cuadernos de

NEGACION

AGAINST THE
VALORIZATION
OF LIFE

september 2020
cuadernos de

NEGACION

We have nothing to sell to our class
brothers, nothing to seduce them
with. We are not a small group com-
peting in prestige and influence with
the other small groups and parties
that claim to represent the exploi-
ted, and that pretend to govern
them. We are proletarians fighting
0 abolish Capital and the State with
the means at our disposal, no more
and no less.

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Forward comrades!

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AGAINST THE
VALORIZATION
OF LIFE

Presentation - 1

Commodity & value - 3

On the historical and logical bases of capitalist society - 7
Abstract labor and value as real abstraction - 10

The law of value - 12

Critique of the critiques of the marxian theory of value - 14
The valorization of value: surplus value - 18

Capitalist contradictions - 27

Notes on fictitious capital - 31

There is no policy against the dictatorship of value - 35

i

ANOTE ON THE CITATIONS

Itis not our task to announce the news nor guard some ancient treasure,
nonetheless, many who decide to read what follows may find small or
grand revelations,
like to share some well-known paragraphs from different publications,

s well as old statements. Those of us at Cuadernos

books, texts and papers that we use o prepare cach issue. When we
reproduce these quotes we name the authors simply to make visible the
steps we have taken and offer an invitation to go deeper. Those who
read attentive be able to distinguish the proximity of one or other
author. The vast majority of them are related, but this does not imply an

uncritical claim of them or of the organizations of which they are or were
part. And whoever reads with the inention of reflecting, as well as the
desire to transform reality, will understand that all of this is about much
more than just books, pamphlets, authors or words.

The texts here cited (as well as others) can be found at:
bibliotecacuadernosdenegacion.blogspor.com
PRESENTATION

There s no other way t end a problem than to finish
off the enemy: And this is what | wanted to get 10, 50
a5 t0 make you understand on what basis this society
i founded on.» (Come de Lautréamont, The Songs
of Maldoror)

In the broad and self-described revolutionary, combative, sub-
versive o however—it-calls-itself milicu, there's a propensity
0 divulge slogans that would look best on a poster, as part
of a publicity stunt. Part of following the capitalist logic of
quantity over quality involves spreading public announcements
instead of spreading reflection, inquiry and collective sharing.
In this way, what is publicized
be contemplated and admired without any participation by the

militancy as commodiy, ©@

spectators; or i the “least of worst” cases publicity is done “in
aninclusive’ way 50 as to gain supports with the promise of an
immediate activism or milicancy.

The understanding of matters such as the crtique of value
does not offer the consumer of political slogans any quick so-
lution to their woes, such as are promised (and also unsolved)
by parties, advertisers or shepherds of the nearest temple. To
understand capitalist domination it is important to engage with
these critiques as they form an important part of our struggle.
Whoever comes to the ritique of the economy with a consumer's
avitude and exclaims, «you have five minutes to convince me
o Il choose another options, may you lose no more time
and head directly to another option. A cerain dedication and
exertion are part of radical critique and they form a part of the
practical opposition to the logic of Capital and its false ricics.

Truly this consumer mentalicy, based in dominant immedia-
ism, is a product of commaodity logic. A commodity which
sets out to win requires an immediate effect. OF course this

immediate effect is otally counterfeit. In organic lfe solutions
0 questions (problems) are part of a process, a movement, and
not a mathematical solution. It s evident chat his process, this
movement, contains certain qualiative jumps which g
a“solution’” 102 question, but whomever wants to invent short-
cuts to quickly reach this qualitacive jump forgets that is along
the way that the quantiative transforms into the qualitative.

Furcher,although it may appear improbable or forced, there
are actions that urgently require a critique of value. So that
we do not use up our forces which in various ways sustain
capiralism, such as flling into the trap of self-management or
falling into the purest and simplst reformism. And we need this
critique so that we may stop sharing the same horizon with
the capitalists: the management of this society. This is why
we are interested in inquiring abou the bases of the cay
mode of production...so then, does thissill seem unimportanc?

Despite the fact that this topic is to be found within the
work of Karl Marx, due to slogancering and the managerial
perspective of Marxism and of Social-Democracy; this topic
has been censured, deliberately pur aside, or considered as a
secondary philosophical aspect of the revolutionary arsenal in
general and of Mars work in particular. As for the anarchist
movement, this topic has been mostly maligned for being
‘Marsist” or simply is existence remains unknown.

Mars sketched our the fundamental elements of a critique
of the basic categories of capitalist sociery: value, money, the
commodity, abstract labor, commodity-fetishism. This critique
of the nucleus of modernity is today more relevant than in the
time of Marx because during his time this nucleus only existed
in an embryonic state. To highlight this aspect of Marsian cric
tique — the wcritique of values — it s not necessary to force
these texts through convoluted interpretations: one only needs
0 read them closely, something which no one has done in a
century.» (Anselm Jappe, Adventures f the Commodiy).

Fortunately there have been some who (including within
the self-described Marxism), starting from a personal and
solitary effort, or also among numerous proletarian groups,
have rightly recognized the centralty of the critique of value
within our emanciparory perspective. Throughout this ssue,
we will explain will explain several of these expressions from
which we have drawn. A few notable examples include the
efforcs of Isaak llich Rubin during the hostile social context
of the early years of the Soviet Union and the efforts of the
curtents of Italian and Dutch-German communists du-

ring the 19205 Also Jacques Camatte with his publication
Invariance in France during the 1960s/1970s and Fredy
Perlman in the United States, as part of a whole generation
that started 1o have access to the once unpublished works of
Karl Mars. Then would come other anti-capitalist writers
and groups from which we have also drawn and which we
put together here.

Thus, what we present here s no novelry:. Even Aristorle (384
BCE — 322 BCE), in Politcs, fa from any critical intention,
approached the topic: «With every article of property there isa
double way of using it; both uses are related to the arcicle tself,
but no related 1o it in the same manner—one s peculiar o
the thing and the other s not peculiar to it. Take for example a
shoe—there s
of exchange; for both are ways of using a shoe, inasmuch as
even he that barters a shoe for money or food with the custo-
mer that wanis a shoe uses it as a shoe, though not for the use
peculiar t0.ashoe, since shoes have not come into existence for
the purpose of barter. And the same also holds well sbout the
other articles of property»

It essential to note that value is not a thing,
price of an individual commodity, it i a social form. As we
developed in The myth of value as natural qualiy in Ed. 9 of
this publication, objects do not naturally possess a quality
known as value. Rather, this is a consequence of the way
in which a society organizes its production. Value and the
commodity, just like money and work, are not neutral and
transhistorical facts, nor are they natural or eternal. Rather,
these are basic categories under capitalism. What s regretta-
ble at this point i that not only the bourgeois reasoning, but
also arguments that claim to be revolutionary accept value as a
natural fact and others even vindicate the prolecaria as “those
who create all the values of society that some evil bourgeoisie
then appropriates”

Thus the critique of “indecent” profits endorses the notion
that there are profics supposedly decent; a critique which secks
t0 understand the ever-greater brutality of capiralism as 2
consequence of the malice of the exploiter, without realizing
that the same exploiter is required to act as such by Capitalin
its constant need for growth. The foundation of capitalist
society is the dictatorship of value in process and the uti-
ity of the objects produced s just a means; what we call
use-value serves only s a support for exchange-value, of
value valorizing itsclf.

s wear as a shoe and there s its use as an article

s not the

When, in the previous issues of CUADERNOS DE NEGACIGN,
we referred to our need to re-appropriace revolutionary po-
sitions, we did not simple refer to the recovery of something
finished which had been censured and forgotten. We refer to
the need to recover theoretical-practical experiences of revo-
lutionaries from around the world and to continue to deepen
them,

In addition, it is important to highlight that both ours and

ique them and grasp chem in our current moment.

others international inicatives, which begin to re-focus on the
critique of value, do not arrive at the same goal by way of just
reading and theoretical discussion. We approach the efforts of
the past by way of the need to struggle against the very substra-
tum of capicalist society. Our task is not then an archeology of
lost writings, i s the living and class-based effort of our past,
present and future for social revolution.

After our last two offerings of CuapErN0s, and continuing
with this block of issues, we go further into the eritique of
the economy, which as we always emphasize, is a critique
of society as a whole. We call it a critique of economy becau-
se it starts from economic categories to show their real social
conten. It is not economist, rather it is its opposite; it s a
critique that roundly opposes the economy and breaks with
every disciplinary barrier

“There is no struggle for communism without a minimum
of passion, and the identification of what s o be considered an
enemy. Killing is obviously not synonymous with communi-
zing: a communist revolution subverts more than it eliminates.
(...) Nonetheless, refusing violence and rejecing in advance the
use of weapons i

Itis rue that our “targer” s a social system, and not bossess,
upper-management, experts or the police offcers they employ.
One of the strengehs of Social-Democracy; and then Stalinism,

o renounce revolution.

was t0 liken capitalism with the bourgeois, the rich, the big
s Tn the same way that within commodity—fetishism
the social relation is presented as a thing, when it comes to
a person, it s incarnated by a big-bellied cigar-smoking
bourgeois, like in the old caricatures from a century ago.
(.~.) Maintaining anger against these characters helps to
deflect criticism towards a side-track: attacking the bour-
geoisie as individuals, rather than attacking them in their
function.

But i our arget is Capital, its structural power, its force
of inertia and not the capitalis; social relacions take no less a
human form. To see in the factory manager only the factory
manager is an optical illusion. To not confront them under the
pretext that they are just a cog in the machine which surpasses
them, really brings us back to a view of society as cohesive
whole (un tour) to such an extent that we no longer know by
which end to grasp this totality. To depersonalize history is to
renounce to act upon it. The absence of detestation of those
who direct us leads us to a fate worse than resignation, at
best reform. Those who do not know o dare nor feel a rejec-
tion for those who exploit and despise them will never change
much.» (Troploin, Sorte d usine)
COMMODITY & VALUE

Aswe have already developed in previous issues of CuapeRNos,
at the core of capitalst sociery we find the commaodity. This is
the pardicular form taken by the products of human activity
in our current era. Its development i neither spontaneous nor
precise. s existence is the result of a process of progressive
submission of human needs to feishist and objectifying prac-
tices, which gradually undermine the close link berween need
and activity. Thus, life is fragmented, and a situation is reached
in which the overwhelming majority of wha is produced is
expressly made with the market and processes of exchange in
mind. As commaodities are produced to be exchanged, their
wse-value is not of much interest, rather they exist in relation
0 the good which will be obtained by its counterpart (exchange
value). What s a use-value to one person, is nothing but an
exchange-value for something else, and vice versa

Ata glance, a loaf of bread is just a loaf of breads it can be
found in the hands of a baker, in an ad or on the table of a diner.
Even when a loaf of bread passes from the hands of the baker
0 the consumer who purchased i, the loaf of bread’ existence
does not change. Nonetheless (and simplifying things here a
bio), for the consumer the loaf of bread is a use-value and for
the vendor it is the basis for an economic relacion. Every loaf
produced for the exchange is intended to become more money.
It may satisfy hunger, or someone’s desire to eat, but this is
something which doesn't matter to the producer as they can
meet their goal. In this way, social relations under capitalism
are inverted: what we have are social relations between things
mediated by human beings. Itis the inversion between subject
and object which giveslife to the thing as a subject of society.
and leaves the role of the object to the human. Value is the
material expression of capitalist social relations.

Adventures of the commodity

Here is an excerpt from Anselm Jappe's Adventures of the Com-
modity. The placement of tites and bold text s our own.

A commodity s not identical (0 a “good” or to an “object of
exchange.” i the particular form which some “goods” take in
certain human societies. The commaodity is merely an object
that not only possesses a use-value, but also an exchange-
value. Every object that satisfies any human need has a use
value which, however, a such, i not an economic category. But

1 Use-value hasfrequently been displaced from the economy; ikewise
i some casesits importance to the critique of the cconomy has been
misunderstood, 1 topic which we have been trying to engage with
throughou past issues of Cuaneixos. To read Furcher on this topic
scc H fiichismo de la mercancia in Cunpiaxos N,

Likewise, although the author here is referring to commodites as
goods or objects, it important for us o present a salvo that we will
decpen in che section Capitalist Explostation: Wage, Labor and Labor-—
Power. As we wil see, use—value will acquire a decisive importance
under cpitalism when it concerns t the commodity of abor-porwer.
Economisss, from antiquity to the present, have associated the use—
value of commodicies with mere private consumption, something
which occurs at the margins of the cconomy and which holds no
imporcance in the economy. As soon as a commodity is used up, is
consumed, is ole cnds in the cconomic process. Effcrively, i | buy
abook, it mattes little to the process of capitalst production whether
Lread i, use it o decorate a oom, use it as a throwing weapon, if €
a uscles heavy tome, or fitsjustthe fetsh of some collector. That
baok has already fulfiled its social function; has rendered money to
ies seller, which then quickly makes of to the coffers of accumulation
for Capital. It i logical that economists venture no furcher, that
view of the whole deprives them of the singularity of lsbor-povier,
which they do not see among the morley seres of commoditis that
swarm in the mackes, a singulariy whose decisive importance ariss

aslong as an object is exchanged in certain quantities for other
objects, it also has an exchange value. If we exchange a shirt for
30 kilos of potatoes, we are treating these commodities as
having different quantities of something identical they must
have in common. When it comes to use-values, commodities
are toually immeasurable. The shirt and the potato have nothing
in common. The relations in which commodities are exchanged
(and consequently also their exchange-value) are subject to con-
inuous variations. But at any given moment the same product
can be exchanged for different exchange values which are equal
0 cach other: a shirt can be exchanged whether for a gram of
gold, 10 kilos whear, a pair of shoes, etc. Itis necessary then
that these different exchange values must therefore have
something in common: their “value”

This shared substance of commodities can be nothing,
more than the Iabor which created them: ics the only thing.
identicalin otherwise immeasurable goods. Labor can be me-
asured by its duration, and consequently, its quantity: the value
of every commodity depends on the quanity of labor which
was necessary to produce it In this regard, it matterslctle what
wse-value such labor results in. An hour spent sewing a dress
and an hour spent manufacturing a bomb are both an hour of
labor. If two hours were necessary to build a bomb, its value
doubles in rlation to the dress, without taking into accoun its
wse-value. The quantizative difference is the only one that can
exist beoween values:if different use-values of commodities are
not taken into account to determine their value, neither is the
concrete labor which created them. The work which makes up 2
value does not matter except as an expenditure of abor, without
consideration for the specific form in which it has been spen.
Marx called this form of labor, which becomes abstracted
from all its concrete forms, cabstract labor.» The values of
commadities are then nothing more than “erystallizations” of
that elly of undifferentiated human labors (Capital, vol. 1)
Value — not to be confused with exchange-value — is  given
amount of abstractlabor “contained” within a commodity. The

From irs use_value. This s logical outcome for cconomists a they
are represcntatives of Capital and express the limited poin of view
of the bourgeoisic. Along with them come a whole series of ritqucs
incapable of breaking sseay from thac logic

‘On the other hand the proletaria underseands that the usc-value
of labor-power, and ics consumption, plays a fundamentl role under
capitalism. Above al, the proletasiat understands this because it is
the axis which capicalis exploitasion depends on and then flls onto
the backs of our class. The commodity of labor—power contains
pecliariy, its use i not ke that o a book or of any ather commadiy.
lispecaliarity s that i us creates value and surplus-value. Although
bourgeois logic docs not understand this, nor dos it care about this
ality of labor-power, it docs nat overlook, when paying for sbor—
powe,is need to get as muuch use as possible aut o ths commodiy
for the specific purpose of creating value. The consumption of this
commodity, whse very use is the motor of the production process
ander capitalsm, i the axis on which Capital cnergizes its ife and
valorizes itelf. This is where the importance of understanding
usevalue as a fundamental economic category in the exchange
between Capital and labor comes from.

commodity then is the union of use-value and of value, just
as it is the union of concrete labor and abstract labor that has
created it

‘We are nor talking here about the labor-
crete individual effectively employed in their production of
a commodity: Value i rather determined by the labor-time,
which in a parcicular society, with a certain level of develop-
ment of productive forces, is on average necessary to produce
the commodity in question. Ifan hour is nough to sew a dress
under average con
ailor takes an hour and a halfthey will only be paid for an hour
of labor. Mars calls this time ssocially necessary time.»* Thus,
any change on labor productivity affects the value of the
commodity. Ifa new invention allows the production of ten
shirts in one hou, instead of just one shirt, then after the
diffusion of this invention, each shirt will contain no more
than six minutes of social labor, even if people incapable
of resorting to this invention continue to employ on hour
t0 sew a shirt

Naturally, we do not work twice to produce a commodity;
once doing a concrete task to produce its use-value and ano-
ther doing an abstract task to produce its exchange-value.
Rather, the same task presens iself with a double character: on
the one hand it’s abstract labor and on the other, its concrete
labor. As far as concrete labor, it is the infinite multitude of
tasks which produce diverse objects in every society in which
the division of abor reigns. This labor knows qualiative diffe-
rences: sometimes s a matter of sewing; other times s about
driving a car other times its about working the land, et As far
as abstract labor, it all amounts to the «productive expenditure
of human brain, muscle, nerve, hand, etc., and are both in this
sense human labours (Capital, vol. 1). Abstract labor, as such,
only knows quantitarive differences: somerimes it a matter of
working one hour, and in others working ten hours. The most
complex tasks count as a multiplication of simple labor: an
hour of highly-specialized labor by a worker could be “wordh”
ten hours of  peasant. This reduction occurs automatically in
economiclife.

