Rancires text in Reading Capital as a contribution to the

debates on Marx's theory of value and the value-form

(presentation at the Historical Materialism Conference, London 5-8

November 2015)

Dimitris Papafotiou

b4uh4us@gmail.com

Panagiotis Sotiris

panagiotis.sotiris@gmail.com

Abstract

50 years after its original publication Reading Capital remains one of the most

important contributions to Marxist debates. One of its most interesting aspects is

exactly the fact that it is a reading of Marxs Capital and of Marxs theory of the

value-form, that in a certain way preceded the major debates of theory of value

and the value-form from the 1970s onwards. However, relatively little attention

has been paid to this aspect, since the main tendency has been to treat Reading

Capital as a more general epistemological and / or philosophical statement and

as the expression of High Althusserianism. In contrast to this tendency, we

would like to insist on the importance of Reading Capital as in intervention and

contribution to the debates on Marxs theory of value and the value form by

means of a comparative reading of Rancie res contribution to Reading Capital and

 2

I.I. Rubins conceptualization of the value-form, attempting to show that in

Reading Capital there is much more to be found than simply structuralism.

Keywords: Marx; Rancie re; Althusser; Rubin; Value-form; commodity fetishism.

Louis Althussers writings in the 1970s were very critical of certain aspects of

Karl Marxs theory of the value form and in particular the notion of fetishism.

Moreover, the tendency of most contemporary value theory is to be Hegelian-

Marxist in its theoretical references. However, at the moment of High

Althusserianism, in Reading Capital, we find a text by Jacques Rancie re that is an

important contribution to value-form theory and offers a reading of value theory

as a theory of social forms and a novel approach to the notion of fetishism.

What makes it more intriguing is the fact that this text pre-dates the opening of

the debate through texts as Hans-Georg Backhaus Dialectic of the Value Form, 1

Roman Rosdolskys The Making of Marxs Capital, 2 or the re-discovery of the work

of I.I. Rubin.

In our presentation, we will move in two directions:

- We will revisit Rancie res conception of the social form by means of finding the

analogies between his positions and the positions of Rubin, taking into

consideration that Rancie re did not have any access to the work of Rubin

1
Backhaus 1980.
2
Rosdolsky 1977.
 3

- Secondly, we will revisit Rancie res reading of the theory of fetishism as the

road not taken in the end by the Althusserian current regarding the notion of

fetishism.

I.I. Rubin, is considered a pioneer of the form-theoretical approach. As Chris

Arthur has stressed,

Rubin stands at the origin of the value form paradigm

of Marxist theory.3

According to Rubin every process of social production has a certain dual

existence based on the material-technological aspect of production, what

traditionally we refer to as productive forces, and the social form of the process

of production, that is relations of production. This duality governs all economic

categories and phenomena.

Parallel to the material aspect or production materialized in the sequence

material process of production concrete labor use value, Rubin places his

own sociological (the term he uses when he refers to social relations and forms)

sequence: relations of production - abstract labor (- value -) - exchange value

money.

Rubin insists that we cannot deduce the value-form simply from exchange. He

conceives commodity economy as an integrated whole, a totality not generated

3
Arthur 2004, p. 39.
 4

by generalized exchange, but a totality generating the special property of

exchangeability of products. Behind the generalized commodity exchange, Rubin

sees a generalized structure, a structure of production relations.

Coming now to Rancie re, it is interesting that we find the same emphasis on the

question of social form: Why does value takes this form, why does it take this

form in exchange, although it is not constituted as such in exchange? For

Rancie re, to answer this question we need a different form of causality that can

refer to social relations of production as an absent cause. 4 Therefore, what can

explain the complex relation between appearing and concealing that

characterizes the capitalist economy in its appearance as an endless series of

commodity exchanges, is not a question of subjectivity or of subjective

appropriation (and distortion) of reality. What we see is the particular effectivity

of a structure that exists only in its effects.

