardian
tradition. However his own non-substantialist theory of value is in danger of
losing the materialist dimension of value or the performance of labour in time
which Marx himself considers to be the substance of value.
Marx quite rightly wants to insist that, despite the diversity of concrete
labour, an hour remains an hour regardless of whether it is the hour of a
university professor or a cleaner, a fisherman or a computer programmer. They
only produce value when their labour is performed in specific social/historical
conditions, but in those conditions it is still their actual hours which are the
immanent measure. So we need to grasp both the magnitude of value (the
hours of labour-time) and the forms (exchange-value/money) and that values
phantom-like objectivity is distinct from but embraces both.

Taylors Critique of Marx

The dangers in a non-substantialist approach are even more apparent in


the essay by Nicola Taylor in The Constitution of Capital. Taylors approach is
different from Heinrichs in that she proposes a reconstruction of Marxs work,
a strategy more influenced by the work of Michael Eldred and Marnie Hanlon
as well as Geert Reuten.33 But they share along with Chris Arthur, whom Taylor
also invokes, a stress on

...the inseparability of production and exchange which are taken for


interdependent moments within a unity, and this implies a method of
exposition which engages the value-form first before introducing the

two-dimensional account. This was an argument I attempted to make all too briefly in
a heavily-edited (cut) first publication on these matters back in the 1970s (Green 1978). I
would now correct the presentation of much of what was written there but stand by the
essential thesis.
33 Eldred and Hanlon 1981; Reuten 1993.

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question of how value-magnitudes are determined.34 Hence it makes


little sense to talk about the content of value before development of the
forms of circulation up to the capital-form.35

Arthurs essay in the same volume on Money and the Form of Value provides
a detailed reconstruction of Marxs own development of the value-forms in
the first chapter of Capital, but without reference to any content of value.36
Arthurs essay is interesting but does not in this instance enter into what he
calls the hugely controversial matter of Marxs identification of value with
objectified labour.37 Taylor, by contrast, makes it explicit that she considers
the first sentence of the quotation from Marx provided earlier It is not
money that renders the commodities commensurable to be a retreat from
Marxs earlier appendix in the first edition of Capital which she claims aimed
to show that money alone renders commodities commensurable... and that
...value cannot exist separately from money.
Leaving aside the questionable character of this interpretation, what is
revealing is that she pays no attention to an essential feature of Marxs later
version, which is acknowledged by Arthur, namely the clear differentiation
between value and exchange-value which is not made in the original
Appendix. She cannot concede that this is a step forward in terms of clarifying
the social relations because, like Reuten and some other value-form theorists,
she collapses value into exchange-value and thus accepts money alone as a
measure of value.38
Taylor rather presumptuously comments that Marxs presentation
...exhibits precisely those flaws observed by Hegel in his Logic: namely that
in scientific thinking various grounds may be alleged for the same sum of
fact without demonstrating any inner connection to the phenomenon to be
explained.... In consequence Marxs project is burdened from the start with an
axiomatic assumption of value content extraneous to its form of appearance.39

34 Arthur 2002, especially the chapter on Marxs Capital and Hegels Logic.
35 Bellofiore and Taylor (eds.) 2004, p. 89.
36 Green 2004 provides a more critical account of some of Arthurs work in the context of a
review of an earlier edited collection by the ISMT group on Volume 3 of Capital (Campbell
and Reuten (eds.) 2002). Arthurs response in a special issue of Historical Materialism
edited by Jim Kincaid devoted to his work is also worth reading (Arthur 2005 and Kincaid
2005).
37 Bellofiore and Taylor (eds.) 2004, p. 40.
38 Likitkijsomboon 1995.
39 Bellofiore and Taylor (eds.) 2004, pp. 989.

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This is a serious charge, and one derived in part from the work of Reuten and
Williams which requires a more systematic critique than it has yet received,
although Moseley, in work not articulated in either of these volumes, has
made some effort in that direction.40 Suffice it to suggest here that, once the
value-form theorist has gone down this route, the core of Marxs analysis of the
dynamics of the extraction of relative surplus-value cannot be maintained.
That analysis rests on a conception of value as measured by socially-necessary
labour-time and as the underlying regulator of market prices. Taylor explicitly
states (and thereby goes much further than Heinrich, along the route originally
mapped out by Backhaus and Eldred and Hanlon) that any attempt to measure
the magnitude of value by reference to socially necessary labour time cannot
succeed because the size of M (the expanded money capital by comparison
with the initial M) depends both on labour productivity and on the structure
of markets.
Yet Marx does not deny the role of market structure or of the uncertainty
which Taylor curiously seems to think he neglects.41 Marx would insist that
these are matters which have to be considered at the appropriate stage in
Volume 3, where indeed they appear if only in fragmentary form.42 Otherwise
one falls into the typically Ricardian error of muddling up the necessary levels
of abstraction, and different types of determination. So, for example, if an
industry is monopolised and this affects the pace of technological change,
this in turn will have an effect on the socially-necessary labour-time. But this
does not preclude a measure of the magnitude of value. What will change is
the relationship between price (or exchange-value) and value, insofar as the
monopoly gains surplus-value at the expense of other capitals. It is difficult to
see how any such analysis of transfers of surplus-value is even possible if value
and exchange-value are in effect identified.
Some of the essential points about socially-necessary labour-time and
relative surplus-value are made by Massimiliano Tomba in his essay From
History of Capital to History in Capital in the Re-reading Marx volume. Tomba
explicitly distances himself from any approach such as Heinrichs which locates