In the inversion which characterizes a given commodity, the
concrete becomes a car

ime which a con-

s, its value is that of an hour and if a

for the abstract. It has no other social

existence in so far as it serves the abstract as a way to give itself
aangible expression.

2 We should really force ourslves o think sbous the use of ‘necessa
i Capil’sterms. So that the socially necessary labor time i the labor
time which s commodiey embodics through the totality of labor pro-
cesses which are necessary fo s creation, determined by the average
production conditions at any given moment. This s why commodicics
produuced a decade ago do not only undergo devalorizasion because:
they “go out of style” or because better versions are now made, but
because in general, 10 yearslater, les ime s needed to produce them.

Further, as we willlater sce,if a capitalise labor process discovers 1.
way to muinimize labor time at the point of production, then it il
have s comparative advantage over other capitalises, and only i thic
labor process is generalized wil its value then be established taking
this process asis reference.

The abstraction of any tangible qualiy, of any use-value, is
nota mental summary,as when we abstract the diffrent genera
of animals 1o then speak of the “animal,” which nonetheless
does not exist as such. The best way to convey this real abs-
traction is found in a passage in the first edition of Das Kapital
(1867), which Marx unforcunately did not reproduce in later
editions: It s as if alongside and external to lions, tigers, rab-
and all other actual animals, which form when grouped
together the various kinds, species, subspecies, families etc. of
the animal kingdom, there existed also in addition the animal,
the individual incarnation of the entire animal kingdom. Such
a particular which contains within itslfall really present species
of the same encity is 2 universal (like animal, god, etc )».

In the mercanile society, labor s not interchangeable, and
consequently social, except by way of their abstract quality.
Commadities cannor be exchanged unil they are transformed
into money; because money is the only commodiy that can be
directly exchanged for any other commadity. No commadit
then, possesses within itself the capacity to be exchanged; thi
capacity exists for a commodity as an exterior object (an equi-
valency, money) in which it must aspire to be transformed. In
acommodity society, the capacity for individual products to be
exchangeable does nor reside, then, in their concrete character
or uility, but it must exist apart from the products and their
separated from them.

Value against the human community

In commodity production, the natural form of an individual
product of labor only serves as the “carrier” of exchange-value.
To participate in exchange — and consequently in the world of
commaodities —, a product of labor must fold inco itslf. This
s nota universal phenomena, since, 2 we have already said, in
societies not based in commodity production, the individual
product of labor already possesses asocial character and has no
need to acquire it by way of equivalency with an object which
exists outsde of !

This is why we can say that value, even in its most innocent
form — namely, “wenty meters of fabric have the value of
a suit” — is already the cause and consequence of a social
formation in which human beings do not consciously re-
gulate their mode of production. When Marx writes, sthe
objectification of the general & social character of labor (as
well as the objectification of the labor-time contained within
exchange-value) directly makes ofits product an exchange-va-
lues (Grundrisse 1), he clearly states that when the product is
transformed ino an exchange-value, along with the seemingly
more innocuous transformation of labor into value, in the
form of abor—time, they do not constiture an original datum,

3 To speak of an individual product of lbor previous to the creation.
of the commodiey implies tcributing to work and the individusl 3
transhistoricanes which the author citques in acee chapters of their
work, which are not included here.

but rather are themselves a consequence of  certain form of
socializacion: one which is based on the labor of separate and
private producers. The objecification of labor-time is a con-
sequence of the abjectification of the social character of labor,
of ts qualiy of being a social link.

Valueis nothing more than a form of social organization.
It production does not make a society wealthier; s the creation
not created during production, but
racher exists alongside it as an exterior form. Every time we

of a social link whi

hear someone speak of “overproduction,” it s worth asking:
an overproduction of value or of wealth? “Wealch is never
overproduced. Bur periodically too much wealth is produced
in s capitalist, antagonistic forms.” (Capital, 111}, although

we cannot really call i “wealch” since the the selfvalorization
of capital — the creation of surplus value—s is an absolutely.
mean and abstract contents (Unpublished 6h Chapter of Ca-
pital)

‘Wha s this content? Money is the sole purpose for produc-
tion. Nonetheless, money is nor the concrete universality of
use-values produced, but raher it s the abstract universality of
produced value, and consequently, of abstract labor expended.

Value is only interested in its own quantity. It is indi-
fferent to the use-values which support it, that “body of
ced blood, books or video
games. Sociability is deprived of all concrete content and social

commodities”s wheat or contamij

relations are reduced to the exchange of quantities

Itis for these very reasons, and not for a simple moralistic
or existentialist recrimination, that we can say that social
life itself has become abstract. This type of abstraction is not
a bad mental habit that could be cured by replacing false ideas
with right ideas. Rather it is the very real subordinacion of
is putino play by
the concept of real abstraction. It is only due to an old habit

conctete content to an abstract form whi

that normal consciousness stats to not notice that it is mad
that, for example, ar pollution s of less value” than the losses
thata limitation of road trafic would inflct on the automobile
industry:. Preceding any more judgment, here madness already
esides in the comparison of two complerely different things —
the health of individuals and the interests of industry — with
the same quantitative and abstract parameters; which i to say.

they are measured with money. We can see here how apparently.
very “abstract” considerations about abstract labor can reach
the very heart of the problems we face today:

It would be no exaggeration to say that the inversion of
M
pitalism.” The transformation of abstract labor into money is

1o M-C-M’ encompasses the entire essence of ca-

4 Many suthors have cstablished a defintive diffrence becveen wealth
and value as capitalie form of weslh. Although i pechaps is not the
best word for i it s important o distinguish that we cannot precend
to distingaish capitalism from communism using commodicy terme
for abundance or scarcity;rather we would distinguished them s the
complete redefinition of human nceds and of sacial weslth.
5 Initally the direc form in which commodicis & money circulate
~M-C, or rather, the transformation of a commodity (C)

the only goal of commodity production; the production of
all use-values are but a means, a necessary evil eyeing only a
single purpose: to have available at the end of the operation a
sum of money greater than at the beginning. The satisfaction
of needsis not the goal of production, but rather a
and secondary aspect. The inversion of the concrete and the
abstract which we considered previously, in an abstract way,
within the relations of two commodiies, now reveals irself as
the fundamental law of a whole society; our society, where the
concrete only serves to feed a materialized abstraction: money.

inevitsble

ot money (M), sating with the ale, for cample,of s book, and
then the purchase of another commodin with the money rceived
i the cxchangs,for cxampl  pale of pasie: e el i e o o
In ths ype of cicubrion maney abweys s up a 2 camameodicy
irculaion by beog used up. Bu ot istore processes e s
s another disint form: MC-M,the rnsformarion of mancy
into 2 commodiy and the once sgsn into moncy,wich i o sy
uping i oder o sl The s will e be the cchange of money
for oy, MM, Thisapparenty absurd el nonethebo revals 3
fundamental diffrence: wheres n the it form o cirulation the
iniisland il commodiy qualatoey diffc from cachorher (the
book & pants forcxample). n his ormthe diffence beoween the
nita ] oy s raly guniiatiethe prooes bways s up
cxtating more money froa clreulation s what was saeed with
inialy. The complete formula then i M-C-M’ where M- is the
sum ofthe money e a1 th e pls a inces a Lncresse
hat i Knawsa ssphie-slu. Henee th vlue tneally intrduced
i crelaon, o only conserves ot magriele of valus bt e
utergoe a change, it Increnes with ucpl vlue, i i, And
el wi s procees thae mony s ransoread o capiral nd s
formla s th grneri formul o expivel. The ciculaion of momey
ascapial sl o e e because the odation of value onky
accars it s cver-renewing proces, this ncmnt movement
(CunERnos ou NEGAGHGN, s 10, Capial nly s more Capita)

ON THE HISTORICAL AND LOGICAL
BASES OF CAPITALIST SOCIETY

This sociery is guided by the incessant growth of Capital, not
by the sacisfaction of needs. This could lead us 1o a critique
of those who best represent this aim and whom profi from
abstract labor pursuing chis aim. But the crux of the matter is
0 try to overcome a society which needs this class of persons,
a society we are all a part of. We must question the very basic
categories of capitalist sociery and the totality of socil rlations
which we are dominated by: As everyday more and more as-
pects oflife become commoditized, our critique should not
remain there, we should go to the root: the very existence
of the commodity.

The commo;

form, just like different capitalist forms,*
have developed for thousand of years arriving at their current
manifestations. To understand their raison d'éte, thei relations
and their dynamic we resort o analyzing them i their different
determinacions and their different levels of abstraction. For
example, in our previous issue we talked about the different
determinations of money: as a medium for exchange, as a me-
dium unto itself, as an accumulation of wealth, as the supreme
objective of capitalist society and finally money as Capical.
Mars, in his analysis of the value-form, also talks about its
different determinations: a simple form, a developed form, a
general form and a monetary form. It s not our intention here
o further delve into each of these forms, but rather to unders-
tand owo dimensions when investigating them: the logical and
hiscorical. As we said, in the eritique of capitalism we resort
t0 using different levels of abstraction from the simplest to
the complex, which are not necessarily conditioned by a
chronological temporality. If we emphasize this distincrion
itis because in our pursuit of the roor of capitalistsociety;it is
important to distinguish berween the causes of it origin and
the conditions of s current existence. Although capital arises
from the commodity, it is only with Capital that the totality
of production assumes a commodity—form.

The value—form assumed by the product of abor isits most
abstract form, but it is also the most general of the bourgeois
mode of production, and in this way it remains characterized
as a particular type of social production and in this way; also,
something very historical.» (Karl Mars, Capital)

Thus what we are trying to analyze and critique is the very
structure and operation of current sociery. In this way, though
it may be important to go over historical developments and
empirical daca, the prevention of certain misunderstandings
and tendenious interpretations of history is also necessary.

An introductory example of this is found in the recurrent
discussions of value, within dominant ideology, where the in-

6 Here we are referring to social forms and ot ust categoricsor con-
cepts, because chisis a matter of the resul of onerete social relations
that coninue to modify over time.
tent s the denial of the very substance of abor. In other words,
denying that the exchange of commor ed by the
labor-time embodied in them. To this end, there have been
developed different theorizations concerning pricing, where
mostof the time there is no discinction between value and price,
where these theorizations rely on certain characteristcs of the
different branches of production (monopolies,oligarchies, etc),
on different State monecary policies, on supply & demand, as
well as on the subjective appreciations of those who participate
in the marker.

Later we will stop to deepen the distinction berween value
and price and explain how commodiies are indeed not bought
and sold in exact accordance with their value (as well as that
the precise calculation of ts abor-time is impossible o realize)
and that the magnitude of prices is foremost determined by
the quantity of labor which it embodies. This is known as the
law of value, which explains the movement of prices, but not
its exace fixation.

In his final notes on the third volume of Capital, Engels
looks to demonstrate the ofull functioning of this law in stages
previous to capitalism: «The same is true for the exchange of
products becween peasants and urban artisans. In the beginning,
this exchange took place directly, without the mediation of the
merchant, on market days in the city, when peasants would
sell and make their purchases. Likewise in this case, both the
peasant and the artisan are aware of the labor conditions of each
other. The artisan themselvesis a it of a peasant , not only does
e havea garden bucvery ofen smal plot of .  ew covs,
. pouliry,exc. In this way, men of the Middle Ages were in
a posicion to make the caleulus of the costs of production of
each other when it came to raw materials, auxiliary materials,
labor 6 2 cerain precision, at least when it came to
the things generally consumed everyday»

We use this example, since it highlights what we previously
mentioned on the logical and
[Marxian] conceps, where the most elemental functioning of
capiralist society does not necessarily coincide with the business
relations which prefigured it It s tempring to seek out in the
past a concrete manifestation of abstra
the present so as to berter understand and explain them, but
this is not how realcy works. The developments in the works
of Mars, and other authors, which appear to be so obviously
logical,have been labeled as metaphysical by thei eritics, and at
the same time certain defenders have tried to fll in these “gaps”
with empirical data, resuling in misunderstandings in both
camps of the importance of the abstraction not as a thought
exercise but a5 a phenomena of reality. We will return to this
subject in the next section.

In the previous issue of CuapErNos, we reflected on the
origins of capitalistsociety. There we saw how commercial and
wsurial capital in their manifestations previous to capitalism
constituted the indispensable moror of capitalism’s emergence,
hoarding up one side and draining on the other. But the place
of commercial capital under capalism is completely different:

corical dimension of these

s which constirute

«Historicall, capital developed in the sphere of circulation
0 then later seize produc
through production that capital is born. The capital that scems

s but under capitalism, it is only

0 be born through circulation (commercial gains, monetary
interest) s only a deduction of the gains realized through
production. This fact should be enough to show that the rela-
tionship between the logical genesis and historical succession
has, in Marx, a very peculiar nature.» (Anselm Jappe, Adsentures

of the Commodity)
“The following quotations from Marx” il help clrify things
in this regard: «Buy cheap and sel dear i the law of commerce,

not the exchange of equivalents.[...] The quantitative relacion
in which products exchange is at first completely accidental

They assume the commaodity form in so far as they are in some

thing,
Continued exchange, and regular reproduction for exchange,

way exchangeable, i.e. are expressions of some

gradually abolishes this accidental character. At the outser,
however, this does no occur for the producers and consumers
but rather for the mediator berween the two, the merchant,
who compares money prices and pockers the difference. It is
through his movement hat the equivalence is established.*
[...] The trade of the first independent and highly developed
trading cities and peoples,as a pure carrying trade, rested on the
barbarism of the producing peoples between whom they acted
as intermediaries. In the stages thar preceded capitalst sociery,
it was trade that prevailed over industry; in modern society it
is the reverse. [ it subjects production more and more to
exchange-value, by making consumprion and existence more
dependent on sale than on the direct use of the product. In
this way it dissolves the old relationships. It increases monetary.
circulation. I no longer just takes hold of surplus production,
but gradually gobbles up production itself and makes entire
branches of production dependent on it. This solven effect,
however, depends very much on the nature of the community.
of producers.»

Human productive activity does not always assume the form
of work, neither does its production take the form of a com-
modity. These social forms and their correspondent conceprual
categories are not transhistorical, nor do they exist apart from
specific forms of relations. Therefore, it is not enough to affirm
that we are the workers whom produce the value that is then
appropriated by capitalists, rather we want to know how we
arrive at becoming workers and how our production took on
the commodicy—form. Itis through the historical development
of different social relations of exchange that made possble the

rise of ualue.Its kernel lies in the comparison of diverse objects

7 Extracesfrom Chp. 20 of the third volume of Capital.

8 Ac fist, the monopolizers of commercial activity had s grester
influcnce on the determination of prices. The competition between
them, 35 well a5 protectionist measues from different governments
stated to level them off, uncil, finally, with the proper subsumption
of labor processes [t Capitall, we nlly arrive at the value-form
which we suffer under oday, with it specific decermination over the
movement of prices, which we will stop to further explain laer an.
0 faciliate their exchange. With the deepening and genera-
lization of these comparisons value established itself over the
centuries and ended up constituting iself as the inermediary
boss ofall transactions, destroying infinite forms of distribution
and exchange which by far did not correspond with this type of
fundamentally quantitaive parameters. Finall; all production
under capicalism i the production of value, and the objective
of society i the production of the maximum amount of value
possible. It was not always the case that activities orientated
towards production and subsistence were so splt from the rest
of reproductive, ludic, creative, pleasurable and contemplative
activites. The separation becween communities and their very
membersis the correlate of the separation of the very activity of
its members into various spheres, up to the level we see today.

The ever-growing precarization, division and ultra-speciali-
zation of work, which the defenders of “skilled, quality and
well-paid for all" work complain o, is nothing but the laest
result of the logic of immanent separation from one’s work and
the production of commodities. Work, as a separate sphere of
activity arises from the generalization of exchanged-based rela-

tions and of value in the process of subsuming human activity.

9 The most widespread critcisms of capitalism heard today are no.
moe than a limited criticism of neo-liberalism, which has as its
counterpart a clear defense of mid-20th century capitalism, which in
curn i idealized a ifthe labor conditions of some sectors and regions
had been the norm for the entie proletarit,
ABSTRACT LABOR AND VALUE
AS REAL ABSTRACTION

The essence of commodity abstraction, however, is
that it is nor thought-induced; it does nor originate
in men's minds but in their actions.» (Alfred Sohn—
Rethel, ntellctual and Manual Labour: Critigue of
Epistemology)

The word “abstraction’” refers us immediately to thought. It s
generally understood as a mental exercise which, in the best of
cases, serves to analyze realivy

Thus, the abstract character of work can be interpreted, at
most,as a metaphor. Just as abstraction in thought, at the mo-
ment of analysis, reduces fundamental components and their
relations; isolates it or does so with some of its properties; the
particular characteristics of concrete labor are abstracted for
value. The only important thing is its quantitative dimension,
that i, the amount of labor which commodiies embody.