[W]hat determines the relation between the effects (the relations between

the commodities) is the cause (the social relations of production) insofar

as it its absent. This absent cause is not labour as a subject, it is the

identity of abstract labour and concrete labour inasmuch as this

generalization expresses the structure of a certain mode of production,

the capitalist mode of production.5

It is interesting that in Rubin we also have, in a certain sense a theory of the

effectivity of a structure. The emergence of exchange value as a social form is the

4
Rancie re 1971b, p. 36.
5
Rancie re 1971b, p. 36.
 5

result of a given structure of relations of production, a structure that sometimes

is called a form of production and sometimes is considered to be a mode of

production.

Although Rubin has been criticized as proposing a theory of generalized

commodity exchange without reference to capitalist relations of production, we

think that he always refers to the entire structure of the capitalist mode of

production. Value form emerges as the result of a system of relations of

productions, of relations of exchange, of socially combined labors which are

studied as a totality, as an aggregated whole, as an effective structure, to use

Rancie res words.

Going back to Rancie re, this reference to the absent social relations of production

is also necessary if we want to explain the contradictions traversing the very

conception of selling labour power as a commodity.

We are confronted with the following contradiction: labour appears as a

commodity whereas it cannot ever be a commodity. That is, we are dealing

with a structure which is impossible. This possibility of impossibility

refers us to the absent cause, to the relations of production. The

immediate producers, separated from their means of production as a

result of Primitive Accumulation, are constrained to sell their labour-

power as a commodity. Their labour becomes wage labour and the

 6

appearance is produced that what is paid for by the capitalist is their

labour itself, and not their labour power.6

Rancie re then turns his attention from the notion of concealment to the notion of

inversion between phenomenal form and real process.

The inversion of the inner structural determinations, appears as a

fundamental characteristic of the process. It is this law that determines

the development of its forms.7

For Rancie re this thematic of the inversion is in fact a theory of the production of

subjectivity in the capitalist mode of production, a theory of capitalist

subjectivity,8 a process through which the basic tendencies and dynamics are

internalized by the bearers of social relations and practices as motives for action.

It is here that Rancie re makes a very important choice of theoretical tactics.

Instead of going first to Volume One of Marxs Capital and the theory of fetishism

presented there, he prefers to start by Volume Three and the formation of the

average rate of profit and the apparent inversion caused by competition in

relation to the real processes and determinations. This has nothing to do with the

anthropological relation between essence and phenomena. Instead, the

conceptual work grasps the articulation of forms insofar as it grasps what

determines their articulation, i.e., the social relations, concealed by the a-

conceptual connection of the rate of profit. 9 It is here that the notion of the
6
Rancie re 1971b, p. 44
7
Rancie re 1972, p. 32.
8
Rancie re 1972, p. 32.
9
Rancie re 1972, p. 37.
 7

subject as the support (tra ger) of social relations enters the stage. It is by this

mechanism that individual capitalists misperceive profit and cannot perceive the

real mechanism by which it is determined. However, this misperception is in fact

instrumental for capital accumulation and the reproduction of its conditions.

The place of the agents of production in the process thus determines the

necessary representations of their practice as mere expressions of the

apparent motion of capital and therefore as totally inverted with respect

to its motion.10

Rancie re turns his attention to the relation between value and price of

production. He insists that this does not represent an advance in historical stage,

but another level in the process of production, thus opposing Engels claim in

Volume 3 of Capital that the law of value was valid for simple commodity

production.11

For Rancie re it is exactly this theoretical problematization of social forms that is

the only way to actually theorize both the structural determinations and the

forms of appearance of capitalist social relations and practices. He proposes a

theoretical system and not just a historicization of the concepts of the classical

political economy. In a line similar to Althussers anti-empiricist and anti-

historicist emphasis on the centrality of the problematic, Rancie re stresses that

10
Rancie re c, p. 41.
11
See Engels preface to Marxs Capital Volume Three This makes clear, of course, why in
the beginning of his first book Marx proceeds from the simple production of
commodities as the historical premise, ultimately to arrive from this basis to capital
(MECW, Vol. 37, p. 16). For a critique see Heinrich 1996-7.
 8

Marx is in fact not historicizing the categories of political economy, but he is

making a system of them.

