Edward Elgar, Cheltenham 2024. 258 pp., £100 hb
ISBN 9781800880757
Reviewed by Peter Green
About the reviewer
…
The title of the edited collection of essays Marx’s Key Concepts may mistakenly suggest that it is yet another of those handbooks on Marx favoured by publishers. The editors have aimed ‘to cover the full range of his critique of political economy’ (xii), but there are some symptomatic absences. Despite a reference to ‘the systemic crisis of the neo-liberal accumulation regime of capitalism’ (xi) in the introduction, there is no discussion of the concept of crisis in any of the essays. The same applies, to refer only to words beginning with the letter C in English, and despite occasional mentions, to the concepts of class, competition, contradiction and cyclicity.
Yet almost every author, including those with whom I have significant disagreements, provides a distinctive and thought-provoking contribution to the project summed up by the editors. After also referring to the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’ and the ongoing publication of all Marx’s previously unpublished material in the MEGA, the editors declare their aim:
to show the research in its making, the theoretical possibilities not yet undertaken, the liveliness of the debate, the inexhaustible dialectic between our questioning of the present and the answers that could come from a Marxian approach (xi).
In that perspective, Marx’s Key Concepts is better regarded as an unusually diverse sampler than a handbook – especially of work which is otherwise only available in German or Italian. We have venerable contributors such as Roberto Fineschi (on the concept of ‘Reproduction’) and Frieder Otto Wolf (on ‘Finite Marxism’), with an impressive record of philosophical reflections on Marx’s method, very little of which is available in English. Representatives of a more recent generation include Stefano Breda (on ‘Materialism and Dialectics’) and Frank Engster (on ‘Money, Measurement and Quantification’) who, on the evidence of these essays, and the details in the list of contributors, have produced substantial books worthy of translation. An essay by Kirstin Munro on ‘Social Reproduction’ discusses recent debates among Marxist-feminists and the danger of analysis of the reproduction of labour-power in isolation from the reproduction of capital as a whole. Emanuela Conversano, on Marx’s ‘Ethnological Notebooks’, summarizes some of her recent work on the MEGA.
Despite the book’s inclusion in a series ‘New Directions in Economics’, most of the contributors (10 out of 14 on a rough estimate) have taught philosophy and/or the history of ideas. That does not include Bellofiore, who, along with Riva, is deeply influenced by the Neue Marx-Lectüre, proposed by Backhaus and Reichelt in the 1970s (cf. Bellofiore and Riva 2015). The relationship between Marx’s dialectical method and Hegel, in some cases mediated by Adorno and other ‘critical’ theorists, in others by Althusser’s critique of such readings, features in many of the essays. There is a relative neglect of other influences on the thought of both Marx and Engels. However, the importance of Aristotle is highlighted by Bellofiore (in his essay on ‘Absolute Value’) with reference to concepts such as potentiality, actuality and substance in Marx.
A chapter by Jessop on ‘The Economic Cell Form’ is exceptional in its discussion of the influence, revealed in correspondence between Marx and Engels, of some decisive discoveries in nineteenth century natural science and is strongly recommended to philosophers inclined to neglect this influence. He focuses on how cell theory in particular contributed to Marx’s choice of the commodity as the ‘cell-form’ of capitalist social relations. His conclusions wisely stress both the heuristic value of the metaphor, and the limits to all such analogies. Vittorio Morfino on ‘Material Interchange’ in a short essay of a mere ten pages, takes off from a footnote on Lucretius in the second edition of volume 1 of Capital, proceeds to Marx’s notes on Darwin and comments that labour-power for Marx is, to quote the footnote ‘above all else, the material of nature transposed into a human organism’ (218). That recognition of the materiality of the production of value is unfortunately absent from those contributions which, influenced by the Neue Marx-Lectüre, focus on the purely social form of value as distinct from its substance and measure.
The more philosophically inclined essays can be grouped into three sets. In the first group, the essays by Breda and Wolf share a commitment to what Wolf initially developed as a project of ‘materialist dialectics’. Wolf’s ‘finite Marxism’ refers back to an essay by Althusser of 1978 and counterposes a ‘finite plurality’ to the ‘monist infinity’ characteristic of so-called dialectical materialism in the Stalinist period. His essay successfully differentiates this approach to the limits of a dialectical presentation from the postmodernist variants of Althusserianism.