Bucthis is not simply a metaphor, but aeality dominated
by the abstract in the most rigorous and literal sense of the
term. We suffer more and more deeply from a social dynamic
that is characterized by an absolute absence of quality by a
purely quanticarive differeniation between our activities and
the product of them

Where does this abstraction come from if not from thou-
ghe It arises from our own actions, more specifically from
our relations of production based on exchange. Alfied Sohn—
Rethel in his book Intellctual and manual labour, suggest that
abstraction is not a property exclusive to the mind, but that it
oceurs in the exchange of commodities and that furthermore
this was first raised by Mars at the beginning of Capital, and
even earlier in Critique of Political Economy in 1859 where
he speaks of abstraction in a different sense than abstraction—
thought

10

This may sound confusing or contradictory, especially be-
cause we access it precisely through the exercise of thought.
Sohn-Rethel speaks of value as a real abstraction, which does
not mean that it does not exist in thought. It is beyond the
tradicional dichotomy of being and thinking, for which a thing
cither exists only in the head, being therefore imaginary —this
is the usual meaning of the term abstraction-, or on the con-
tary it is real, material, empirical. As an abstraction it exists
only in though, but the difference is that this abstraction
does not arise from it, nor do we take note of its existence in
a rational way

The importance of the work cited is that it elaborates a cri-
tique of the economy at the same time as a critique of science
and epistemology, a critique of the separation berween manual
and intellectual labor with the progressive commodification of
life In other words, the concep of real bstraction also speaks
0 us about the forms of human knowledge with the develop-
ment of mercantile exchange, the relationship becween being
and consciousness under ts dominion and generalization, the
link between the relations of production that dominate today’s
society and the perception ofits participants about them: «They.
don' know but they dos.

To dwelve further into this point, let us rerurn to commo-
dity-ferishism. It has often been understood in an analogous
manner to religious fetishism as a kind of distorcion of realiry:
just as belief in God avoids an understanding of realicy that
favors maintaining relations of domination and privilege, the
real structure of apitalism would produce fals representations
of iself. So, commodity—fetishism, when not directly igno-
red, was understood as a mystification, a “superstructure”
belonging to the mental or symbolic sphere of social life
While we criticize and will criticize mystifications such as
progress, freedom, value as a natural characteristic of things,
or the subjectivity of prices; the fetishism of the commaodity.
goes beyond this.

Fetishism does not refer only to an inverted re-presen-
tation of reality, but to an inversion of reality itself, where
social relations between people are objectified, where the means
have become the end, where sociability as a whole depends on
the private character of production.

«Feishism is not only a phenomenon of social consciousness,
but of social being. (...) The absence of direct regulacion of the
social process of production necessarily leads to the indirect
regulation of the production process through the market, throu-
gh the products of labor, through things.» (Isaak Illich Rubin,
Essays on Marss Theory of Value).

The concepe of abstract labor has been and is of great im-
portance in the critique of abor as opposed o human actvity,
which has had greater scope and development in the last 50
years. But it is necessary to make a clarification in the context
in which we live. The practical manifestation of the abstract
character of labor in increasingly unskilled, ultra-specialized,
fragmented, repetitive and frustrating concrete jobs has been
a fundamental scarting point for taking up these critiques, but
eValue is a relation or process thar unfolds itself and
maingains itself through different forms — in one mo-
ment money, the next the commoditis that compose.
the labour process (including the commodity labour—
power), the next the commodity product, and then
again money — whilst always maintaining a elati
its money form to its commodity form and vice versa.
For Mars then, value is not the embodiment of abour in
the commodity, nor an unmoving substance. Itis rather
arelation or process which dominates those who bear it:
a substance that is at the same time subject. Yet in the
orthodox Marist tradition there was no recognition that
“abstract labour” was a socially and historically specific
formarcing of one part of human activity implying the
conversion of human beings into a resource for the
boundless increase of this activity and its resulc as an
end in itself. Understanding value as merely a form
imposed — by the private ownership of the means
of production — on a basic unproblematic content,
went together with a vision of socialism as a state—
directed version of essentially the same industrial
division of labour that is organised by the market in
capitalism. On chis view labour, which was restricted
by market forms under capitalism, would become the
conscious organising principle of society in socialism.

A major exception to the traditional Marxist neglect of
the value-form and ferishism was the Russian economist
Isaak Rubin. In path-breaking work in the twenties, he
recognised that “[clhe theory of fetishism is, per se, the
basis of Mary’s entire economic system and in particular
of his theory of value,” and that abstract labour as the
content of value is not “something to which form adheres
from the outside. Rather, through its development, the
content itslf gives birch to the form which was already
latenc in the content” But Rubin's work, suppressed in
Russia, remained more or less unknown.» (Endnotes,
Communisation and value—form theory)

i eselfinsuffcient.* The dominance of the abstract over the
concrete in capitalist society can also be interpreted as «con-
erete labor becoming increasingly abstracts, but this can lead
0 serious errors if what we are aiming for s a radical critique.

All commodity creating labor is always inevitably abstract
and concrete lsbor and these are two aspects of labor, totally
immeasurable and irreplacesble to each other. From an eman-
cipatory perspective it is not a question of reconciling these
wo parts nor i it possible to choose one for the other,the only.
possibility s the destruction of both for the overcoming of abor.

10 Nor should the notion of sbstract labor be confused with that
of immaterial labor or with lsbor processes that do not macerialize
a5 physical object.

1

The critique of value in its
quantitative and qualitative form

To understand these two dimensions of the ritique we can
start from the following quote from Mars from the chaprer of
Capital on commodity fetishism:

«(...) undoubredly political economy has analyzed, albeitin
an incomplete way, value and the magnitude of value and has
discovered the content hidden in these forms. Although it has
never arrived at even asking why such and such content has
taken on such and such form; or why labor represents itself s
value, or why does the measure of labor, in accordance to its
duration, represent itself a the magnicude of value reached by
that product of labor.»

Value and magnitude of value are not synonyms. The mag-
nitude of value, and exchange value as a manifestation of
magnitude of value, refer to the quantitative aspect of value.
Which i t0 sa, the amount of bor embodied in a commodicy:
Tt seeks to explain, mainly, how the magnitudes of value of the
commoditie are related, that is, how much they are worth.

The qualicative aspect of the critique of value, which is bove:
all what we have been addressing, secks to answer why com-
modities have a value, why the substance of value is abstract
labor." It is a matter of analyzing general social relacions of
production and exchange, whose most superficial manifestation
ends up being exchange value, and even more so its transfor-
mation into prices. When we refer to this qualiative, social
and general aspect of value, we usually speak of the social form
of value, or value—form, in order to distinguish i from value
alone, which is more asily associated with magnitude of value
and exchange value.

11 The amount of sbor time that detcemines the magnitude of the
value is of a type of lsbor that contains a double character in both
concrete and absteact. This division exiscs i labor insofsr asit i sbor
that creates commadites, and it i the abstract characeer that allows
ies quantification but it is not ts unit of measurement. To spek of
quanity of abstrace labor s not the mast appropriste thing, but
quantity of labor time (both abstract and concret).

THE LAW OF VALUE

The word law is typical of the decline of critique in
science.» (Gilles Dauvé and Frangois Martin, Value,
sime and communism: re—reading Mars)

Various ~ not to say the enormous majority — expressions of
Marxism, or others that claim to represent a crtical economy,
refer 10 Mar's developments on the issues we are dealing with
as economics, and tend to address the quantitative aspect of
value in a limited way, while at the same time separating it
from its qualicarive aspect, ignoring or disregarding it. They
see in Marx a continuity with the clasical political economy
of David Ricardo and other cconomists of his time and not a

break with it. With their economicist and scientis

vision they.
ook for laws as if they were “objective” descriptions of realty,
when the word law here, as we shall see, makes more sense
to associate it with the repressive arbitrariness of the Law,
with the dictatorship of Capital imposing its own logic and.
dynamics on society as a whole.

When we begin o read or hear about these issues we fiequent-
ly come across formulations such as the sheory of salue-labor
and the Law of value, which establish that the relacionship of
exchange values between two commodiies s proportional to
the socially necessary labor time of production of each, thus
explaining the movement of commaodity prices in the market

The commaodities are then exchanged for their value, es-
blishing an equivalence relationship. But here the word
equivalence should not confuse us as if it were something

12 The word faw is loaded with scienific pretensions just as Marx
s 00 in many of his analyses. That Marxism has wreaked havoc
with his work should not be an excuse to ahvays porray him as mi-
sunderstood or distorted, although in the centralaspects of his work
he is. His immense contribution must be underscood and assumed,
aehile at the same time critcized and overcorme.

12

equitable and “fair”. The value of the labor force (and the salary.
as 2 monetary expression of i) is equivalent to the value of the
goods necessary for their reproduction. Therefore, compliance
with the law of value implies that the labor force receives
what is just, the minimum to reproduce. The commodity
labor force is paid for what is necessary for its reproducion,
ot for the equivalent of what i produces. The appropriation
of a part of the product without equivalent (in the labor—ca-
pital exchange that is the fundamental exchange of capitalist
society) is precisely the basis of a law that imposes the exchange
of equivalents. A law that i totally fulfilled when the value of
use of a particular commadity (labor force) put into operation,
thatis, the consumprion of labor force (production), instead of
destroying the value of it is capable of creating a value greater
than that contained in its purchase. Itis precisely the proletariat
that opposes thislaw, the commodity and the value from which
it emerges, because i is the cause of its condemnation, of its
condition of exploitation. And it has no other way of breaking
that condemnation than 1o liquidate the basis on which it is
reproduced.

The law of value is presented as the law on which the prole-
ariat s put to work by Capital, creating al social production
and receiving only what s indispensable from this production
o continue producing: only for it is exchange without equiva-
lent. We repeat: the commaodity labor force is paid for what
is necessary for its reproduction, not for the equivalent of
what it produces.

Tolook into value and is elationship with the movement of
prices we return to Rubin: «The state of equilibrium berween
two branches of production corresponds to the exchange of
products on the basis of their values. In other words, this sate
of equilibrium corresponds to the average level of prices. This
average level is a theoretical concepeion. ‘The average prices
do not correspond to the actual movements of concrete
market prices, but explain them. ‘This theorerical, abstract
formula of the movement of pricesi, in fact, the *law of value”
From this it can be scen that every objection to the theory of
value which is based on the fact that concrete market prices
do not coincide with theoretical “values,” is nothing more
than a misunderstanding, Total agreement between market
price and value would mean the elimination of the unique
regulator which prevents different branches of the social
economy from moving in opposite direction. “The possibi-
lig, therefore, of quantitative incongruity beween price and
magnitude of value, or the deviation of the former from the
latter, is inherenc in the price form itself. This s no defect, but,
on the contrary; admirably adapts the price-form 10 a mode
of production whose inherent laws impose themselves only as
the mean of apparencly lawless irregularities that compensate
one another. (Mars, Capital).»

Then, the market prices of these commaodities also move
around that relationship of proportionality becween the labor
times incorporated in cach one. But i is not the transformation
of exchange value into price that interests us most, and it does

not even make sense to investigate this aspect separately from
an anti-capitalst perspective. I is an inseparable par of a uni-
ary crtique that secks o explain how value regulares captalist
society as a whole, determines our decisions and, above al, that
of our exploiters.

A given level of market prices, regulated by the law of
value, presupposes a given distribution of social labor among
the individual branches of production, and modifies this
distribution in a given direction. In one section, Marx speaks
of the “baromerrical fluctuations of the market prices” (C...
1, p. 356). This phenomenon must be supplemented. The
fluctuations of market prices are in reality a barometer, an
indicator of the process of distribution of social labor which
takes place in the depths of the social economy: Butitisa very.
unusual barometer; a barometer which not only indicates the
weather, but also corrects it. One climate can replace another
out an indication on 2 barometer. But one phase of the
distribution of social labor replaces another only through
the fluctuation of market prices and under their pressure. If
the movement of market prices connets two phases of the
distribution of abor in the social economy; we are right if we
assume  tight internal relation between the working activity
of economic agents and value. We will look for the explanation
of these relations in the process of social production, ic., in
the working activity of people, and not in phenomena which
lie outside the sphere of production or which are not related
it by a permanent functional connection. For example, we
will not look for an explanation in the subjective evaluations
of individuals or in mathematical interrelations of prices and
quantities of goods if these inter-— relations are treated as given
and isolated from the process of production. The phenomena
related to value can only be grasped in close relation with the
working acivity of sociery. The explanation of value must be
sought in social “labor.” This is our first and most general
conclusion.

(.. Through exchange and the value of commodiies, the
working activity of some commodity producers affects the
working activity of others, and causes determined modifications.
On the other hand, these modificacions influence the working
activity itslf. Individual pares of the social economy adjust
0 cach other. But this adjustment s only possible if one part
influences another through the movement of prices on the
market, a movement which is determined by the *law of value.”
In other words, it is only through the “value” of commodiies
that the working activity of separate independent producers
leads to the productive unity which is called a social economy,
0 the interconnections and mutual conditioning of the labor
of individual members of sociery:. Value is the transmission belt
which transfers the movement of working processes from one
part of society to another, making thar society a functioning
whole. » (Isaak llich Rubin, Eisays on Mars Theory of Value).

When too much of  particular product s produced in rela-
tion to demand or if the qualiy i defective, some commodities
are not sold or have to be sold ar a discount. In cases like these,

13

the actual work incorporated into the commaodities is nor rea-
lized as socially necessary work time.

In fact, it is through this social mechanism that a market
economy regulates itself. We recurn to the question of the
relacionship berween production and distribution, and we
emphasize precisely tha this value erystallized in the process
of labor, does not conclude its cycle, but when it is validated
in the marker, realized, and made concrete in its money form
50 tha the capitalist restart is cycle. This realization of value
does not mean that it is the marker that creates the value, but
that it s this that imposes the aliquot'? (proportional) part of
value that corresponds to each commodity on the basis of the
socially necessary labor time, including of course the value of
the labor force.

13 In capialism it i clear that individual value docs noe cxist a5
such, value i social and the value of the singular commoity is only.
an aliquor part of that social value, I is fundamental to s that value
docs not emerge from a separate commodity; but that the singular
commaodity is an expression ofa totality. This being understood, it
isoften wscful and necessary o resort o the expresson of individual
value in onder o explain various questions, a we will e, for example,
in the setion The salorization of vae: surplus valuc

Mas starts from the “germinal cell” to discover the hidden subs-
tance,that is he analyzes the origin of the value form by taking a5 3
reference the relationship between wo commadities, whose unitary.
basis s the amount of abstract labor that acts 4 2 “common third
party”. When he ascends from simple ciculation to thecirulation of
capital he goes fully inco the analysis of Capital and its reproduction
(M-C-M'). Hisanalysis is not framed on the immediate mercantle
exchange of the principle, but requires the intervention of more
complex mediations thatare developed a esul of the socilization
of value: ransformation of the e of surplus value in the rate of
profi, ransformation of surplus valuc in profi, ransformation of
profi in average profit, transformation of marke value inthe pric of
production, division of profi into industial profi, interest and and
e, fititous capital, issues o which we seck at et to approach
in 3 general way: In this feamevork,in which the whole of capitalst
reproduction (M-C-M" as Global Capital) is taken as a sarting.
point, value s presented i alisfullnes a  social value. The price
of production of each individual commoity arises from the mass of
elobal produced vlue (M), that i, the global mass of absract lbor,
which is distibuted among the various commaodiies on the basis o
erce competiion between capitaliss and the leveling of the rate of
profi at s average level which distributes the social surplus value:
among the various capitalists in relaton to the capital invested.