It is interesting that a similar anti-historicist approach can also be found in

Rubin, when he insists that confusing the theoretical and the historical setting of

the theory of value is not only pointless, as we have shown, but also harmful, 12 or

when he insists that [t]he logical order of the economic categories follows from

the character of the production relations which are expressed by the

categories.13

Following the position of Althusser, Rancie re distinguishes the theory of the

value-form in Capital from the anthropological perspective in the 1844

Manuscripts. Rancie re insists that inside the problematic of alienation of human

essence it is impossible to pose the question of a scientific theory of the value

and to set up of the field of political economy as a field of objectivity 14

This can also be found in the texts of Rubin several decades before Reading

Capital: In Rubin we find a move away from a conception of labour substance or

essence and a move towards a relational concept of value, though for Rubin this

is not defined as a break or shift in the work of Marx.

The last part of Rancie res text turns to the question of fetishism in order to

present a reading of the notion of fetishism that is not a variation of an

12
Rubin 1973, p. 273.
13
Rubin 1973, p. 32.
14
Rancie re 1971a, p. 51.
 9

anthropological theory but a structural notion that emerges at the surface of the

process of production.

The fetishistic discourse is the elaboration of this connection of concrete

forms presented on the surface of the capitalist process and reflected in

the consciousness of the agents of production.15

Once again, Rancie re chooses to begin not with Volume One but with Volume

Three of Capital in order to study the question of what Marx defines as the

externalization of capitalist relations. For Rancie re the process that leads to

fetishism in Marx begins with the externalization of the relations of capital in the

form of interest bearing capital and in particular Marxs reference to it being an

a-conceptual [begrifflose] form, since it is a form in which the form that makes it

possible disappears.16 The circuit of money-capital with its principle of the self-

expansion of value that can only be explained by what disappears in the process,

namely capitalist social relations, is a condensation of the logic of capitalist social

relations. The result is double motion that includes at the same time the

materialization of capitalist social relations and determinations of production

and what can be described as a subjectification of the material bases of this

process.

Lets now note some of Rancieres crucial theoretical choices on fetishism:

15
Rancie re 1976, p. 352.
16
Rancie re 1976a, p. 354.
 10

The first is that he conceives the Marxian concept of fetishism as a structural

generalized fetishism, a fetishism of value and not just commodity fetishism. This

is exactly Rubins argument in the Soviet Debates in the 1920s. We should also

stress that Rubin not only rejected commodity fetishism but even capital

fetishism, arguing that it is not class antagonisms that generate fetishism (this

would finally lead to a subjective conception of fetishism) but commodity

structure (which implies a non-subjective theory of fetishism, just like Rancie res

theory) leading to a theory of the fetishism of value.

Rubin and Rancie res move from commodity fetishism to fetishism of value, is in

our opinion also closer to Marxs own conception of fetishism exemplified by the

treatment of fetishism in the 1861-63 Manuscript. The following passage from

Marx is revealing

The ossification of relations, their presentation as the relation of men to

things having a definite social character is here likewise brought out in

quite a different manner from that of the simple mystification of

commodities and the more complicated mystification of money. The

transubstantiation, the fetishism, is complete.17

It is interesting to note that this is also relevant to the very evolution of the

notion of fetishism. Marx elaborated the notion of fetishism in the 1861-1863

Manuscript as a fetishism of value and capital and then elaborated upon the

notion of commodity fetishism in Volume One. The second is that Rancie re

17
MECW 32, p. 494.
 11

incorporates the notion of fetishism to a broader thinking about social forms,

presenting in his text a theory of the emergence of the commodity form and the

value form as representation of capitalist social relations. This in turn produces a