Breda builds on this project with a cogent critique of what he terms ‘germ-cell dialectics’, in which Marx’s method of presentation is understood as a process of logical deduction of categories from one another. He agrees that the development of the categories does not correspond to a historical temporality. But it does depend at each stage on introducing historical-empirical data, corresponding to the preconditions of the existence, for example, of labour-power available as a commodity. This presentation of materialist dialectics is very well-constructed but marred by a casual reference in its conclusions to Marx’s supposed ‘theoretical errors’ with respect to questions such as the transformation of values and the rate of profit. The very questionable claim that these ‘errors’ are ‘evidently due to inadequate meta-theoretical awareness’ (28) reveals the influence of Michael Heinrich, whose major work Breda has recently translated into Italian.
The second group comprises contributors writing either explicitly (Luca Micaloni on capital as an ‘Automatic Subject’ and Roberto Fineschi on ‘Reproduction’), or as mediated by Adorno and critical theory (Chris O’Kane on ‘Domination’ and Gianluca Pozzoni on ‘Real Abstraction’), in a more Hegelian vein. The Pozzoni essay deserves credit as a concise survey of discussions of the concept of ‘real abstraction’ from Marx (who does not use the term as such) via Sohn-Rethel and Adorno through to Toscano and the Endnotes collective. In contrast, O’Kane, writing on ‘Domination’, regards any reference to the primacy of class domination as somehow both trans-historical and reductionist. Instead he emphasises the domination of all participants by a rather nebulous ‘bourgeois society’. Whether he can reconcile that partial truth with the Communist Manifesto is doubtful.
Miccaloni’s contribution is interesting on how Marx adopted Hegel’s conception of a true infinity with respect to concepts such as freedom, Spirit and God, and applied it to the sphere of political economy and capital – although more could have been made of the fact, noted by Miccaloni, that Marx, in the French edition of volume 1, replaced ‘subject’ with ‘substance’ in the relevant passage on capital as an automatic subject.
Fineschi’s essay on ‘Reproduction’ is a marvel of compressed clarity. He starts with one of Marx’s plans in the Grundrisse, referring to the Hegelian triad of Generality, Particularity and Singularity, and then explains how Marx shifted his position so that by volume 1, he has placed the necessity for capital of positing its own presuppositions, via a process of reproduction, at the heart of his analysis. Fineschi defends the necessity of Marx’s differentiation of primitive accumulation as a historical process from the ‘proper theory of capital accumulation’. However, Sebastiano Taccola writing on ‘Primitive Accumulation’ converges with Harvey’s stress on the contemporary relevance of the category.
The third group comprises the two editors and Frank Engster who have in common the influence of the Neue-Marx Lectüre. Their chapters are philosophically dense and sophisticated. We might agree with Bellofiore, whose essay is mainly devoted to Marx’s critique of both Bailey and Ricardo, on the problematic character of English translations, for which he provides an illuminating additional note. Yet one could fundamentally disagree over his rejection of Marx’s theory of money because of its supposed dependence on money as a physical commodity such as gold.
Riva, in his essay on ‘Critique’, focuses on Marx’s critique of classical political economy for its neglect of the forms of value. The way in which that critique is also a critique of ‘value’ and of the social relations reflected in political economy is explained very well. However, Riva ignores Marx’s equally fundamental critique of Ricardo for his ‘faulty architectonic’: the absence of the intermediate steps necessary for resolving the so-called transformation problem.
Engster refers positively to Backhaus’ critique of Marx’s approach to money and is dismissive in a phrase of ‘essentialist and substantialist’ value theory. His primary theme is the necessity of money as a measure of value, but he evades any systematic discussion of socially-necessary labour-time as the ‘immanent measure of value’. The division between necessary and surplus labour-time appears but only after money as capital has been derived – as in the work of Chris Arthur. An elaborate Hegelian account of Marx’s derivation of money as a solution to the ‘money-riddle’ misses, as do Backhaus and Arthur, the point of section 3 of chapter 1 of Capital. Marx was not concerned with the historical necessity of a universal equivalent, which is explained in chapter two, but with how any money commodity is necessarily the incarnation of social labour in general (giving us a monetary expression of labour-time). That was the riddle the classical economists failed to solve. What emerges in Backhaus, Arthur and Engster is a monetary theory of value without Marx’s value theory of money.
The third set of contributions deserves a longer, more forensic, critique. Here we can only conclude by endorsing the recommendation of Massimiliano Tomba on the back cover that this collection ‘is an innovative exploration in Marx’s laboratory and a must-read for passionate specialists.’
20 February 2024
References
- Riccardo Bellofiore and Tomasso Redolfi Riva 2015 The Neue Marx-Lektüre Radical Philosophy 189, Jan/Feb https://www.radicalphilosophyarchive.com/article/the-neue-marx-lekture/
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