R

14

CRITIQUE OF THE CRITIQUES OF
THE MARXIAN THEORY OF VALUE

As we have already said on other occasions, the critiques of
value that we are trying t expose here are not the exclusive
work of Marx, although his reflections have made a funda.
mental contribution to the core of the question. For us, it is
the critique of the economy as an inseparable aspect of the
revolutionary struggle of our class, developed through various
efforts throughout history: But, due to the centraliy of Mards
work, different theorizations about value and the economy
have in many cases taken the reference of this author, for or

against him. The term Marvian arises, precisely in opposicion
to Marxism as  total falsifier of the central lements of Mar's
critique." In any case, abels alone do not guarantee anything,
In fact, the work of Isaak Ilich Rubin, long cited throughout
this issue of Cuapernos, i entitled no more, no less, than
Essays on the Marsist theory of value and we return to it once
again 10 investigate the critiques that have arisen towards the
theory of value that we have be

exposing,

The labor theory of value discovered the fetish, the reified
expression of social labor in the value of things. Labor is “cys:
allized” or formed in value in the sense that it acquires the
social “form of value.” The labor is expressed and “reflected”
ich darstll). The term “sich darsellen” s frequently used by
Man to characterize the relaionship between abstract labor and
value. One can only wonder why Mars’s ertics did not norice
this inseparable connection becween his labor theory of value
and his theory of the reification or fecishization of the produc-
tion relations among people. They understood Marcs theory of
value in a mechanical-naturalisic, not in a sociological, sense
[Ed. Note: in other words, in a social sense]

(.. Thus value appears, qualitatively and quantitacively, as
an expression of abstract labor. Through abstract labor, value
is at the same time connected with the social form of the social
process of production and with its material-technical content.
This is obvious if we remember that value, as well as other cco-
nomic categories, does not express human relacions in general,
but particularly production relations among people. When
Manx treats value as the social form of the product of labor,
conditioned by a determined social form of labor; he puts the
qualicasive, sociological side of value in the foreground. When
the process of distibution of lsbor and the development of pro-
ductivity of laboris carried out in a given social form, when the
‘quanicatively determined mases of the toral labor of society”
(subsumed under the law of proportional distribution of bor)
are examined, then the quantitative (one may say, mathemati-

14 Although the use of chis term, or ohers thattend to individuslize
and personalize what i a collective ffot, s not entirely accurate. For
s, although it s incomprchensible o bourgeois logic, Marx s il
tantis not a brilliant individual,or anything of the sort, but a singular
expression of  historical process, of a commanity of struggle, of the
proletariat. Withous reference to tha totality Mar loses all meaning,
cal) side of the phenomena which are expressed through value,
becomes important. The basic error of the majority of Marts
ertics consists of: 1) their complete failure to grasp the quali-
ative, sociological side of Mar’s theory of value, and 2) their
confining the quantitacive side to the examination of exchange
ratios, ie., quantitative relations of value among things; they.
ignored the quantiative interrelacions among the quantities
of social labor distributed among the different branches of
production and different enterprises, interelations which lie
at the basis of the quantitative determinarion of value.» (Isazk
lich Rubin, Essays on Mars’s Theory of Value)

In the years following the publication of the fist volume of
Capital(¢he only one published during hislifecime and entirely
edited by Marx), dissident voices slowly began to emerge at the

core of his critique, that i, the theory of value. As we mentioned
before, a huge part of the self-styled Marsists systematically ig-
nored and ivialized t, ocusing on other aspects and stipping.
it of the unity and consistency with which it was expressed. On
the other hand, a st of theories was developed, in contrast to
Marx, which were called subjecivis, and historically, the most
refined form of this approach is the so-called theory of marginal
wilty, so they are also known as marginaliss

The subjectivism of this theory is given precisely because
the subjecrivity of the users would be what gives “value” to
the commodities. That is, broadly speaking, what is known as
wtilty (which in authors like Kant, and the utiltarian school
would be equivalent to welfare). As more and more consumers
indicate in the market their disposicion to acquire a commodity.
(or even their willingness to order one that is not yet produced)
its value would increase.

Marginal utility

Here is an example to better understand what the theory of
marginal utilicy is all about:

A farmer owns five bags of grain. The first one will be used.
t0 make bread, this will merely be the food tha allows him
0 survive. With the second one he will also make bread, and
this will be the one that will give him energy to be able to
carry ou other actvities. With the next bag, he will feed the
animals he raises. The next one will be used to discil whisky,
and finally the fifth one will be used to feed the pigeons.

In case any of these bags s stolen or rots, he wil not redu-

ce proportionally each of these five activiies. He will simply
stop feeding his pigeons. IF another bag went t0 waste, he
would stop making his whiskey and so on.

The ereator of this story was Eugen Von Bohm-Bawerk,
who was the central figure of the so-called Austrian School,
the current of economic thought tha synthesized the sub-
jectivist approach and developed the concept of marginal
wility during the second half of the nineteenth century: Von
Bohm-Baverk was also a furious critic of Marx.

Allthis theory is a direct heir of the Enlightenment, and of
its founding premises: the individual and equalicy. Subjectivism
does not stem from the diverse subjectivities characterisic of
asociety full of conflicts and contradictions (not only of class,
but also of others that develop around sex, ethniciry, etc.) but
racher from an ideal subjectivity postulated: that society is
composed of equal individuals, who sell what they produce
and buy what they need.

Then, on the one hand, there is the Marxism thar caims to
be the defender and continuaror of Marc' work, in spite of the
face that it s really a giganic ideological force of falsification
and liquidation of the oeuvre of this militan, of the eritique
of the economy and the revolution. By giving an objectivist
character to Mars work, it destroys the pillars of the eritique
of the fundamental caegories of the economy. Such objectivism
is incapable of going to the bottom of the critique of abstract
labor and value because it is incapable of going beyond con-
crete matter, it s incapable of seeing social matter, of secing
social relations reified, objectified into a thing. Itis incapable
of perceiving that what was an object has become the subject
of sociery, since it expresses social relations in it being, it s the
social nexus. Indeed, abstract labor and value are purely social,
even if they are sought empirically they will never be found.
Noy it i not in the object where the abstract work is. But it is
evident that it is materialized through i. The illusion is born
of the fact that a social relationship takes the form of a thing,
That Marsism has not understood any of this is demonstrated
by pointing to Marx as a “eritical continuator” of the theory
of labor-value when from the beginning Marcs work, as an
expression of the critique of the economy of the prolecariar,

“This current was then continued by Ludwig Von Mises
and Friedich Hayek towards the beginning of the 20ch
century, and was ken up again after the impulse of the
liberal premises afier the 1970s by, among others, Milton
Friedman, but it is seen as t0o extreme in its postulates by
the proponents of the neoclasscal synthesis, the currently
dominant position.

Leavingaside the fallacious elements typical of economic
thought (3 a Robinson), his argument expresses an obvious
issue. We do not all want the same things to the same extent,
nor are we wiling to spend our time or salary equally on all
the acti

Marginal uiliy (che utility of the last commodiry, in
this case the fifih bag) i as important a variable as demand,
supply, exchange rat, etc. But this does not mean that the
value of each bag is different, since the value is not a fact
that can be reduced to a simple individual determination
or 02 sum of them.

s we do.

What's more valuable, a diamond
or a hottle of water?

‘The fac that an amount of diamonds is incomparably more
valuable than the same mass of water is not very paradoxical
s In this inverted society, there is nothing unusual about
2 mineral that only has certain uses in the production of
tools and, as we know, is one of the most fetishized objects
because of its ornamental character, being more sought afer
than a fundamental element for life.

Bu this apparently absurd question has appeared ag
and again in the history of economic debates (where
has been called the value paradox), and expresses a central
contradiction around the question of value. In the words
of Adam Smith: «Nothing is more useful than water: but it
will purchase scarcely anything; scarcely anything can be had
in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has sarcely
any use-value; buta very great quantity of other goods may
frequently be had in exchange for it»

Diamonds are worth more than water and this is not

because they are more useful in our daily lives, but simply
because the whole process necessary for them t0 reach the
market requires a greater share of human labour. The same
happens when we analyse the value of water in a desert re-
glon in relacion to s purification process on the banks of a
major river. It is not the scarcity itself that increases the
value of a commodity; but rather the difficulties assox
ted with this scarcity in relation to how this commaodity
is produced and distributed.

Even, and as with most “natural resources”, the most
accessible and easily exploited diamond deposits have alre-

is 2 counterpoint and critique of it. Having said this, once
again, it s clear that under the label “Marxist” there have been
expressions that were distinet from Marist ideology and really
defended the critique of the cconomy:

In wen, against the objectivist conceptions of Marxism has
emerged is vulgar opposition, the subjectivist, which we have
alteady alluded to. Starting from the same object-subject se-
paration, they assert that value is a product of human subjects
independent of the object. That is to say, value is something
that corresponds to the brain of men, o their ideas, value s for
them a sign actributed to an object thar expresses those ideas
of value. Just as Marsist objectivism does not understand ar all
wha reifcation is, which means that an object embodies, not a
cognitive representation, but a social practice. It s precisely the
reversal of human activity in a generalized commercial society.
where the object s presented as a subject and the subject as an
object, where human activity is presented s an externalized
force that does not belong to them, and subdues them, which
allows a substance, value, to dominate sociery. Hence the ridi-
culousness of wanting to reduce this substance to the activiy.

16

ady been looted, leaving the deepest and most difficult o
access (and also many others in conflict zones — cradle of
the so-called blood diamonds). This is why for many years
the value of diamonds has been rising steadily.

Furthermore, it is important to note that the diamond
industry was hiscorically monopolized by the South Affican
company De Beers. For decades, this producer experienced
a surplus ox monopoly profi, inflacing prices above their
rium, based on the generation of arrificial demand.
Butsince the 19905, with the emergence of new mines and
suppliers, new ways of marketing, and syntheric diamond
production techniques, the value of diamonds has been
reduced, and as the monopoly pressure diminished, so did
their overprici

But perhaps it is important to consider that for many of
us the paradox has less to do with discussions about cold
categories, and more to do with the fact that the word value
(in Spanish but also in many other languages) has the abiliy
10 represent very different things. It s essential o be able o
recover this distinction in order to recognise thar, asa result
of forgetting i, today we consider something important o
bevaluable, regardless of whether we are referring to ts need
in our daily livs, its emotional aspects, or even the amount
of work it took to produce it.

The mere fact of having to compare a diamond with
water says a lot abour the world we live in. The equali-
zation that the world of value produces is imprinted in
our conceptions. And another experience of social life
‘will necessarily erase those incongruities of language,
‘which reveal the dissociation to which the society of
value subjects us.

of the brain of the living, to subjective aspects of human beings,
even to the will and tastes, and not to a subject that expresses
a eified social relationship.

While vulgar materialism only sees value as the property of
the thing, the idealism as a projection that arises i the head
of humans. That a social relationship is projected onto a thing
is something that only dialectics can grasp. Objectivism and
subjectivism, both, insofar as they split the object and the
subject, are incapable of seing the reification of a social
practice, of an activity, of a social relationship. The alienated
human activity is manifested through things, it rises as an alie-
nated power, as an externalized and counterposed force to lfe.
The critique of the econom that the proletariat develops starts
from thi realiy that is not understood by all kinds of ritiques
and aliernatives that arise against it and that do nothing more
than start from the logic of the bourgeois separation berween
object and subject.

The theory of marginal utility is evidently motivated by po-
litcal and capitalist management issues, and its emergence is
intimately linked to the historical moment in which economy
moves from beinga discipline considered as part of philosophy
0 one more dependent on mathematics (or economerrics)
also coincides with technical developments in relation
0 differential calculus and calculation tables-. The supposed
rigour of this theory lies in introducing a technical lement,
via differential calculus, to determine the relationship between
the uiliy provided by a new market unit and the income that
a consumer s willing o spend to acquire it. This is how these
postulates have permeated the academy and the dominant
ideology.
Nevertheless,

practice (and as we expressed carli), becau-
beral economics is not to make a critique
of capitalist society, but o determine elements that allow.
it to be managed,  this theory focused on the question of
how prices are determined, so it would be more appropriate
historically to define it as a theory of prices.'*

As Paul Mactick explains in Mars and Keynes, the maximum
vulgarity of the utilitarian theory consists in its circularity:
Through the marginal uilty of a commodity ts price is defi-
ned, but at the same time price is a fundamental variable when
establishing the uilicy of said commodity: In curn, uriliy s the
characteristic of the commodity which makes people want to
buy i, but at the same time that people want t buy 2 com-
modity makes its utilty:. They go in crcles gradually explaining
more refined forms of prices, which as we willsee later are not
under any aspect, synonyms of value.

se the interest of

15 As we will see later in the section Minusalias, another of the
cental premises of this tendency is the ustification of the role and
importance of the capialists a promorters of development. A partial
criticism of this position has been mainly developed by socil de-
mocracy,and particularly by trade unionism, where the bourgeoisis
wsuall considered a parasite, someone who, without doing anything,
lives ke a “consumeris pg” at the expense ofthe workers he cmploys.
But we find it disguscing to consider that antagonism with Capical
can be redusced to haing the bourgeois as 3 non-worker. The critique
of capitalise categories must necessarly lead to the critique of labor,
and thus to the self-critique of the role th pertains to proletarians
i thic world.

16 Itis nota minor thing that even some slf-determined Marsists
— such a5, for example, che gur of “Mar
ofthe Second Intemasional: Hilferding — have critcized Marx fo not
having solvd the “problem oftransformation, hat s, hove and under
what determinations the value ofa commodity s expressed in s price.

¢ cconomics”in the times

17
THE VALORIZATION OF
VALUE: SURPLUS VALUE

In the previous issue of CuADERNOS, in the chaprer entitled
Capital only wants more capiral, we developed the transition
berween simple circulation and the cycle of capitalst repro-
duction. Its within the reproduction of Capital where money
assumes a new determination which will appear in all exchange
relations: M-C-M', the movement par excellence of Capital,
is at once the original movement of commerce, capital as
commercial capital, which already existed in the earlest phases
of cconomic development accompanied by usurious capital
However, in that preceding stage capital only occupied  peri-
pheral position within society, although this did not prevent it
from implanting the necessary premises to then take over the
historical development of the conditions of existence.

While in ics prediluvian forms, capital ~ both commercial
and usurious forms — the cycle of M-C-M’ extracts profit from
circulation, or rather “buys cheap and sells dear,” whereas under
capicalist production things happen in a different way. Under
capicalism, profit can only be further generated through fero-
cious competition which displaces thi primal form of profic and

17 Sce our previous issues section Accunulation, Trade, Usury and.
Disposssion, s el s chis issuc’s O the Lagical and Hstoical Basic
of Capitalist Sciey.

18

imposes as a point of departure the exchange of equivalencies
thus forcing every capitalist o sell commodicie at their value,
the time socially—necessary for their production.

Under these strict capitalistlaws there is only one possibi-
lity: 0 seek out a concrete commodity in the market whose
use-value and consumption which instead of devaluing or
destroying its value, is capable of reproducing and amplif-
ying the value it contains. And this commaodity can be found
on the market and is a product of the historical separation of
the human being from their means of existence: labor-power
While all other commaodities devalue with use or consumption,
the same does nor oceur with labor—power. The use of this
commodity isits effctive consumprion within the production
process, labor tself,the secting in morion of living labor which
not only makes possible is very conservation a value (as well as
the conservation of value of the other commodites that enter
the labor process) but also allows the creation of even more
value,surplus value.

The vital question of valorization thus takes place in the ex.
change of living labor and dead labor, an exchange which takes
place not within circulation but rather within the production
process itself Itis within this framework where the exploitation
of labor-power generates surplus value. It is an unavoidable
condition for the production and reproduction of capiral

Effectively, by entering the production process (it does not
matter whether this production is material, immaterial or
independent of developed concrete production) we see how.
the C within the cycle of M-C-M" unfolds as lving labor (-
bor-power) and as dead labor (raw materials and work tools)
While raw materials and means of production only transmit

their through production in as much as they are used and so
lose their value (real transference of value), acting as constant
capical; labor power put into morion, reproduces its value (de-
termined by socially necessary labor-time for its production:
food, housing, educations, houschold tasks, care work, new
generations

the means of subsistence of those who do houschold work, ge-

consequently the value of labor-power includes

nerally asigned to women), but not only does it reproduce its
value,

Capitalist Exploitation: Wage,
Labor And Labor-Power

o generates surplus value, acting as variable capital. ™

‘We mentioned that only labor-power can produce value, since
the substance of value is precisely abstract labor. But while
surplus value is a strctly capitalist phenomena, surplus labor

i nor. In several passages Marx describes how pre-capitalist

forms demonstrated a systematic extraction of surplus labor
from producers. But the principal distinction between pre-
capitalist surplus labor and capitalist surplus labor is that,
while the former is determined by the immediate needs of
the dominant class, for their consumption and enjoyment of
the surplus; under capitalism what determines this surplus is
not s consumption by the capitalist, but rather valorization,
surplus value and its accumulation. The wage laborer does
not work to meet the immediate needs of the capalist, but
rather to valorize, in an infinite cycle of accumulation, the
capital which the capitalist manages. Evidently, n this process

1s
a clear example of hovw the capialist system historically assumed the
continuity of the sexusl division of lsbor. The intensification of the
separation beween the public sphere and the private sphere further
aggravaced che already existing differences in the daily lfe of the
sexes. The public sphere associated with the designated male and the
private sphere asociated with the designated female are necesary to
the development of the process of valorization.

s with any labor, the function of the dominant ideology is that
domestic labor be naturalized, amalgamated with any human activity

In the case of “non—salaried” domesti lsbor and care we can sec

awhen in fact ic i a specific and hiscorical social phenomenon.

“The domesti lsbor of dughters,sistes, wives,slaves and the perma-
nent underpaid conditions of domestic workers (mostly migrants and
refuges by Capital), has been and is a fundamental contribution to
the face that capitalism has been sble to extend itelf socially as i did.

‘Capital also determines the exploitation of he non—salaried proleta-
st and the non-salaried aciviies ofthe proletise. We must assume
the production of value 1 a global production and rejec both the
sworking-class and bourgeois vindication of productiviry:

Those of us who make up the proletaria are not defined by our
particular and immediste position in relation to production, but by
our antagonism to . Even those who, deprived of the means of sub-
sistence, are unable to sel ther lsbor power in the labor market are
also st of the prolecariat, since they contain the same opposition to
Capital that deprives them of the means of lfe and of their own lf.

19

of accumulation the bourgeois also consumes and enjoys them-
selves, but only so far as they act as a functionary for Capial, as
long as they subordinate and impose the needs of valorization.

Labor-pover is the only particular commodity which main-
ains its value among a cluster of products — produced in turn
by the former — and generates an additional value, when it is
put together with them in a labor process. We say particular
because labor-power is not a common commodity, and like
labor-capacity it is inseparable from the worker which sells
it, from the human being which carries it as a commodified
characteristic o their being.