highly original theory of social appearances that moves from the subjective

terrain to that of social relations and practices. It is at the level of social

structures, in this case of social relations of capitalist exploitation, that the

condition for the emergence of these forms, as at the same time presence and

concealment, emerges. This creates a new relation between the visible and the

invisible at the level of social practices and relations. The visibility of social forms

is a result of the social relations underlying them, but we are dealing with a

different kind of causality, a form of structural causality, or of absent cause,

where a structure exists only in its results. It refers to a socially necessary form of

miscognition. The very fact that the agents of capitalist social relations do not

have an accurate knowledge of the mechanism of value creation and of surplus

value as the origin of profit, is indispensable for their fetishistic conception of

profit and, consequently for their conception of the average profit as a

mechanism for the distribution of capital between sectors and enterprises, for

their perception of interest bearing capital and for their perception of the self-

expansion of value. All these deformed perceptions of reality are socially

necessary for the expanded reproduction of capitalist social relations.

It is again interesting that a similar non-anthropological and deeply relational

conception of fetishistic relations of objectification can also be found in the work

of Rubin:
 12

Marx did not only show that human relations were veiled by relations

between things, but rather that, in the commodity economy, social

production relations inevitably took the form of things and could not be

expressed except through things.18

Now the question arises why both Rancie re and Althusser discarded in the end

the notion of fetishism as anthropological, idealistic, and -especially in the case of

Rancie re - a mystification of the collective envisioning of the struggling

proletariat.

One of the reasons has to do with their increased apprehension of the effectivity

of social antagonism. In Althusser this takes the form of an insistence on the

primacy of relations of production over productive forces and on the importance

of autonomous popular struggles. 19 In Rancie re this takes the form of a turn

towards the modalities of proletarian subjectivity.

This emphasis on antagonistic relations of production, on struggles and

movements, could easily lead to an underestimation of the importance of social

forms and in particular of the social and ideological effectivity of the value-form.

The reproduction of the capitalist mode of production does not depend only on

the relation of forces in production, but also the reproduction of a series of

practices at the level of circulation. Capitalism is not simply extraction of surplus

18
Rubin 1973, p. 6.
19
Althusser 2014.
 13

value; it is also the generalized expansion of the market, including money and

capital markets.

At the same time, Althussers post-1968 emphasis on the role of the state and a

more political approach can also lead to a certain misunderstanding of these

forms of miscognition, arising out of the realm of economic practices. Two

important points have to be made here. One is that the theory of the Ideological

Apparatuses of the State is not a theory of the origin of ideological

representations but of their reproduction. Ideological representations arise out of

all aspects of social life, out of all social practices, economic, political, or

discursive. Ideological State Apparatuses are instrumental in order to turn them

into more coherent ideological discourses and strategies and in order to

reproduce them. The other is that the processes of the emergence of fetishistic

representations are not outside the State or the practices of the State. The State is

always already present both in the market and in the capitalist production

process. The legal guarantee of the wage contract, and of money, the importance

of State power to safeguard credit and the banking system, the role of bourgeois

law in all aspects of the economy, all these attest that the social practices from

which fetishistic representations emerge, are always also conditioned by state

apparatuses, their material interventions and discursive tropes, the class

strategies inscribed in state apparatuses, and the ideological practice being

reproduced in the ISAs.

Now 50 years after Reading Capital, in a conjuncture where we can see both the

return of mass politics and the political effectivity of social and political
 14

antagonism, but also the pervasive effects of the expansion of money and capital

markets, exemplified in the fetishistic neoliberal fantasies of auto-regulated

markets, we can return to these debates, re-read texts that have lost nothing of

their theoretical force, but also open insist on the communication between

different traditions of Marxist Theory, in order to move from parallel monologues

to a real and fruitful dialogue.

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