40 Reuten and Williams 1989; Moseley 1997.


41 Taylors suggestion that Marx neglects the uncertainty at the heart of exchange on
capitalist markets is particularly objectionable given Marxs explicit stress on the perilous
leap of the commodity (Marx 1976, pp. 2002). Although Marx subsequently leaves the
question of realisation of commodities to one side whilst exploring the production
of surplus-value in Volume 1, there are innumerable references to the problem that
production does not guarantee sale throughout Marxs texts.
42 Marx 1981, Chapter 10, pp. 273301.

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the objectivity of value simply as a product of exchange. This, he suggests,


leads to finding Wertgegenstandlichkeit [value objectivity] wherever there are
exchange relations and thereby loses the essential historical discontinuity
that characterises the mode of production of commodities. Heinrich who, like
Arthur, would stress that the analysis is always of capitalism as a social totality,
would not I suspect accept this account of his position. However Tomba
proceeds, more insightfully, to emphasise, quoting from Krahl, that43

The growth in value takes place in production but it manifests itself in


circulation: the value contained in the commodities must be realized,
such that the valorisation process is completed only with the realisation
of value: the exchange-value considered logically is constituted in the
sphere of production, considered genetically, is constituted in the sphere
of circulation.

Once again, however, a clear distinction between value and exchange-value


would have helped to clarify what is at stake in this analysis: it is the value and
not the exchange-value, in Marxs later version, which is constituted in the
sphere of production.

Bellofiore and Moseley Debate

Roberto Bellofiores essay A Ghost Turning into a Vampire in Re-reading Marx


soon reveals that he does not share the approach of Taylor, his co-editor for
the other volume. Bellofiore opens his account with a defence of dialectics
which he proposes has three distinct roles in Capital: firstly in exploring the
inner connection of objects and concepts which Schmidt labelled as a weak
ontology; secondly in stressing that whilst essence must appear...appearance
while exhibiting the essence at the same time distorts it or, following Roberto
Finelli, dialectics as dissimulation; thirdly, along the lines advocated by Arthur
and Reuten, systematic dialectics in which categories (including value) need
to be redefined again and again at each successive stage or layer of Marxs
theoretical development of the concept capital. Bellofiore proceeds to consider
the method of Capital, again invoking Finelli, as a circle of presupposition-posit.
This means that the presupposition of the result is posited by the result itself,

43 Krahl 1984, as quoted by Tomba.

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in a spiral. What at first appear as subjective and mental abstractions are rather
posited by the argument as objective and real abstractions.44
All this is highly compressed but illuminating and suggestive. Bellofiore then
develops an account of the abstraction of labour as a process drawing on both
Napoleoni writing in the 1970s in Italy and Rubins Essays in a very interesting
way. He concludes that section with the suggestion that [t]he only way to
rescue the Napoleoni-Rubin line, in my view, is to radicalise it so that the living
labour in production is already tentatively social thanks to some monetary
ante-validation.45 Up to that point I remained sympathetic to the argument.
Once one moves to the circuit of capital in Marx, the actual purchase of living
labour-power as a commodity does indeed require some form of monetary
ante-validation, or money up front. Wages are paid in money, not as a basket
of physical commodities, and indeed this is one reason why neo-Ricardian
approaches to the transformation problem are mistaken as they rest on the
assumption of the wage comprising a fixed bundle of commodities (as David
Ricardo also assumed).
Bellofiore, however, insists that it is necessary at this stage to break with
Marxs notion of money as commodity and substitute finance granted by the
banking sector which he regards as essential in Marxian critical political
economy.46 This is quite another matter and suddenly shifts the argument onto
another plane. Whilst Bellofiore is right to claim that such finance has become
central to the circuit of capital (and this can be traced back to Marxs own
time as Marx himself recognises in his notes on banking and credit) it does
not follow that Marx was wrong or even merely historically dated to start from
money as a commodity in his value-form analysis. We need to retain Marxs
recognition that money can be derived as one commodity produced among
others with its own intrinsic value before we can grasp the logic whereby
commodity money has been replaced by a symbol of itself, a symbol which still
acts as the Monetary Expression of Labour-Time (a concept which Bellofiore
endorses).47
Bellofiore also takes a critical stance towards Fred Moseleys essay on Money
and Totality: Marxs Logic in Volume 1 of Capital in the Constitution of Capital

44 Bellofiore and Fineschi (eds.) 2009, p. 180.


45 Bellofiore and Fineschi (eds.) 2009, p. 184.
46 This is the Schumpeterian thread in Bellofiores work which he has continued to
defend over many years. For a more elaborate presentation, see Bellofiore 2005. See by
comparison Lapavitsas 2005 in the same collection edited by Moseley for a defence of
Marxs starting point.
47 Lapavitsas 2005.