This special particularicy also arises from the fact that the use—
value of labor-power has a quality which no other commodity
possesses: it creates value. In this sense, it is important not to
confise labor-power for lsbor-capaciry or with cither putinto
movement. While the former i the commaodity [labor-power]
sold by the proletariar, the later i the consumprion of its use—
value in the productive process [labor-capacityl. If 4 hours is
necessary to keep labor-power alive,this does not preclude that
one could use this labor-power for 8, 10, 12 or 18 hours. Its
daily costs of maintenance and its daily yield are of different
magnitudes. With this difference, the difference between the
value of labor-power and the value it produces is conden-
sed the secret of surplus value, and of the exploitation and
appropriation by capitaliss. This can only be understood over
the base of the law of value, where it is understood that the
hidden substance of value, and the cycle of M-C-M', s the
very movement of Capital, where the prolecarianized human
being s the simple mediation of money converted into the
subject of their movement

s likewise also understood that under the irrational form of
the wage, the value of abor-power i superficially transformed
into the price of labor, concealing under thar category that that
which is really paid for i labor-power and not labor itself. The
tremendous diversity of wages shows us how in comparison
with other commadities, within the price of labor-power there
are factors that go beyond the determination of social labor-
time, stating with the cortelation of power between dlasses

Forms of exploitation: absolute
and relative surplus value

“To critique exploitation we have two moments where we can
unfold the productive process. The first is necesary labor-time
0 reproduce the value of abor-power and the second is surplus-
labor-time, which produces surplus value. If the productive
process s interrupted when an equivalent tha can replace the
value of labor-power s reached, it i clear that we are facing the
simple reproduction of value. However, with the prolongation
of production, the start of the process of valorization and pro-
duction of surplus value, occurs beyond this moment. Surplus
labor-time is thus the time of the production of surplus labor:

Capital tirelesly secks to grow the time of surplus labor so
that it may increase s proficsin two forms. The first consists

of making workers work more, by cither lengthening the
work day, or by intensifying work. This surplus value is
termed absolute since it refers to an absolute increase in
the quantity of time of surplus labor, maintaining fixed the
amount of labor-time necessary for the reproduction of value
of labor-power. This first form is directly utlized by certain
capalists since i allows them to rase their rate of profic while
diminishing the final impact of the price of labor-povwer

The second form of surplus value consists of increasing the
surplus labor without increasing work, which is to say that
there is no increase in the duration of the workday nor in the
intensity of work. Following, the intensity and duration of the
workday remain fixed while the quantity of time destined for
the reproduction of labor-power is diminished and, all the
while, the time destined for the production of surplus value i
increased. Surplus value generated in this way is termed rela-
tive surplus value. For example, a workday of 8 hours cut up
into 4 hours of necessary labor and 4 hours of surplus labor,
undergoes an increase of relative surplus value by transforming
into a workday split into 2 hours for necessary labor 6 hours
for surplus labor. In this example, the capitalis wil lower to
2 hours the time in which the worker produces to replenish
the value of their labor-power, expanding in turn the 2 hours
dedicated to producing surplus value, all this keeping the 8
hours of the workday constan

I¢s evident that, in as much as value is determined by so-
cially-necessary labor-time, a reduction in the labor—time of
a workday which a proletarian dedicates to replenishing the
value oftheir labor-povwer is equivalent to reducing the value of
this labor-power. Since the value of commodites are inversely
related to productivity of labor, the increase in relacive surplus
value s linked to an increase of producriviy.
be be due to various modifications in the production process, a
reorganization of the production process o the incorporation
of technology.” As when the production power of an industrial
branch is duplicated by some invention and then an hour of
sociallabor is now expressed in 2 way which was once two hours
And when this duplication affects all sectors that direcrly or
rectly enter into the value of labor-power (food, housing,
domestic tasks, etc.), it i clear that the value of labor-power
is halved. If we return to the previous example of the 8-hour
workday, we can easily understand the change in the magnitu-
des and the increase in relative surplus vlue.

But chis relaive surplus value is not only gained in the case
of the sectors involved with the value of abor-power. Any capi-
alist which makes their production more productive than their

19 We seicly talk bout technologies and it is o casual. Sorme-
times the term machinery i used and e consider that his term
s become absolete 1t was not abways s0). Not allproduction
advantages aec mechanical o roboric. A company can incrcsc it
productivity by sdopting beter uniforms for is workers, new ma-
nagement software, by changing the method of organizing the work
processor the stock control, higher sandsrds of leanlincssor many

2

competitors also incorporates surplus labor into a greater part
of the workday. Any capitalist who makes his production more
productive in comparison to his comperitors also adds a greater
parcof the working day o the surplus labor. To follow the same
example mentioned above, in its production, productivity is
doubled, its 8-hour working day instead of being reflcted in
an 8-hour product like that of its competitors,is relected in
two times as much, in a 16-hour product, since the socially
necessary working time is still marked by that determined by
its competitors. Whil the other compeitors have to make their
workers work 4 hours to restore the labour force and 4 hours for
the surplus labour, our innovative capitalist has the advantage
that in 2 hours his workers have restored their labour force
(as these represent 4 hours of social work) and the remaining
6 hours are dedicated to producing surplus value (which are
represented in 12 hours). It has enough margin to put a price
o its product that i lower than the social value and destroy.
the compericion with ir*

Lt be clear that an increase in the intensicy of labor implics
a greater expenditure of energy, a greater amount of bor; on
the other hand,
increase in production with the same amount of labor.*

“These two ways of increasing exploitation are highly related
and mutually reinforcing. The physical and psychological limits
of the proletariat i the face of the increase in the intensity of
labor and the extension of the working day have produced as
many accidents and illnesses as resistance and struggle. Such
conditions forced the bourgeois o grant certain concessions to
the exploited, while gradually modifying many labor processes

increase in labor productivity means an

20 Thissinuation is temporary it lase uncil he productve advantsge
is assumed by most of the competitors in the same branch and the
value is decermined by the new level of productivty. In this context,
the most productive hou of abor will come to represent the average
productivity and will no longer represent two hous, but one hour of
social lsbor, but it vwill b expressed in wicethe use vahuesthan before:
the increase of the productive force, which will cause a devaluation of
the merchandise that will contan les living lsbor. Marx calld this 3
decressing tendency ofthe e of proft, since the profi obrained in cach
particular merchandise decreases, 50 it becomes necessary to increase:
the amount of commodiics produced in that branch to counteract
that decresse. This trend, which is driven by comperiion between
private capitals, was already developed in Cuapenos No. § in the
section Technology and prof. Here we willFocus on the increase in the
amount of surplus value that this increase n productivty implis and
that docs not disappear swhen the productive advantage s sssumed by
ll producers but on the contrary becomes generalised

21 “The distinction is important to understand the different me-
chanisms of exploiation, although in reality it i more complex o
differentate them. O the one hand, the bourgeois ove to talk about
increasing labor productivity when n reality many times they ae only
making us work harder, Their investment in the workforce is more
productive but not the work done. At the same time, the incorpora-
tion of technologics that incresse work productivity usualy brings
sbout an increase in work intensity. That is why diffrent proletarian
expressions of ejection to the incresse of productivity do not result
only from an increase in reltive bu also sbsolute surplus value, su-
Fering dircetly in the lsbor process the increase of work.
and strategies in order to improve and increase exploitation.
For their part, certain innovations in production, such s the
incorporation of technology, also made it possible to make labor
more intense by imposing a pace that was previously impossible
or very costly 10 obtain through mere supervision. In turn, these
transformations generated new spheres of production where it
is possible to extract absolute and relative surplus value again.

When we speak of salary as the value of the means of life
necessary for the subsistence of the proletarian, we cannot help
but observe how the composition of those means of life has been
constantly changing in accordance with the needs of Capital
‘The increase in exploitation is also found in the progressive
worsening of the quality of the most basic commodities
required for our subsistence. Iis present whenever we are
sold flavoured shit at an ever-increasing price and whenever
weare forced to consume a futile and meaningless commodity;
as technological goods of all kinds are today. In turn, “free
time” also follows the same path, being subject and object of
the needs of capical valorization. Under increasingly degrading
forms, time for rest or non-work is alienated lisure.

Year afier year, the classic pay dispute berween capialists
and workers (especially those in unions) is reproduced. In this
context, in contrast to the increase in nominalsalaries (the gross
increase in money received), the concept of rea salaris salaies
that are compared with inflation and other determinants of pur-
chasing power) emerges, which, depending on various factors
such as economic conditions, the importance of ach sector, as
well as the intensity of the struggles, may decrease or increase.
Bu, in addition, and this is rarely questioned, the concept of
reative surplus value also makes visible another determining
factor around wages

As we have seen before, as long as the amount of work in-
corporated in each commodity that i contemplated within the
reproduction of the abor force decreases, the salary relative to
the surplus value decreases. This decrease in the relative salary.
(which decreases permanenly) is an expression of the perma-
nent degradation of what is produced. Expressions of struggle
against this phenomenon emerge here and there, although in
many cases prolecarians ar reduced to mere consumers against
the increase of certain products and services, and against the
abuses or corruption of some capitalists. ‘This split becween
“struggles in the field of lsbour” and “consumer struggles” se-
parates the proletarians in struggle and prevents them from
having a unitary programme against c exploitation

Given all this development, it must be clear that, although
weare talking about transformations in the labour process and

22 On particular oceasions, the proletarian force has managed to
expressa joint practical citicism. An example of this was the combi-
nation of struggles in the workplaces with the systematic practice of
self-reductions, paying less or dirccly not paying the eletriciey bill
cents, et Today, we can slso find various exampls of struggles that
have become widespread s a result of the confrontation with the
incresse in the price of goads or srvices, such as the case of urban
transport in Brazi in the Lt decade.

21

in the forms of exploitation, these have an impact on and are
inseparable from the totalty of social life.

Surplus value and profit: the same but different

In the previous sections we talked about both surplus value and.
profi, both concepts thar are ofien confused. While surplus
the result of surplus labour (from “unpaid labour”)
and its understanding shows that only variable capiral (capiral
invested in labour force) creates new value; in contrase, profit,
the way surplus value is transformed on the surface s a category.
that hides this internal reality by showing each component part
of capital (variable and constant capital) paricipating equally
in the creation of new value. In effect, it hides the fact that

only the part invested in variable capital creates new value,
while constant capital only transfers it. Precisely, the rate of
proftis calculated in the ratio of profit to global capical
the rate of capital gain is the ratio of capital gain to equity only.

Capital feeds on the extraction of surplus value, and drives
the capicalsts o carry out this extraction, but they; having an
extremely partial and limited vision and sensitivity to the ge-
neral needs of Capial, can only appreciate this need, and carry.
it out practically, aking note of the rate of profit!
capialists can only perceive, calculate and speculate with the
fate of profic
the particular capitals according to the needs of the market.

Lt take an example from a company in the automorive
sector. Afier years of ahigh rate of profit n the sector, it begins
0 decline due to an increasing flow of capital into the sector
This can cause the company to decide to redirect part of its
production to the manufacture ofairplane fsclages, since such
redirecting s nor expensive, and in that marke there is current-
ly lctle competition and a better rate of profit. There are also
relatively recurtent phenomena in the economic cycles,such as
when afier a construction boom the rate of profit n thatsector
decreases. It is then when we will e capital moving away to
other sectors, perhaps to the real estate sector, o
in fixed terms due to the increase in the interest rat.

«Every individual capital naturally secks to atain an oligopo-
listic or monopolistc position on its market. While favourable
0 the valosisation of individual capitals, this is contrary to
the interests of capital in general. By pricing its producrs hi-
gher than the production price, a monopolistic capital extorts
from other capitalists a larger share of the social surplus value,
exceeding the normal average rate of profit. The farmer’s gain
slows down the accumulation of the latters (Bruno Astarian,
Everything must go! The abolition of value)

Hence, capitals with different organic capital compositions?*
obuain the same rate of profit. They acquire their rate of profit

le

nce the

s the reference that makes them redistribute

23 This is further developed next in Capitalist Contradictions.

24 The organic composicion of capital refers to the relationship be-
tween constant and variable apital,that i, becween the pare of capical
destined forthe means of production and thatinvested i labor force.
not from the variable capital they exploit but from the toral
capital they invest in a given sector. Comperition, the unsto-
ppable transfer of capital from one sector to another in search
of higher profits the massive arrival of capital o such a sector
because there i a higher profi, it light to another because the
massive comperition has made the rate of profic fall there.
an unstoppable movement. We see that under the effect of com-
petition, the various rates of profit are equalized into an overall
rate of profic, which s the average of all the rates of profi.Itis
thus understood that the general rate of profic corresponds to 2
capical of  given magnitude, whatever its organic composition.

Therefore, a capitalist rarely receives  profit equivalent to
the surplus value extracted in his particular company, but
depend on the rate of profit. Moreover, part of his profit is
distributed among the different capitalists (direet producer,
distributor, lender, tenant...). Hence such obscure categories
as land rent o incerest are integral parts of that profit and
therefore have their genesis in surplus value.

Itis therefore clear that surplus value and profit are not
synonymous. They are not a single concept, only analyzed
from two different points of view. They are not the “proleta-
rian way” and the “capitalist way” of calling the same thing.
Surplus value and proficare balanced at the end of the complete
eycle of accumulation, where the social mass of surplus value
i equivalent to the social mass of profic>

Inso doing, thanks to the rate of profit, lementary func-
tions of capitalist activity are carried out, guaranteeing a
permanent redistribution of capital that will always embrace
the general interests of Capital (fulfling, for example, credic
functions, lowering the costs of the energy used, erc). It lso
ensures that, although an activity may be considered unethical
o unglamorous according to certain parameters, if ts profita-
ilty is seductive there wil be capital willing to undertake it
Buc chis i not immediate, and other determinations (cultural
for example) influence this process:

Take a contractor who has been running the same plumbing.
company for 40 years and employs a couple of his nephews
He knows that he could make 2 higher rate of proficif he sold
itand invested his money in an upscale bar catering to yuppies
in a gay neighborhood, but he doesn'. His prejudice against
homaosexuals, or his religious conviction against the consump-
tion of alcohol, or just his attachment to the family business
s a barrier to the movement of his capital.» (Prole Info, The
Housing Monster)

The morion of capital around the rate of profic s also impor-
ant (o reflect on the development of certain cooperatives and
self-management ventures in recent decades, where workers
remove the employer from the middle (or usually it is the em-
ployer who decides to leave) and start managing their businesses
themselves. In the first place, lt us bear in mind that ifa capi-

25 Although fictiious capital temporarly breaks that process, for
the sake of what we are trying to develop, it can be omitted. See below
the section Notes on fititious capital,

talist decides to leave it is because the rate of profit in that
productive branch is not high enough. Thercfore,the workers
do not have much profit to manage or to distribute when they.
ke the reins of production. In doing so, they help Capital to
move out of the way a bourgeois that is too expensive for it in
times of crisis. Moreover, in many cases,if the self-managed
enterprise succeeds, it is because the workers are subjected to
conditions of exploitation that a bourgeois would never allow:
IFan employer wanted to implement measures such as abruptly
lowering wages or even going months without paying them,
increasing the pace, forcing workers to engage in the orga-
nisation of the labour process for fice, and not paying social
security funds and other social insurance, his company would
s00n be in flames. Under self-management, with the weight
of the ideology that “the company belongs to the workers and
they work for themselves” alienaion is brought to the sumum
where all sorts of sacrifices are accepted. But even in the hypo-
thetical case thar the workers succeed in effectively managing
production, thus maintaining a high rate of profi, they will
always have to devore a significant part of it to the growth of
their private capital of which they are now owners. In short,
Capital always continues to grow at the expense of its lsbor.**

“Minusvalias”

«Given that the capital that is advanced in the form
of salares and in the form of complementary goods
entals a waiting and risk—aking for the capitalist,
could it not be that the surplus value
from the armed robbery against the worker but from
the remuneration of these two producrive factors
(time and risk)?» (Juan Ramén Rallo, The fiasco of he
Marist theory of exploiation).

The bourgeois in their individualism and pettiness makes
Global Capital work. And even though they are a sad servant
of Capital, they presume themselves to be heroes and martyrs
of this society that we should revere. Thus, the exploitation
we suffer every day s presented as a “Marsist theory” if not a
completely subjective fact. «Time and risk are as productive
factors as labors say the paid specialists hiding that our labor
force cannot be accumulated so as to wait t sell it at a better
price. They deliberately hide the fact that those of us who only.
have our own workforce take risks every day in shitty jobs, on
the way 1 or recurning from them. But the bourgeois declare
their own risk the most rsky: the risk of not making a profit.
‘Thus, by risking their supposed shortcomings, they would
be fully enitled to surplus value. We 00 -with no other
choice- would then risk the capiral losses in every adjustment,
in every austerity plan, when the company closes and we are
lefi without a job. Every worker, day by day, advances work

26 The problem of seli-mansgement will be addressed in grester
depth in the next ssue of CunDERNOS,

2
that is not paid in advance and will nor receive more money
for such a risk. A thief can risk hislife at any moment, and the
bourgeois who is assaulted
he has stolen for the risk he has taken. Because capitalism s not
a moral system. When the investor risks money and earns
more than the proletarian who risks his life, for his labor
power is inseparable from his body, we learn an important
Lesson: the labor power of a proletarian (and with it his life)
is worth less than we thought. And the mere fact that his is
calculable—not that it i expensive or cheap—is reason enough
0 launch a struggle against this widespread mercanile society.

