| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 54

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Christopher J. Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx's Capital (Leiden: Brill 2002)

CHRISTOPHER ARTHUR has devoted much of his scholarly life to studying the relation between Marx's Capital and Hegel's Logic. This is a collection of essays, all of which (except the introductory and concluding chapters) have been published elsewhere, but are here revised to varying extents.

For those interested in Capital, this is an important book to read, for it concentrates the mind on the meaning and sequence of the categories in Marx's great work. It suggests a rigorously dialectical way of reading the interconnection of categories in Capital volume one, chapters 1-6, a way that parallels Hegel's Logic. He makes the important claim that these chapters should be read strictly as a theory of the commodity, money, and capital as circulation forms. It follows that the content of these forms, which requires a labour theory of value, can only be well grounded dialectically after the logics of the value forms have been grounded.

Arthur masterfully presents the basic elements of dialectical reasoning and its appropriateness in studying an object which is self-abstracting in the sense that it is self-expanding value (capital) itself that, through its own motions, homogenizes the actuality that the theory aims to grasp. To an extent, then, in its historical unfolding, capital helps the theorist by developing a commodity-economic logic that attempts to subsume all fundamental economic categories to its self-expanding motion. It becomes possible for the theorist to complete the abstracting precisely because capital has already taken the lead in history, such that the theorist must simply learn to follow it. This means that while "the systematic dialectic of capital" is rooted in history, its completion occurs only in thought. It follows that the logic of capital and the history of capitalism are distinct, forcing upon us the necessity of always thinking the ways in which and the degree to which capital's logic impacts on particular historical contexts. As Arthur points out, actual historical prices are always "hugely overdetermined" relative to the abstract law of value. (14)

According to Arthur, the fruitfulness of the starting point of a dialectic is demonstrated by its ability to absorb more and more concrete moments of a totality until it comes full circle. It is this circle that makes capital a self-subsistent subject or a totality able to reproduce and expand itself from within itself. But this means that all inputs and outputs of production must be securely commodified, so that capital can achieve the indifference to use-value that is required by its single-minded focus on profit expansion.

While there is much more in Arthur's collection of essays that I agree with, I think that it will be of interest to the reader, if I briefly mention some of my disagreements. I will condense this discussion down to two fundamental points. First, I think his understanding of the dialectic of capital is flawed by an inadequate understanding of the relation between value and use-value. Second, while Arthur distinguishes systematic dialectics from historical dialectics, by not theorizing both their separateness and connectedness, he sometimes inadequately distinguishes them.

Arthur claims that Capital volume one, chapters 1-6, is strictly a theory of forms without content, and that use-value is strictly absent. (150) Thus, it follows that the dialectic unfolds from value as presence relating to itself as value as absence. The resulting value form theory is "the prime determinant of the capitalist economy," (11) or, in other words, the "form of capital is the overriding moment" (88) in the entire system.

The dialectic of circulation comes to an end when it is confronted by the use-value obstacles of production, or when form is confronted by content. If the remainder of the theory of capital's inner logic does not parallel Hegel's Logic, then it is unclear just how it is to be theorized. The basic problem is that in Capital the basic contradiction is between value and use-value from the beginning. By pushing use-value into the background, Arthur makes capital into pure form, which in turn leads him to overemphasize the role of pure form determination in the entire theory.

This leads to incoherence because he then wavers between emphasizing the preeminance of value form theory, on the one hand, and the claim that "value is the outcome of class struggle at the point of production" (57) on the other. If we take this latter claim seriously, then the laws of motion of capital disappear altogether, since we cannot generalize about value beyond saying that it varies with the balance of class forces in each factory. The problem is that he defeats his own dialectic by first evacuating use-value and then returning to it with such a vengeance. It is fine to claim that "labour is in and against capital;" but at the level of systematic dialectics, we cannot give the "against" any specific content, precisely because at this level the labour market, periodic crises, etc. regulate wages and the supply of labour. Again, it is not a question of denying labourers all subjectivity, but of seeing capital's commodification of labour-power as successfully channelling that subjectivity into channels supportive of profit maximization. For example, workers are free to quit any job, but at this level of abstraction, we assume that any other job will have similar wages and working conditions. Workers are free to bargain for the highest wages possible, but this bargaining power is undermined by the fact that in pure capitalism we cannot assume the existence of trade unions and by periodic crises that produce high unemployment.

Arthur again falls towards incoherence when he argues that the systematic dialectic of capital has two subjects — capital and labour. If labour is outside capital, then the dialectic must be of capital and labour — two totalities and their interrelations. Arthur tries to say that there is really one totality, but labour is relatively autonomous within this totality. But if labour is even relatively outside, it can continually disrupt the dialectic in unpredictable ways thus preventing it having any coherence. In order to have a coherent theory of capital's inner logic, we must assume that labour power has been securely commodified. The reason Arthur has a problem with this is that he wrongly thinks that such an assumption must deny all subjectivity to workers, and because he thinks that the class struggle that is so present in history must for some reason be diminished if it is not also given a central position in systematic dialectics. This latter concern, I believe, stems from inadequate attention to articulating the relations between systematic and historical dialectics as distinct levels of analysis. In other words, Arthur at times gets sucked into the very logical-historical method that he explicitly rejects. For if the levels are distinct, the reification at the level of systematic dialectics that subsumes labour to capital can, at the level of historical analysis, always be resisted and even radically transformed.

My recommendation would be to see the entire three volumes of Capital as a single dialectic in which value generates successive categories by gradually overcoming the fundamental use-value obstacles present in all capitalist economies. The use-value of commodities is an obstacle to exchange until we dialectically generate the money form from the commodity form. But even with the money form, the exhange of one use-value for another is an obstacle unless we generate the capital form that uses money to make more money. In turn this becomes inexplicable unless labour and production processes are subsumed to the capital form, and so forth. At the level of systematic dialectics we study how variations in the length of the working day impact on the extraction of suplus value, but we do not have a working day of a given length. For that we need to turn to historical analysis where numerous causal factors may play a role, though we would expect that among these class struggle would always be important. What systematic dialectics shows is that there is necessarily an antagonistic relationship between capital and labour, but it cannot show how this is translated into historically specific forms of class struggle. Thus instead of making the gratuitous claim that class struggle is the primary determinant of systematic dialectics, we should claim instead that systematic dialectics presents a clear structural theory of class and shows why class antagonism is likely to be the constant companion of capitalism in history. And if our dialectic encompasses all three volumes we will also understand how capital achieves not only indifference to land, but also, in the form of interest, indifference to itself. Indeed in the present age of finance capital, we are being made painfully aware of possible consequences of such indifference.

By focusing on the dialectic of capital, Arthur's book is a real gift. For while a strictly dialectical theory may be impossible, even to approach such a theory is to construct a theory with great epistemological strength, strength that should help us immensely to clarify our historical love/hate relation with capital and finally to separate ourselves from it.


Robert Albritton York University

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