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collection. Moseleys initial objective in that essay is simply to establish that


Volume 1 is about money from the very beginning.48 Money is the necessary
form of appearance of labour times, he writes, using the same quotation
from Capital, Volume 1, that I quoted earlier.49 Once Marx moves to the
transformation of money into capital in Part 2, all the quantities of value and
surplus-value are measured in money. The second part of the essay is devoted
to establishing that in Marxs analysis of individual capitals in the sections on
surplus-value production those individual capitals are consistently regarded
as representing the total social capital. His seemingly uncontentious thesis
is that Marx has produced a macro-monetary theory, to use the language of
contemporary economics.
Given his own insistence on the monetary character of Marxs analysis one
might expect Bellofiore to endorse the phrase macro-monetary. Nevertheless
Bellofiore challenged Moseleys interpretation in his chapter on Marx and the
Macro-Monetary Foundation of Microeconomics in the Constitution of Capital
collection and this provoked Moseley into a brief reply. One issue is again
Bellofiores concern to develop a non-commodity monetary theory. However,
Moseley makes no reference to this question in his response where he is more
inclined to emphasise points of agreement at that level of abstraction. Where
Moseley admits to a significant difference, this concerns Marxs derivation
of the value of variable capital (or labour-power) from a given quantity of
subsistence.
The textual evidence appears to support Bellofiore on this. Marxs reliance
on a fixed real wage determining the value of labour-power, however qualified
by references to social and historical conditions, can indeed be regarded as the
one problematic Ricardian residue correctly identified by Heinrich. Yet Moseley
is also right that defining variable capital as the actual quantity of money-
capital advanced enables a more coherent solution to the transformation issue
in line with the so-called new interpretation and this appears to be his primary
concern.50 If there is a difference it appears to be more that Bellofiore wants to

48 Bellofiore and Taylor (eds.) 2004, p. 147.


49 Marx 1976, p. 188 as per footnote 24.
50 See also Moseley 2000. Saad-Filho 2002 associates the so-called New Interpretation of the
Transformation Problem with value-form theory because they share an emphasis on the
monetary expression of value. But it is possible to retain socially-necessary labour-time
as the immanent measure of value for commodities and endorse Moseleys version of
the new interpretation, because the latter assumes the monetary form of both constant
and variable capital corresponding to the monetary starting point of the circuit of capital
M-C-M.

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insist with some justification, as he shows elsewhere, that defining the value
of labour-power as the labour-time equivalent of the money wage is a break
with Marxs own analysis.51 Yet this is not spelt out clearly in the chapter under
review and once again the hapless reader is left to speculate on precisely how
the contours of the map of differences have been shifting over time.

Tony Smith and a Conclusion from Marx

That criticism aside, this review has sought to suggest why these two books
are not simply disparate collections of essays with little relationship between
them. What is on offer from all the contributions is a serious engagement with
Marxs method in Capital, in a manner which Rosdolsky for one would surely
have approved. However, there is a good (dialectical) reason for concluding
with praise for one of the authors who has so far only been mentioned in
passing.
Tony Smith has chapters in each of the two books relating to issues of
machinery and technological change. One theme emerges in both and is also
mentioned by Tomba. What Marx achieves, in a manner unmatched by any
of his contemporaries or those who have followed, is an explanation of the
astonishing paradox of technological innovation under capitalism that remains
acutely relevant to our current condition. In his essay in the Constitution of
Capital volume, Smith explores, with his usual scrupulous care and lucidity,
exactly why the currently influential school of neo-Schumpeterian analysts
of technological innovation, for all their many insights, simply cannot get
to grips with this paradox. The development of machinery has always been
accompanied by pressure for the intensification of labour and an increase in
the working day, precisely because the capitalist who introduces it is afraid
of the threat of moral depreciation, a loss of capital value, if a competitor
introduces even more advanced technology.
As so often, Marx put it best in a quote Smith puts into a footnote. It is a
conclusion that Marx would never have reached without his version of value
theory and an analysis of the coercive laws of competition as central to the
dynamic of capital. For the benefit of any reader who does not know it already,

51 Bellofiore 2002, p. 120, elaborates on his views of the New Interpretation which he
describes as a tremendous advance but one which breaks with Marxs chain of causality.
Bellofiore seeks to reconcile this with a Sraffian simultaneous solution, but in my view
that model is addressing a different sort of question from Marxs and values in Marxs
sense do not appear at all in Sraffa.

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Marx refers to ...the economic paradox that the most powerful instrument
for reducing labour-time suffers a dialectical inversion and becomes the most
unfailing means for turning the whole lifetime of the worker and his family
into labour-time at capitals disposal for its own valorisation.52
Humanitys revolutionary task requires that we realise the potential for
liberation contained within those products of the globalised collective worker,
such as IT systems, which continue to be used as means of our subordination.
The product may be immaterial, to use a fashionable adjective, but the number
of hours spent tied to the desktop computer remains a determinant of value.
Not all the authors in these two very useful collections appear to share that
analysis but one hopes that all would endorse the objective of liberation from
domination by capital.

Peter Green
Independent Researcher
peteg367@gmail.com

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