Without blushing, because automatons do not blush, any
human amplifir of the dominant ideology discursively redu-
ces all this social network to particular facts where one could
choose to be or not to be a worker, a homeless person or a
businessman. In one way or another, we are told that eworkers
are not by force, because they are not slaves, they are free and
they chose not to be entrepreneurs or self-employed because
they do not want o take risks. Instead, they want  predictable
and frequent income, rather than investing to carn perhaps
quite abit more in months or years». In the same way, the poor
would not be entrepreneurs because they do not wan to save
and this would be «a question of mentality and not social class».
Underlying thisis ofien the same refrain about the importance
of education for better civilization. However, the question can
be explained clearly but with conceprions that go against all
the dominan reason:

not reward him with more than

Itis historical - and not natural or random — conditions that
determine whether we sell our labour orce. We are deprived of
the means to fully produce our lives. Those of us who constitute
the prolecariac were and are deprived of a direct relationship
with nature (both human and non-human) to satisfy our
desires and needs, limited to offering on the marker a single
commadity: our labor power. Selling it or blowing up is our
choice, that is our freedom.

Under these conditions, the bourgeois stands as a mediator
berween two “things” that before they were integrated into
a toual and nawre. Thus and only chus is
human activity degraded into labor and the capacity for labor
produces a value greater than that needed to reproduce that
labor force. Then the bourgeois pays the value of that abor force,
which s the value of the commodiies needed to reproduce it

Is communism then that each worker keeps the equivalent
of the whole outcome of his labor? No, and a thousand times

human acivi

no. That is what social democracy has trafficked in for com-
‘munism, a perhaps utopian reform within the narow state and
capiralist margins.

«From each according to their ability to each according to
their needs is 2 way of stting in plain words what we mean by

27 “ltsvalue [ehat ofthelabor orcel, like that of any other commo-
amount ofsocial worl had been spent on the production of the lbor
force, but it wse value resides in the subscquent externalization of
that force. (Karl Mars, Capral)

23

Credit and interest

We commented in the previous section that profic s
distributed among the various capitalists. While there are
distributions that are not difficult o understand, such as
the one made by the dircet producer capicalist and his
commercial capitalist who sells him the producr, there
are others that generate more problems to grasp them
such as interest and land rent.! In order to understand
in depth the first one lec take the example of the cycle
of a particular capital.

Imagine that a capitalist asks for credit in order 0
carry out his cycle of production and reproduction. That
eredit plays an increasingly essential role i this process
is obvious. OF course, the lender in this context will de-
‘mand not only thar his money be returned in full after
the agreed date, but also that he receive an economic
compensation in return. Otherwise, he would keep his
‘money or invest it directly in the production process. The
producing capitalist will deduct a part of his profit to
pay his lender Interest is the form taken by this peculiar
type of money that generates that loan for the lender. The
interest rate that crystalizesin that sector will of course:
prevailin any loan, regardless of what the borrower does
with the money: Although from the lender's point of view
the movement is synthesized in M-M’, we see clearly
how that interest has its basis in a deduction from the
profi to the borrowing capiralist. In our example, when
the latter receives the money from the lender capialist,
he spends it on his productive apparatus, obaining
product whose sale wil pay the corresponding salaris,
‘means of production and raw materials, leaving a rem.-
nant from the part of the social surplus value that is
pocketed as part of his profit,although a certain portion
will have to be ceded to the lenderin the form of nterest.

1 See the section on Land rent below:

communism. Against the administration, maximization and
quancification by this or any State. But also against the llusion
of a world of atomized individuals who try to individually
quancify their production and their retribution. Not because
it is morally wrong but because i is impossible to do so, only.
the capitalist menaality resorts to these falsehoods. We must
necessarily star from the social genesis ofthe production of our
world. Who has created from nothing? Who has an oceurrence
that has not been directly or indirectly influenced by the social
relations it maintains? In whom does an idea begin? In whom
does an invention begin? All production is socil.

Itis clear that each person is unique and parcicular, but each
person is also a collective being who asserts himself in this at
every moment. Revolution does not mean the triumph of the
masses by crushing each being, revolution —among other things-
means the suppression of the “individual” s slfish and limied,

giving rise to the “parcicular” human being who does not
oppose his species but develops together with s, (CuapEros
DE NEGACION nro. 3, Against the generalized mercantile societ)

In chis horrible capitalistllusion, the fact of considering Ca-
pitalas just another neutral “facor of production” s repeatedly
stated. When i is nothing more than layer afier layer of surplus
value, of dispossession, of the result of exploication crystalized
in the form of money that innocendly and repeatedly enters
the process of production asking for more labor. All capital is
surplus value.

Let’s imagine an easy-to-understand example. Let us be
benevolent to the capitalist and say — abstracting the impos-
ity of the hypothesis for the very needs of valorization
in capicalism — that our capitalist s limited to the simple
reproduction of his capital. That i has a capital of 100 and
that half of i is spent on labour force and the other half on
constant capial (which, to facilizate our example, lers say s
all raw material and falls integrally inco the final produc).
Lec’s imagine that the exploitation rate is 10006, In each cycle
M-C-M' their 100 becomes 150 (50 reproduce the value of
the labor force, 50 transfer the value of the means of labor and
another 50 are the surplus value that our bourgeois pockets)
As we said, he does not accumulate capital, so he spends all
50 for his luxurious new life and reinvests the remaining 100
back into labor power and means of production. When he
finishes a second rotation he finds himself in the same situa-
tion. Another 50 for his expenses and 100 for his business
However, at this point, the bourgeois has squandered 100
on his needs (meals, parties, luxuries...) In other words, the
captalist has spent all his original capital. And et he has 100
intac, ready to enter production again and generate 50 of
surplus value along with the conservation of the 100, s easy
0 deduce from where not only the 50 of our good bourgeois,
butalso the 100 that he invests in workers and means of work

continue to come out: from the labor of his workers. There is
nothing in his capital that does not come from surplus value;
itis all unpaid labor. Everything is paid for with the labor of
the proletarians: their salaries, the means of production, their
private needs and vices as well. That in the reality we live cach
particular capital not only demands this simple reproduction,
butits constant expansion through accumulation, is something
thar the bourgeois will quickly perceive as a requirement to
maincain their clas stacus.

Productivity and standardization

Throughout chis ssue of CuapERNOs, we have explained how
the market and the production process are interrelated, how.
their movements are mutually determined and in line with
value valorization. Thus, the need for standardization, unifor-
mization of production processes and particular commodiies,
are the resultof this interrelated process and we cannor separate
them asif they were demands of the market or the productive
sphere in an isolated manner.

2

“The woman who makes a shelf for her family, makes the
shelf her family needs, with the means available to her. When
she becomes a self-employed worker (a carpenter in this case),
she will have to make shelves that meet various expectations
of those who want to keep obiects in their homes, even if she
has licle or no knowledge of what they might be, since she is
a private and independent producer. This obviously modifies
the shelving created.

Usually, producers do not manufacture by demand bu for
a market™ and, in addition, these tend to be integrated ino
more general work processes of which each one only makes a
small parc”. Whatever the case, we know that in general, we
produce for the needs of Capital and not for human needs, and
the most ominous expression of this process of standardiza-
tion s that those human needs end up being standardized
and converging in the needs of Capital.

As Bruno Astarian says (Everything mus go! The abolition
of value): <In order to understand the standardization of
objects and activities under the rule of value, let’s start
with the difference between usefulness and use value. This
difference is not dealt with in Mar’s chaprer 1. Marx and
Engels limit themselves to stating that the product must be
useful 10 someone else. However, the producer wanting to
satsfy that need has only an imperfect knowledge of what it
is exactly. Only the actual sale will confirm that the producer’s
gamble was correct. Standardization, as we wil see, is part of
that gamble, which is inherent to commodity production. In
that sense, sundardization imprints  clarly social mark on the
object’s usefulness. | use the phrase “utlity value” to underline
the fact that the commodity’s usefulness is not natural. The
thing being produced is fundamentally a commodity. The phrase
‘use value” has been employed 100 ofien as the usefulness of the
thing, the mere medium for exchange value, or as something
good (as opposed to the evil of exchange value) for i to serve
our purpose. “Utility value’, in contrast, must be construed as

28 One might think that there are exceptions in this regard... chat
il emain those who produce specificaly to order, o satisfy @ pas-
ticular nced, but even i these exceprions by which the market i not
governed, the standardization of the market i presented with the
overshelming weight of the multiple detcrminations that all com-
modities exert on that partcular need. This, morcover,in many cascs,
can be a partcular need in relation to a productive process, such as
a soffware or 8 machine custom-made for the capiclie. In the ima-
ginary of production on demand, it is wsualy related to sumpruous
o luxury production, but the social expressions of this productive
form are much more diverse.

29It is necessary to stop here, since one of the most widespread
Marsst valgarities call his process of parcializacion alienation, gratly
distorcing the resl importance of this concepr. Then, and above this,
as we will sec in the next issue of CUADERNOS DE NEGACION, the rec:
laimed companics movement in the Argentine region, following thic
distorcion, stablishes s an essential claim, the integral knowledge of
the work process by each worker, < 3 way of rstoring their dignity
and their character as producers,
an entirely social category, and an integral part of the theory.
of valuer

Standardization must also be understood in its true dimen-
sion in respect of the world market. When a productive activity
specializes and separates tself from the community on which
it was based and where it found its need, it loses the particular
characteristics of that community. It must then assume a suffi-
cient degree of generality tallow is inegration into the social
interdependence of labor processes in formation, with licle or
no knowledge of what ts parameters are or will be."

This standardization, moreover, penetrates into the very
depths of human activity and marerializes in the different
determinations of the division of abor. The labour force that
is synthesized in the commaodities cannot be thought of as
previous to sandardization and mercantilization, and then it
becomes immersed in market condi

ns. There is no starding
point that i alien o all this, there is a specific form of work,
defined by the continuous search for productivity and standar-
dization. In the same way; a potato cannot be considered as 2
“pre-value potato” that willlater be brought to the market. The
determination to plant that potato, to take it out, to tansport
it, why that particular kind of potato, in that field, under tho-
se particular social conditions; s a product of this process of
standardizaion

Itis easy to criticize the use value of those commodities
that common sense perceives as unnecessary; sumptuous, or
anti-human. There i ltle meric in crticizing the war industry,
or the huge advertising posters tha plague the cities where

we live and die. But it is becoming increasingly necessary to
generate a critique of the production of even the elements that
we consider most necessary and essential. I is the very process
of valorization and standardization that poisons the food we
buy, that permanently diminishes the qualicy of the basic tools
and utensils we use in our dail lives, that unifies and ruins the
beauty of natural diversiy in favor of the world market

And it the same process of standardization that standardizes
us. By imprinting the same superficial astes on all of us equally,
welearn to need what s offered to us. In the desert of the equal,
everything is flactened to become an object of consumpion.

30 We emphasize, along with Astarian, the importance of not
tishizng use value, a3 ifthe revolution were  return to it (ss many
wwho are involved in frir trade programs postulate). The commadicy
has @ dual character in terms of use value and exchange value and
avhat it is all abous i its destruction 3 3 social form, slong with all
its deccrmintions.

31 Asamonstrous corollary, we can chink of the greatsruggles that
currenty oceur in many corners of the world against the prolferstion
of hybrid or genctically modificd sceds, which by force o the mech-
nism of profit, or by their own technical constitution, tend to make
various local specics dissppear, historical support for the feeding of
buman communities and regional funa.

2
Land rent

An uncomfortable moment of the most vulgar formula-
tions of the value-work theory has to do with the price of
‘commodities that are not produced, and would therefore
be valueless

«Objects that in themselves are no commadities, such
as conscience, honour, &c., are capable of being offered
for sale by their holders, and of thus acquiring, through
their price, the form of commaodities. Hence an object may
have a price without having value. The price in that case
is imaginary, like certain quantities in mathematics. On
the other hand, the imaginary price-form may som:
conceal either a direct or indirect real value-relation; for

is without

instance, the price of uncultivated land, vk
value, because no human labour has been incorporated in
it.r (Karl Mars, Capital)

That land has a price, which can be measured and con-
ceived in socially unified terms, is also a product of the
process of standardization. It is only when two plots can be
compared in relation to the production of agiven crop, in
relation o the potential for raising an animal historically
transformed by human action, or as a teritory where there
is an x amount of a particular mineral, that the access and
private right to that plot can be measured in relation to its
expectation of success in a capitalit production.

‘Also, theaction of capital,inits development and shaping
of urban living conditions, determines the price of land in
its distributive (commercial) function. It is the plots that
are found in the most populated or wealthy areas that have
2 higher rental price, precisely because it i in these areas
that maximum profic can be made. Thus, the owner of the
Tand captures o a greater or lesser extent part of the surplus
value that commercial capital obrains (again to a greater o
lesser extent) from productive capital.

But, atthe same time, we must bear in mind that,althou-
gh the ultimate substrate on which the right of property rests
was not produced, there is incorporated work on some lands,
maximizes their productive potential. Both private
work (plowing,soil improvement, landscaping, ec.) and sta-
e work (access to energy, flood control, roads, surveillance
and regulation of private property; etc) increase the price
of land because they are effectively processes of valuation
per se, where living labor crystallzes

Therefore, the revenue comes from the productive diffe-
rence that one land brings in relation to another. The one
that grants more productivty t the labor will give a plus
profit in comparison to the one that grants les. Let’ ima-
gine,in agriculture, aland that has an underground river in
‘comparison with other land that has to bring water, paying
for the first one has the same advantage that a capitalit with
the relarive surplus value has by introducing some techno-

logical invention that makes labor more productive. The
only difference is thar here that surplus value is converted
into land rent that goes into the pocket of the tenant (the
fact that the owner of the land is the same as the agrarian
capialist makes no difference to the analysis, but rather o
the pocket of the capitalist who shares the loot ith himself).

On the other hand, the question arises s to what happens
in the worst lands, where rent is nevertheless paid. Marx
insists in opposition to the political economy that the rent
in these cases also exists and that it is a deduction from
the profic. For him the organic composition of capital in
agriculture and extraction always lags behind the prevailing
average composition, there is always more living labor used
than the average in the other scctors. At the same time,
Iand ownership operates as a limit to the fiee movement
of capital, which restricts the leveling of the rate of proft,
thus allowing a surplus profic over the other spheres of
production.

Therefore, «wherever natural forces can be monopolised
and guarantee a surplus-profit to the industrial capitalist
using them, be it waterfalls, rich mines, waters teeming
with fish, or a favourably located building site, (..) the
proprietor of these natural objects will wrest this surplus—
profi from functioning capital in the form of rent.» (Karl
Mars, Capital)

It clear that this land rent belongs exclusively to the
capitalist mode of production and has nothing to do with
its conformation to the old land rent. Its common link is

the itle to the land, only that in capitalism that lan
subsumed under Capital. Not only is the rent conformed
according to capitalist laws, but also its sale. Hence, the
price of land in capitalism refers o0 a product of human
abor even though the land is nor produced (but improved,
transformed...); it refers o is title of ownership that allows
its owner to monopolizea part of the profic (surplus profi)
It s a title that allows to absorb a part of the surplus
Tabor. The price of thattitle i therefore determined by that
rent as a capitalized rent. In fact, in general, land is sold as
ific were a money tite.!

1 Le, i $1,000,000 gives me $100,000 a year in incerest, 2 $100,000 rent for a picce ofland is worth $1,000,000.
CAPITALIST CONTRADICTIONS

The private socialization of
capitalist production

In capitalism, the private labor of isolated production units
is socialized in the market, that is, through the exchange
of commodities. It is produced on the basis of a successful
exchange, not the needs of one’s own and others. The pursuit
of the highest possible profit ffects the character of production,
as well s the quality of materials and work processes. That is
capicalist socialization.

The private labor of producers s related to the labor of all

other producers of commodiies becoming social abor, because

the product of each worker is equalized as value with all other
commodities. Alllabor then cortesponds to the same mercanile
and toulitarian economy:

«(...) the commadities of each individual producer appear
in a depersonalized form as separate exemplars of a given type
of commadity regardless of who produced them, or where, or
in which specific conditions. Commodities, the products of
individual commodity producers, circulate and are evaluated
on the marker. The real connections and ineractions among.
the individual - one might say independent and autonomous
— firms are brought about by comparing the value of goods
and by exchanging them, » (Isaak lich Rubin, Fisays on Marxs
Theory of Value)

This capicalist socialization of production has promoted,
thanks to an impressive development of the productive forces,
that we proletarians are increasingly deprived of the means

27

of subsistence. The ultra-specialization and international
division of labor, as well as the commaodification of more
and more aspects of life, make our jobs and our daily life
more and more integrated into capitalist sociery, while we
feel more and more lonely and fragile. The generalization of
the commodity is the generalization of social atomization
and misery.

