At the end of the last decade, Steffen Boehm and Chris Land observed that ‘[t]he question of measure has become a hotly debated topic’ among heterodox Marxists. This debate centred on the claim ‘that today’s labour is “beyond measure ” or “immeasurable”’ (2009, p. 90). On one side were postoperaists like Hardt and Negri (2001, 2004), who argued that the rise of ‘immaterial labour’ (Lazzarato 1996) based on creativity, communication and cognition had sparked a ‘crisis of measurability’ simultaneous with a crisis in the law of value and the redundancy of the Marxian theory of value that conceptualises it. On the other were those autonomists like Caffentzis (2013) who argued for its persistence on the basis of a defence of the traditional labour theory of value (hereafter LTOV).
Taking a different route through these questions, this book brings new theoretical resources to the understanding of what is at stake in this debate. The debates Boehm and Land recount from the time pre-existed the Anglophone ascendancy of the New Reading of Marx (NRM), a revisionist reading of value theory based on new exegetical work on Marx’s manuscripts. The NRM overhauls how we think about the relationship between value, labour and their measure, providing the tools to overcome any purported crisis of measurability associated with changes in the immediate form of labour.
This renewed and critical Marxism finds a way past the impasse of autonomist debates around the crises of measurability and the law of value to craft an account of why measurement still matters in contemporary capitalism. The book comes at a time when the uptake of postoperaist ideas in popular left ‘postcapitalist’ literature is gathering apace. The idea that capitalism can fall apart owing to a collapse in its capacity to capture value in existing frameworks of measure is the source of much ‘wishful thinking’ (Thompson 2005). But rethinking value, labour and how they are measured, the NRM offers us thinking that is not wishful, but critical. This book shows how.
1.1 New Directions in Marxian Value Theory
The book sits at the theoretical meeting point of two revisionist strands that challenge the traditional understanding of value, but in different ways. They lay divergent stresses on certain parts of Marx’s output. In common, they reject the ideological monoliths erected of Marx’s work in the last century. They emphasise instead what is unfinished, fragmentary and open to reconstruction. They do so distinctly, however. One cites empirical reasons for its specific and selective reading of Marx. The other does so exegetically.
The first is postoperaismo . In the Italian 1960s and 1970s, its forerunner, operaismo, focused on the factory as the locus of capitalist society. Postoperaismo , however, situated the factory in society as a whole. This theoretical switch was informed by an empirical understanding of changes afoot in production. They focused on the shift towards ‘immaterial labour’ (Lazzarato 1996). This rises with the service sector, creative industries and so-called knowledge economy. Postoperaists brought this empirical understanding to a reading of Marx’s Grundrisse (1993). The Grundrisse were a series of notebooks for what would later become Capital (1976a). Their availability in English and Italian offered elements of an unorthodox Marx. Specifically, postoperaists seized on one part of the Grundrisse , the ‘Fragment on Machines’ . The scenario Marx paints in this led postoperaists to posit a crisis in the law of value his wider theory describes. Significantly, they use a revolutionary new Marx derived from long-unpublished notebooks to suggest his key theory’s exhaustion. From the Fragment, they derive a vision of an incipient communism realised in the shell of capitalism. This vision, we shall see, wields political influence today. A new generation of postoperaist-inspired dreamers begin from the same few pages of Marx.
The second is the NRM, with which we can also associate a descendent, Open Marxism , with which we will also engage in this book. Postoperaismo cites empirical reasons for its specific and selective reading of Marx. But the NRM takes an exegetical approach. It originates in Germany, around the same time as operaismo. Scholars under Adorno’s tutelage began scrutinising Marx’s published and unpublished manuscripts (Bellofiore and Riva 2015). This close study showed the progression of Marx’s value theory as it appears in Capital . Constantly revised and honed, in the procession of working drafts new complexities shone through. This exegesis extracts from the development of Marx’s work a reconstruction of his value theory. The central insight is that value relates not to expended concrete labour as in orthodox accounts. Rather, it relates to abstract labour. This is a category of social mediation expressed in money . It springs from the exchange of commodities by means of money in the sphere of circulation . Thus, for the NRM, the Grundrisse here plays a much lesser role than Capital . And there is less consideration of empirical factors than we find in postoperaist literature. Focus falls instead upon the general laws of how capitalism proceeds through a series of social forms .
Thus, both postoperaismo and the NRM radically challenge received Marxist wisdom around value. The former comes to bury it using the Grundrisse and new empirical facts. The latter, bearing the first volume of Capital , buries only one form of it – the labour theory of value (LTOV). In its place, it establishes an alternative ‘value theory of labour’ (Elson 1979). On one hand, postoperaismo foretells the demise of the law of value and its theory. NRM, on the other hand, maintains their persistence, in radically rethought forms. The two schools are seldom treated together. This book is an occasion to do so.
1.2 The New Reading of Marx
The NRM can be thought of as something like ‘the critique of political economy as a critical social theory’ (Bellofiore and Riva 2015). As a critical social theory, and not a theory ‘of’ society, the critique of political economy assaults what Adorno and Horkheimer call, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972, p. 205), ‘ticket-thinking’ that thinks about things as given, rather than through them as forms of socially and historically grounded relations. As such it asks why the content of life under capital should assume the forms it does (Bonefeld 2014, p. 58). This differentiates it from extant mainstream and Marxist approaches. Taking inspiration from Adorno’s ‘Seminar Mitschrift’ on the critique of political economy (1997), the NRM might best be described as adopting a Frankfurt School -informed perspective on Marx based on the exegetical revisiting of his manuscripts for Capital. This dispels the myth that Adorno had no value-theoretical or political-economic component to his work, a subject to which he increasingly turned his attention towards the end of his life (Bonefeld 2016b; see Jay 1973, p. 152; Habermas 1983, p. 109 and Braunstein 2011 for the opposing view).
At the NRM’s inception were two students of Adorno , Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt (see Backhaus 1992, 2005; Reichelt 2005). As Bellofiore and Riva explain, ‘[b]oth Backhaus and Reichelt date the birth of the NRM to Backhaus stumbling upon a copy of the first edition of Capital in the library in 1963’ (2015, p. 25). However, Reichelt has claimed, this ‘would have had no consequences if it happened to someone who had not attended Adorno’s lectures on the dialectical theory of society’. This combination of Marxology and a commitment to the subject–object dialectic were to structure the NRM thereafter, and specifically its approach to the issue of social constitution and social validation , best synthesized in the work of Werner Bonefeld. In particular, this involves a turn to the section on the commodity fetishism as not incidental but central to Marx’s work and the tradition of critical theory as a whole, after a fashion which saw, for instance, Althusser notoriously recommend that one could skip the first three chapters when reading Capital for the first time (2001 [1971], p. 52).
Instead of taking the relationship between labour and value at face value, as has traditional Marxism , it is abstract labour, and not concrete practical human activity, to which the NRM holds value to relate. This is a crucial difference between this new interpretation of Marx (which itself has its roots in the earlier work of Isaac Rubin (1972)) and the traditional orthodoxy of Marx-interpretation, which emphasises concrete, practical labour as the source of va...