Value in Marx : the Persistence of Value in a by George Henderson

Value in Marx : the Persistence of Value in a by George Henderson

By George Henderson


Long vulnerable to dogmatic war of words, the query of worth 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 brilliant. In Value in Marx, George Henderson deals a lucid rereading of Marx that strips worth of its turgid theoretical aid and reframes it as an research into the tensions among social family 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 price that equates worth to capital. as an alternative, those books experimentally compose and recompose price for an international that's greater than capitalist. At stake is how Marx conceives of human freedom, of balanced social preparations, and of keep an eye on 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 cheerful, means? Can they develop into points of what we wish, instead of being silenced and denied? so long as we persist in studying price greatly, following it as an energetic and never a shut-down, predetermined function of Marx’s texts, Henderson eventually perspectives Marx as responding certainly to those demanding situations and utilising price as a robust device of the political imaginary.


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Extra info for Value in Marx : the Persistence of Value in a More-Than-Capitalist World

Sample text

That commodity is labor power, and the site where its peculiar property is evident is in commodity production, not the sphere of circulation (the market). In capitalism, therefore, it is not simply that labor takes the form of value. , labor power must be commodified and put to the task of creating more value than it has itself). Capitalism must be a class-based system in which the surplus value produced is up for appropriation. We have now moved beyond our starting point. Value appears in a form other than itself and (a second point of broad agreement) masks the form that is crucial to its appearance, wage labor (or its analogues, piecework and salary work) as the source of surplus value.

The logic of the hoard is therefore immanent to the logic of circulation. 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 commodity in some sense mocks us. What else could it embody but social labor? What else could happen in the commodity society except that prior access to social labor be withheld? ”7 We know that commodity production abstracts human labor but invest the commodity anyway with extra powers. Precisely because it is possible to be silent about social labor, it is possible to fill it up with pleasure of an ironic sort or, indeed, pleasures that are far less canny. ”8 Where do things stand, then?

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