Capivalist progess sellsitself s a progress of humanity; and
s idea is widely spread by those who believe that itis more of
amanagement problem. They want to socialize a production
that only exists at the expense of the private. Private not only.
as 2 maerial deprivation of ivelihoods but as a destruction of
community. We need a human socialization that is comple-
tely opposite to the logic of exchange

The capital-labor contradiction

In many cases it is said that capital-labour s the fundamental
contradiction of capitalism. It has been enunciated as the
contradicion between the social character of labour and the
private character of capitalist appropriation, which is neither
more nor less than what we talked about earlier. That is, the
hardships to which the prolecaria is subjected a the expense
of capitalist developmen

Even if we think about it from the point of view of use and
exchange value, we see how Capital makes labor a part ofiself
as variable capital, while at the same time constantly launching
it into the market as a labor force. In turn, as we will see in
greater depth later on in the contradiction valorization—devalo-
sization, Capital must make the part destined for the purchase
of labor force diminish relatively more and more in relation to
Some try to convince us that money, as wella the social
contradictions generated by capitalism, can be suppres-
sed by issuing time bonds, ime banks or by creating
“social fair currencies”. The total incomprehension of
what money s, and more specifically value as a social
form, leads them to believe thar these juggling acts in
the matter of monetary circulation putlimits or question
the very existence of money. The hourly bond —or the
time banks-, which is the most extreme version of all
these monetary aliernatives, wants to substitute the mo-
netary mediation and to be an “authentic” and “direct”
expression of the labor of sociery, to make production
directly social. But it i the greatest ofllusions to believe:
that the particular form that social mediation takes in
capitalism is what makes production directly social or
not. Money exists precisely because production is not
directly social, but requires exchange in order to be
socialized. Contrary to the illusions of the hourly bonus,
the abstract work cannot be directly expressed because
it only produces a social form, it needs an objective me-
diation t0 obiain a universal form, it needs a universal
symbolic product. As production remains for society
and in society, bu at the same time this production is
not immediately social, this mediation is indispensable,
‘money is a condition. The hourly bond wants to act as
‘money but without the implications and contradictions
of money, tha's why it sinks. Money does nothing
but express the social relations of production, any
‘mediation can only work ultimately as money and
express all its miseries in one way or another. What
all chis hidesi that all these “transformations” of money
leave intact and proteet precisely what money generates:
the commaodity mode of production, capitalis social
relations, exchange, value.

that destined for the means of production, with a whole series
of brutal implications on the prolecariar.

The important thing here is to take note that this contra-
diction is not solved by another form of appropriation of
production, “making the product of labor truly social”, but
by the revolutionary overcoming of capitalism by destroying
Capital and labor. These are immanent contradictions that
give life to capitalism, which do not contain a revolutio-
nary solution in any ofits extremes but in the overcoming.
of both.

Instead, Marxism was constituted under the premise that
the defense of the pole of lsbor constituted the road to com-
munism and, therefore, gave a revolutionary character to the
capital-labor contradiction. Social democracy in general assu-
med and assumes this perspective by sacralizing work, making
itits fundamental premise. We are called upon to defend labor,
even in the name of “revolution’”.

2

On the contrary; in the proletariat-Capital contradiction,
or even more s0 benween Capital and life, we can speak of an
antagonisic pole containing 2 revolutionary way out.

The near toality of men rising against the torality of capi-
alist sociery, the struggle simultancously against capital and
labour, two aspects of the same reality: .. the prolecariat must
struggle against its own domination s0.as o be able to destroy.
itself as class and to destroy capital and classes. Once victory is
assured worldwide, the universal class which is really consitu-
ed (formation of the party according to Mars) during a huge
process preceding the revolution in the struggle against capital,
and which is psychologically transformed and has ransformed
sociery, willdisappear, because it becomes humanity. There are
0 groups outside it. Communism then develops freely. Lower
socialism nolonger exists, and the phase of the dictatorship of
the proletaria is reduced to the struggle to destroy capitalist
sociecy; the power of Capital.» (Jacques Camatte, Capital and.
Gemeinvesen)

The revolutionary perspective may look like a purism im-
possible to assume when one has o survive and fight inside
capiralism in a context such as the current one. Trade unionists
and reformists in general will say that contradictions must
be assumed, that one maust put one's feet n the dirt, that the
prolecariat can only fight for the immediate, that this s not the
time to talk sbout revolution.

Those of us who defend a radical perspective are accused of
alienating ourselves from the rest of the class, o pretentious en-
lightenment separated from social reality, of not understanding
the contradictions of it But that is precisely our starting point
for fighting for revolution: overcoming our contradictory
reality as a class.

The proletariat as a contradiction

Allthese determinations act socialy,configuring a contradictory
existence in every aspect of social lfe. If there were only a con-
wradiction beoween the “prolecarian camp” and the “bourgeois
camp” it would be relatively simple, but the contradicion is
in the very essence of the proletariat. Our class expresses—as
0 other class in history—the social contradictions within
its own ranks.

‘We produce value while being a hindrance to its develop-
ment. We work to live and we lose our lives working.

Inversion issuch, abstra
an extent, that the logic of value acts as if the concrete does
not exist and finds in value a resistance from the fact of inite
existence before a supposedly infinite reproduction. Whether it
s “natural resource’” ora “human resource”, they are a means,
almost a necessary evilfor Capital t0 have more money at the
end of the operation.

The formulas that victimize and determine the prolecariat as
a forced and necessarily revolutionary subject do not usually
take into account that in everyday life we are also a factor of
production and that, therefore, we oppose cach other in the

dominates sensitive lfe to such

same way that different capitalsts do permanendly, because we
are a class within Capital and in some way we behave as mere

variable capital

The driver who on his way to work curses other workers on
a picket line may find himself in the opposite situation the
following month. The immigeant who succeeds in integrating
himselfinto a new region, despises the immigrants who follow
his steps and “steal his job”.

But it is not simply a matter of raising awareness of this
process. Even those who have a certain sensit
phenomena cannot help but find themselves in the midst of
the contradiction itself, which can only be resolved by blowing
it up, without taking sides at any pole of the contradiction.
Neither living labor over dead labor, nor the producer over the
commodity,nor any kind of moralistic hope can emancipate us
from Capital in its own interior, drowned in its own categories

«When labor and capital merge, the material community.
of capital presents iself o society s the human communiy:
where one believes oneself to be deali
ing, one only comes across value and its materialization in the
form of commaodities. Yet beneath the material community of
capial lives and develops the human community; beneath the
alienated desires live the desires, and the system produces its
own subversion.» (Négation, The Proletariat as the Desiroyer
of Labour)

In a truly overwhelming personal dissociation we submit
ourselves to raising the profits of the bourgeois and fighting
against this at the same time. It is our struggle as class within
Capital and as the class which society does not regard as
such, for which property has already been abolished. It is
the struggle berween survival and ife.

Our interests and those of the bourgeoisie can only concur
in our survival, in getting used to misery and crumbs. So why
share the same horizon? What is the poinc of going down the
path traced by the enemy when you don' need the same thing
as they do? What is the point of using their organizational
forms? None, because their organizational forms, as well as
their longings and their enire imaginary, emanate from the
very world of Capital

to these

with the human be-

Valorization/devalorization

Extracted from Notes against the Dictatorship of the Economy,
Communism Magazine No. 13. of the Internationalist Com-
munist Group.

To be valorized, value must be invested in two parts, one in
constant capital (purchase of machines, buildings, raw materi-
als...), the other in variable capiral (purchase of the labor force).
The value of the first parcis ransmitted to the final product by
labor, staying constant, hence its name. The second part,on the
contrary,the variable capital that was destined to the purchase
of the labor force, will increase by the very action of that lsbor

2

force, that is t say by labor. It i this parc that produces the
surplus value. In fact, the labor force is the only commodicy.
capable of
the capalists.

“The compeition inherent in Capital forces each capitalist

ging more value, the only source of profi for

produce as cheaply as possible in order to impose themselves on
the market against their competitors,if they do not want to be
swept away by them. To do so, they must necessarily increase
their company’s productivity, that i, produce the same thing
with less work or more precisely produce the same thing paying
less wages This increase in productivity involves an increase

in equipment and infrastructure (constant capital) and a
relative decrease in the importance of the labor force (va-
riable capital), which results in less and less live labor being
incorporated into products and obviously implies a loss of
value of the products and also in the means of production:
in other words, a devalorization.

To counteract this effect of unitary devalorization of their
products, the capitaliststry to increase the bulk of these products
by further increasing constant capital as opposed to variable
capial (that i, by further increasing the organic composicion
of capital)
more! The mass of commodities produced wil increase, but

which socially reinforces the devalorization even

each commodity will contain per unit less human labour and
therefore less added value. Let us also remember that value is
only realized when the commodity s sold and the increase in
mass makes this part of the cycle of valorization (the realization
of value) more difficult. If no buyer i found, the value s not
realzed and there will be another devalorization.

Buc with the generalization of the increase in productivity,
o which all capitalists are obliged if they want to stay in the
market, the amount of labor contained in each final product
decreases, s well as the amount of abor contained in the means
of production involved in the production of those commodic
and uldimatel it is the value of the torality of products
and the means of production that decreases. Devalorization is
increasingly violent.

All that movement produces “the crisis”. It is increasingly
difficult for the mass of existing capital o be valorized. It is a
period of bankrupicies, of destruction of unsold stocks, of high
percentages of paralyzed means of production, unemployment,
decrease of real saaries... Ac first this purification is suffcient
and the destruction of capital allows comperitors to reactivate
their activiy, which produces a new active phase of the cycle.
Butin the long run this kind of cyclical destruction is insuffi-
cient and capital needs to destroy surplus commodity on a large:
scale 10 allow a more durable valorization: this is the genera-
lized war. I the generalized war there is a general destruction
) and of
variable capital (massacre of proletarians on all fronts). By this

of constant capital (nfrastructure, factories, stocks.

means capital obtains a brual devalorization by the pure and
simple destruction of the things and the men that act s capital.

‘The general reduction of value is limited to the destruc-
tion of the objects containing the value! This apparent
paradox is explained by the fact that the destruction of
constant capital gives new impetus to valorization. Recons-
truction is iniciated on the basis that the proportion of constant
capital has fallen sharply in relation to variable capital. And so
anew cycle begins again until a new generalization of war
One could think thar Capital carries out that circle in an infi-

nite way, but thatis only anillusion, given that the cycle is never
the same, each time icstars from  higher point of producivity,
of incorporation of the technique to the productive apparatus,
which makes accumulation more and more important and
also requires a greater destruction. It is more of an expansive
spiral process and not a circular process in which one returns
0 the starting point. Over time the bourge
delay the depressive crisis (destruction of stocks, restrucruring,
ficttious capital, arcifical increase in effective demand...) but
the longer it is delayed, the more important and greater the
amount of surplus capital that needs o be destroyed.

has learned to

30
31

NOTES ON FICTITIOUS CAPITAL

Among the various mechanisms that Capital employs to coun:
teractthe contradiction becween valorization and devalorization,
ficticious capital has occupied a decisive place in recent decades
alongside the imperialist war and the constant advance in the
exploitation of the proletariat (ol intimately interrelated).

The hisorical importance of fictitious capital s fundamental
0 keep alive an aging subject and to cushion the irresolvable
contradictions it generates by postponing them in time (irresol
vable from the bourgeois point of view, not from the proletarian
one, which contains s resolution with the abolicion of that
social form through revolution). Only by understanding this
hiscorical development in which Capital has more and more
difficulties to renovate its reproductive cycles (M-C-M') can
we situate the incalculable dimension of existing ficttious capi-
al. Social democracy criticizes finance as a tick that would
suck the blood out of the productive, industrial economy,
an cconomy that would be in good health were it not for
the intervention of those finances. Its the trend ideology
The vulgar conceprion that guides them prevents them from.
understanding that it s precisely the limits and contradictions
of the “productive economy” that has multiplied finance, and
the latter has given artificial life to the “productive economy”.
Capitalism is not rotting because of ficttious capital, but the
social form that this mode of production takes as a whole is
rotcing, Finance works like  freezer holding meat in the process
of rocting: it does not prevent rotting, but slows down and
postpones the process n time. But, at the same time, ficttious
capital has more influence on the process of reproduction of
Capital than the freezer has on mear, since it not only delays,
but also gives new impetus, new youth to Capital, as i it erases
all the contradictions that threaten it

Therefore, in a historical dynamic in which the process of
valorization implis a process of devalorization, the use of credit
begins o escalate, since if the production of value is reduced
in relation to the invested capital, its reproduction through
new investments, increasingly higher due to the increase of
fixed capital, requires new sources of money that do not come
from the cycle of tha capital, since valorization itself cannot
guarantee them. The expansion and multiplication of credit
therefore has its origin in the problems of reproduction of
Capital. As Kurz states, cinterest-bearing capital i preses
ted as an artificial respiration mechanism for an economic
system that is gradually losing its vigour

Banks become a fundamental tool for the development of
credit because they centralize all the money “put aside” from
society to be used in loans. The development of banks as a key.
sector of credit goes hand in hand with the development of
capialism, but their social weight s directly proportional to
the large investments in constant capital and they become the
key piece in the cycles of capital reproduction. Only when they.
are able to centralize the money of the whole society do they.
fully assume this specific function. Thus, afte the great bank

filures becween the 18505 and 18605, commercial banks with
large savings networks began o appear, unil the appearance
of Credit Agricole owards the end of the 19th century, the frst
depositbank in the world, which will be the trend from chen on:
centralizing all the savings in society and setting them in motion
for the reproduction of capital through credit. Everything seems
0 be going in the logic of value as long as the reproductive
eycle M-C-M' i successful and the lender receives his money
along with its corresponding interest. Here, within the logic
of value, credit only presents a time lag, being a commitment
0 future production and profits. However, the diffcultes of
valorization of the productive cycle, as a consequence of the
scientific-technical development and the decrease of the profit
rate,will create serious problems to carry out the cycles, causing.
a compromised sivuation. It is precis
Mar encapsulates the appearance of that determining element
that s the fititious capital.

Therefore, the MM movement of the interest bearin
capital is in trouble when the reproduction of the M-C-\
capiral in which the borrowed M is invested collapses. Then the
valorization process cannor pay back the loans it has committed
0. The time projection breaks down, furure production has
not only faled to meet profit estimates, but in many cases has
not even managed to retain half of the original M. The credit
cannot be repaid. But the borrowing capitalisc ~and Capial in
general- finds a way out: they pay for those insecure (or risk)
eredits with new credits they obtain, thus creating a whole
chain of credits. The dynamics of Capital does nothing but
constantly set condicions for the colonization of reproduction
by fictitious capial. In this way, credit money is multiplied,
which is detached from the substance but acts s f it were part
of the real process of valorization. The mass of credit money
muliplies 1o limits that are currently beyond understanding),
maingaining and extending the temporal projection beyond
all limits. Here the basis s aid for an indefinite separation be-
tween money and its substance (abstract work). Realty shows
us inall history that, as Mars says, internal unity makes ts way,
sooner or later even if only by violence: the fi
eredits will end up collapsing when the M-M’ movement and
the chain of interest repayment reach their limits. Just look at
the story of these mountains of credit money as the story
of their downfall. When the magnitude reached cannot be
further developed the card ladder falls one by one. «Credit,
which is profit that is consumed before having been realized,
can postpone the moment when capitalism will have reached
its systemic limits, but it cannot prevent it» (Amselm Jappe,
Credit unto Death)

Of course, once these basis of separation berween money and
its substance as the only way to maintain this irrational system
have been laid, the system itslf will increasingly require, in an
insatiable manner, this form of reproduction and will insert
increasingly complex mediations that will make this credic
and fictitious process so indecipherable and generalized that it
will project in the heads of economists and other analysts that

in this context where

us chain of

32

money has the quality of generating money, that value works
without ts substance. As n other times, these economists will
do nothing but express and vindicate the needs of Capital, that
is o say; untie any knot that makes it difficult to assert oneself
o that valueless money. Just as the physiocrats, mercanlists,
Keynesians, liberals.... expressed and claimed the needs of con-
crete development of Capital when their theories dominated
among economists, the new apologists of valueless money have
been playing that same historical role for decades.

“This process of consolidation of fictitious capital, of disas-
sociation of the value from its substance (abstract labor) is
impossible without the rupture of what binds money with the
eycles of reproduction M-C-M”. Already in the credit system
inself, the anchoring of money to its substance (historically
represented in gold) implied a bond that prevented fictitious
capital from taking off. The constant tendency to get rd of that
tie comes from long ago, with its comings and goings in mo-
netary policy. In the nineteenth and carly twentieth centuries,
states loosened the reins in periods of expansion and dropped
the anchor in periods of recession. But the conditions for
money o seck to detach itself from its substance become
more pressing the more important credit becomes in the
reproduction of global capital

‘While the increase of credit and fctitious capital in the deca-
des before the 60705 of the past century sill rlaively followed
the thythm of real accumulation, and itssocial function was to
speed up and give impulse to those cycles to be achieved, from
the end of the 60s the dynamics s reversed. The problem is no
longer that the cycles of reproduction require credit money to
be realized, but that the rate of profit is increasingly squalid for
the productive undertakings of Capital, which makes Keyne-
stanism useless. In that sense, only a part of the credit money.
was used in the cycles of reproduction M-C-M’, because the
rate of profit was sinking. Inflation reflects that money had
increased, both absolutely and relatively, compared to the ag-
gregate value of all the commodities produced. And as Marx
already stated in relation to the quantitative theory of money,
if production does not grow in line with the increase in the
means of exchange, money depreciates. The accumulation of
capiral already shows a the end of the 19605 a great weakness
together with a growing devaluation of money: The public debt
shot up, dissociating itself from the future production of value.
Capitalism formalizes what i a realiy, the convertbilicy of the
dollar is abandoned.

«When, in the 19705, the delinking of the dolla from gold
became formal, already weakened and barely valid for state
and institutional carriers, the foundations of the means of the
capitalist end-in-itself were already subverted. But this was
by no means addressed in this way; the crisis potential of this
process and its remission towards a tendency towards the toal
selfdevalorization of capitalism were, o large extent, ignored.

Through their posicivist perception, science and common sense

only could and wanted to grasp a monetary “fact” thar, for
some reason, was now altered; money seemed to have simply.
shed its substance and (superficially considered) its meral base
o continue to function happily beyond any gold coating. And
so it really was. So much the beteer for the expansion of credit
and for capitalism, ficed from uncomforcable inhibitions as
0 its moneary matter. The old theories of money, evidendly
including above all that of Mars, had been nothing but a
“substancialist” error. Such perception shows how affirmarive
consciousness ed, by virtue of its positivist way of
thinking, o reinterprer, until the practical proofof the contrary.
(and beyond it), al the phenomena which point to the pro
mity of the absolute internal limit, as so many other posicive
and self-sustained alerations of capitalism. The presupposition
of all this is that there s not even an objectified internal law of
capial, it is only a result of struggles between interprecations
and relationships of subjective forces.

Such an ignorant percepion was only possible because the de-
valorization of money (in analogy to the fall of the rate of profic)
was il being processed as a clever development which, however,
already presented some dangerous anomalies. Regardless of the
pretext —which, in the beginning, was merely the war economy
behind which, however, lurked a causal complex of decper im-
plications-. at the beginning of the 20th century the process of a
huge secularinflation was set in morion that,although advancing
through uneven outbreaks, never stopped completely. Thus, spe-
cialists in cconomic history investigated that,in the United States,
a certain mixture of typical household and food products could
be obuained for $100 in the year 1790. In 1913, ic cost $108,
50 prices temained stable for more than a century. In 2008, the
same mix of products cost $2,422. This example shows the drastic
qualitaive break in the character of capiralist monetary matter.
The historical process of the devaluation of money always made
itself felt, more o less incisively and decisively,in the daily life
and in the empirical balances of capital; however it seemed that
secular inflation could be kept under control, although it was
always considered a danger, without anyone having understood
the internal nexus». (Robert Kurz, Money withou Value. General
lines for the transformation of the eritique of economic politic)

At this point of development, any return to the gold stan-
dard is impossible without immediately bringing to light the
whole earthquake of capital contradictions. The flow of credit
money is of such volume that it cannot be related to the real
substance of value, represented through gold. It s evident that
this desubstantiation leads to a historical process of inflation
as Robere Kurz explains in the previous quoration. While
some countries manage not to disrupt inflation due o the
weight they currendly occupy in the world market ~although
since 2008 they are beginning to stagger-, the majority of the
international proletariat is suffering the consequences, unable
0 survive with an inflation that exceeds two digits, or as Kurz
says «the majority of humanity is facing the consequences of
monetary policies: hyperinfation at rates between one thousand
and one million percents

Alongside this process of “money without substance” inhe-
rent in the development of fictitious capital, a whole network

33

of mediations is unfolding. Al the historical development of
this tendency of Capital, of overcoming the limitations of the
concrete, has been sharpened in the last century, especially in
the last decades. The ways of accumulating fictitious capital
have multiplied to the point that today it is impossible to
know which percentage comes from real transactions and.
which from fictitious ones.

‘Mars already analyzed public debt and stocks as the main
actors of this trend. In the first case, he observed how the capiral
destined to buy public deb securities is never really invested,
since it is used to finance the public defici. As it covers a past
expense, it cannot be used in a reproduction cycle. In reality,
o
of a share in the statel income (such as taxes). In the case of
shaes, it should be noted thar, after the issue of shares for a
certain financing of a company, the capial continues to exist
independently. That s, not only as a resul of the capital inves-
ted, but also by the capitalization of the shares through their
continuous sale on the stock markets. Over time, the market
price of the shares may come to represent a sum of money with
no relaion to the nominal value established in the inicial issue.

erest that the owners of the debr securites receive consists

However, there are many more financial inventions such
as derivarives, which are financial products that refer to other
products of their kind. As with stocks, derivatives are initially
issued with a direct reference in the reproduction process,
although they then tend to become autonomous from their
relationship to the reference (such as the housing bubble in
the US). Another form is utures contracts (contracts where the
buyer and seller agree on delivery within a certain time frame
with a price estimated according to market trends). Because of
the profit that can be made from the difference between that
price achieved and the final price, there is arcificial pressure on
the market. In these contracts, speculating with that difference
is often the deal (in the case of oil it is seen as the whole ime
projection disappears: with the price rising so sharply a few
years ago and the tendency to rise further — with the threat of
its exhaustion — some companies made fuures contracts buying
oil for many years, soon afier the price started to fall).

The limits of fictitious capital

«Almost all bourgeois thinking reflects the logic of value in
that it assumes the existence of an independent form that can
coninue to develop eternally without ever encountering the
resistance of a content or a substance. The bourgeois ccono-
mists always reason in quantitative terms and believe that value
can be increased at will, without having to fear any objective
limits, such as society’s limited capacity for consumption, the
laws deriving from the use value of fixed capal or the limited
nature of the natural resources and the available labor force.

While the later data are more o less nacural, there are much
more limits which, although social, because of their fershistic
character assume an almost natural aspeet, as i the case of the
allin the rate of profit or overproduction. The form, insofar 2s
itis something thought out,is quantitatively unlimited, while
the content ahways has limits. The certainty that realty could
be manipulated to infnity collapses at the latest upon the c
the existence of an inescapable ralit, of a substance that hasits
own laws, then comes to light. (Anselm Jappe, Credit o Death)

State indebredness, fctitious money, dozens of product
categories of the financial market, securitisation, bonds....all
this has become uncontrollable and insatiable. The capitalists,
the economists.

all beleve in this fiction that appears to be
real and believe that they have evaded the law of value. The
production of surplus value that is only generated in the
M-C-M’ cycle is laughable alongside the mountains of
fictitious capital. Money belicves o have freed itself from
the dictatorship of its substance, currency believes to have
emancipated itself forever from its condition as a simple
sign of value. Fiction scems o be established for etenity.
As Marx insists, the very separation of buying and selling that
money articulates and its function as a means of payment con-
ains the possibilty of projecting transactions in time. Naturall,
the same thing happens in the cycles of capital reproduction,
which is why fction can work.

But the fiction can only seck to inhabit reality, when
reality contains the material basis for the fiction. Therefore
the fiction does not collapse as mere fiction, but its collapse
expresses the collapse ofits very material basis. Al this fiction
has no imagination, 2s Marx said, since all its construction does
not go beyond the current production projected in time. As
so0n as that projection can no longer be maintained on firm
ground, it collapses. Where a benefi or asimple future income
collapses, since the basis ofis deployment fall into the present
as reality, fction flls apart. Tha is why Capital squeezes and
tracks everything that brings real value (that i, the results of the
real productive process), no matter how insignificant the profit
it makes. Every injection of real valorization is a drop of water
in the desert — because of the sate of the profit rte — but it
transformed ino an oass by the interaction with the fcttious
capical that projects that valorization in time. Without  point
of reference that i at the origin of the whole mountain of re-
ferences, everything falls to the ground. Thus, a the financial
bubbles burst uninterrupredly, new bubbles rise over new cycles
of capital reproduction (M-C-M),

Therefore, thelimit of fictitious capital cannot be understood
if we dissociate that its basis s the transfer to the present of
a fuure value that is linked to  present resource that cannot

be created in fictitious space, but on  real reproduction cycle.

The decoupling of money from its substance therefore con-
ains infrangible time limits. Where unity proves impossible,
ficttious capitallosesits basis It is no longer simply a question
of a temporal separation between abstract labor and money,
but its unity in time is totally denied, presenting the furure
realization of abstract labor (substance) as something impos-
sible and money as money without its substance. To deny this
social reality s to build an independent and unlimited power.
Even the sellers of these fictions are aware of this ssue at some

34

level. Thus, we have scen how sectors as important as the real
estate market, the dot coms, the crypro-money... have gone
from being key sectors in the production of ficitious capital o
becoming expressions of devalorization. Despite the fact that
new “bubbles” are starting up with new energy, even in these
affected sectors, the logic on which they are based does not
augur well for them other than new devalorizations.

The financial crisis of ecent years, with the exception of 2008,
has not yer reached a widespread and liquidating level. Financial
bubbles are bursting here and there in an interrupted process.
Global capital ties to protect itself by creating ideological fic-
tions beween bad banks-good banks, toxic products-healthy
products, safe credit. but everyone, despite the
spread of propaganda that everything is going smoothly, percei-
ves that chis can only bring new problems. The contradi
are becoming more and more acute

‘We are walking towards an unprecedented devaluation that
is currenty skewing the lives of a large part of the world's pr
letariar. Although our class tries to counterbalance, s struggles
end up being crushed and/or framed by bourgeois factions.
For the time being, this process of shacks continues, despite
all the good news that Capital's apologists are trying to spread.
Itis very difficult to predict how the crisis of valorization wil
e o present itself as a consequence of an internal logic
that Capital thought could avoid forever: that ofits substance,
abstract work.... What is cercain s that our class will be the only.
one that can give it the blow, by purtingall the hardships on it

sk credit

The need for a revolutionary solution is increasingly pressing,

and yet we have never been so weak in affirming our program.
THERE IS NO POLICY AGAINST
THE DICTATORSHIP OF VALUE

So, everything is value in this capitalist world? The answer is
o, but it does not express a less perverse realiry.

The critique of the valorization of lfe does not seck to in-
dicate that absolutely everything is commodified in the same
way and that all the activities we carry out are labor. It secks to
indicate that production and reproduction of capitalist society.
as 2 whole are developed, directly or indirecrly; around the
production of value.

In this society many aspects of ou life are not developed in
the form of an exchange of equivalents nor are they quantifisble
as 2 quancity of abstract labor. However, chis is nor ousside the
logic of value. Different activities of affection and care, as well
as other more unpleasant ones, have nor been created by value;
however, they have been sbsorbed and even moified by it. And
we do not reduce the analysis to interpersonal relationships
berween acquaintances and close friends, but to society as a
whole. We refer to how Capital has been appropriating and
integrating into its own dynamics various aspects of social
life, modifying them. And that it could not exist without
them. Capital could not existif we only behaved as variable
capital in the same way that a company cannot exist if allits
employees complied with each and every one of th regulations
throughout their entire workday.

32 Well-known work—to-rue job action consiss of the stict ful-
Bllment of the labor, health and hygiene norms and with rigorous
application of the dispositions of the lsbor agreements, causing
pasalyss of the corporate actvity ss a consequence. The effect of
production slowdown s produced by taking to the cxtreme the inter-

35

‘We have tied to express throughout this issue how value is
not limited to being a merely economic form and that in capi-
talism the abstract tends to dominate the real. Not because ve
represent reality in an inverted way; but because value inverts
reality, and that is what the notion of commodity ferishism
refers to

Demanding “more democracy” against the onslaught of the
economy is nonsense. Democracy s equality and freedom is
the self-fulfilment of the economy: Like commodities, ctizens
are equal. Democracy disregards social inequalicies and reduces
us to ctizens with equal rights.

Equality, 252 dominant concept of our imes, comes precisly
from this reaicy from the materialization of vlue, from buying
and selling, from the marker. This “mysterious” process of
equalization, which operates on the basis of value, is the key
to the whole bourgeois right that permeates the thinking
of all the oppressed. Therefore, one s not democrarized only.
when one goes to vore

“Mystfication s not a phenomenon planned by the members
of the ruling class a hoax that they perpetrate. If o it would
be enough to have a simple adequate propaganda to eradicare
it from men minds. In fact it acts in the depths of the social
structure, within social relations.» (Jacques Camatte, The de-
mocratic mystifcation)

We think that the historical (and logical) unity of democracy.
and commodity are two aspects of the same reality. Democracy
does o arise from slavery (although it coexists with i), but
from trade. In fact,in those ancient societies where the commo-
dity was on the periphery of society, democracy also occupied
that peripheral place, and only acquired an internal importance
in the commercial centers, a5, for example, in Athens. In the
generalised commodity sociery, in capicalism, democracy is
generalised. A set of fictitious communities (not only the
homeland, but the race, the party, the religion, the region, the
football club...) reproduces the illusion of a community as a
condition for the reproduction of the atomisation of the indi-
vidual» (Miriam Qarmat, Against Democracy)

How then could democracy curb Capical? How could poli-
ticians curb what they administer?

Against the State!

In CuADERNOS DE NEGACION no. 4: On the destruction of the
State, we address the critique of the State by linking it to the
critique of the econom:

‘What we consider fundamental to know is that the State is
not an enemy for reasons of taste, moral affinity or ideo-
logical ancipathy. It is s0 as a fundamental power scructure
that guarantees our submission to wage labour, that allows
and defends the destruction of nature in pursuit of economic

pretation, n some cases literally, ofthe legal norms chat regulate the
aciviey causing downtime i the process and a drop in productiviy

33 This was discussed again in No. 9 in che section £ pluribus umum.
production and guarantees war as a method of economic reor-
ganization and social contol. (...)

Since its origins the world capitalist State has been crys-
allized in national states, but it has not emerged in one or
several countries and from there it has been spreading. Capital
emerges from the world market, it develops, subsuming all
previous forms of production.

The development and power of national States is the deve-
Topment and power of world Capital, and specificall, o each
atom of Capital thatin order to confront another one -and in
its development— associates and coalitions other atoms until
it structures itslf into opposing state forces. Without losing
sight of the fact that, despite their comperition, these atoms
are part of world Capital.

IFwe reject the State it s because we reject a whole system
of social organization that leads to the State. Its abolition is
inseparable from the abolition of the system of wage labour.
That is why the struggle against the State is not a political stru-
gele of apparatus against apparatus: political parties or groups
that aspire towards State power in an extra-parliamentary way
through, for example, the strategy of the armed pach. (...) It
is 2 social struggle, toral and toralizing,

IFwe poin this our, it i due to the misunderstanding of the
current social organization, which is ofien confusingly separated
as political on the one hand, and economic on the other. This
ertor of analysis —when no longer embedded in the thought as
ideology that nullifies any analysis when accepting instituted
dogmas- becomes a great obstacle at the time of changing that
misunderstood reality:

(..) The State is not so much an entity s a historical and
social activity. Itis the product of a sociey that, upon reaching
a certain stage of development and situated in an irreconcilable
social antagonism, in the attempt to perpetuate itself found
away to continue and guarantee ts existence by prescrving,
precisely; that irreconcilable social antagonism. Also guaran-
tecingthe fiee development of value, in a scenario of order and
assurance for it existence.

Modern State was born with the class society: and it has 0
maintain those conditions if it needs to continue to exist. This
i the same as saying, then, that the modern State will become
extinet with class sociery.

Itis by understanding the State in 2 historical and social way
that we understand that is destruction cannor be s

that the State could only be destroyed overnight ifit did not
have its roots buried in the social realm.

(...) The destruction of the State means the destruction
of a society that “needs” the existence of the State. To
suppose what the world would be like today if the State
did not exist, means thinking of the revolution as the assault
of a minority on the parliament or as a political party that
wins elections and must take charge of the situation that has
been lef o it. In other words, it is t deny the possibility
of revolution as a mass action of total destruction and
construction.

36

In the face of the human needs and desires thar push to stren-
grhen the struggle, to coordinate i, to radicalize it, al the
conservative normality of the devorees of Capital is opposed.
Reformism is an enemy, sometimes more powerful than open
repression; it is ltimately a repressive variant against revolutio-
nary action. To reform: to remake the form while preserving
the content, by means of pol or managerialism.

Just as the proletariat cannot take state power for its own
benefit, neither can it take capitalist production for its own
benefit Just as enslaved human beings did not fight for a slave
republic but for their emancipaion, we proletarians must fight
not for a society of proletarians bu for total emancipation.

All reformists, aspiring governments or self-management
fanatics do not understand the rupture between capitalism
and communism. Their intention of chaining us to the state
and productive machinery aims, consciously or nor, to lock us
into the capitalist reasoning that sces nothing outside its own
interior. They see communism as a new form of government,
as 2 set of labor innovations.

Acting in the image and likeness of Capital, the exploited
suppose to resist commerce by trading or politics by voring
demanding even more democracy:

‘We reaffirm that the alternative for wage slaves does not lie
in having a government more to the left or more to the right or
in participating in the constant grievance and reproach beween
one party political organization and another. The fundamental
contradiction lis between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie
and the development of communism and anarchy, that s, the
destruction of exploitation, the State, value and clas society.

PREVIOUS CUADERNOS

NEGACION. NEGACION. NEGACION. NEGACION.

cusdemosde cuadern: " cuadernos de . cuadernos de .
o WS | NEGACion| | NEGACION

Since, chnology nd Valing from ane Albough commadi, o s s of o
the it e ofprdic. oue movement hcugh he cvryhing nhis oy vithout of Capil s the sbject nd
< 9h 2omshsua

N0IJADIN

The foundation of capitalist society is the dictatorship of va-
lue in process, and the utility of the objects produced is just

one means. The so—called use value is only a vehicle for
the exchange value, for the valorising value.

But nothing, nowhere, naturally possesses a quality
such as value. That is a consequence of the manner
in which society organizes its production.

Value and commodity, like money or labor, are not
neutral and transhistorical data, let alone natural and
eternal, they are basic categories of capitalism.

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