The two disruptions: Marx & Scholz

This article was originally published in March, 2022, and can also be read in Plutonics Journal v. 15 (pp. 21-38).

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At a global level, a couple of questions present themselves nowadays: does a post-Covid world exist? And if it exists, are we approaching it after three years of intense psychological and physical stress? These questions appear as if they were suspended in mid-air of our deepest fears regarding mortality and its interaction with dangerous invisible lifeforms. Such anxiety is aggravated by the intense prolongation of the virus imperial domination: some thought we would be free in a matter of months, at most a year, vaccines included or not.

The never-ending sensation of the coronavirus pandemic can easily bring back memories of another apparently eternal and immortal thing: the regime of capital. Although capital, through its defense mechanism, tries to dissociate itself from the emergence of new versions of established pathogens¹ we know their ability to manipulate our perception of time is not the only property they share. Capital and the virus actually present themselves in a causal relationship, since the only way humans can interact with updated versions of virus and bacteria is through nature, exactly from where capital extracts its raw materials that later will work in its favour. Similarly, meat consumption in its current mass-produced state is an open bridge for an infestation of new microscopical parasites.

(I) From value to capital 

It is hard to deny Capital as Marx magnum opus. Its understanding of the capitalist mode of production brought about an enormous impact on political organization and for a long time it functioned almost like a Bible for Marxists². But something which is commonly undervalued interests us here, first done in Capital; something bourgeois Political Economy did not do and Marx did for the first time: the conceptual transition from value to capital.

Adam Smith and David Ricardo notably comprehended the primacy of value, constructing their theoretical building around it. They failed, however, in deriving capital, labour, profit, and all the other concepts of Political Economy from value. Continuing the building metaphor, what they did was expand horizontally an architectural construction when it should be expanded vertically. Instead of a building with floors, they constructed an immense hallway, in a movement incapable of representing difference, exposing only the same, only value, repeatedly: they started with value and stayed there for the whole ride. Practically, this meant it was impossible to penetrate the internal movement of value towards capital.

Their failure can be indebted to a prevalently empirical method, as suggested by Müller³, combined with their methodological individualism⁴: an approach that absorbs the concepts somewhat directly from appearance, disregarding the mediations involved in our experiences with the world, and presents individuals detached from pervasive social bonds. In short, a procedure that establishes the individual as the only subjective measure and the worldly appearances as almost unmediated objects. To this list, authors such as Heinrich and Lima also include a shared tendency to see classical economics as a reflex of a known human nature, which they call anthropologism, and to understand capitalist relations as following natural laws, expansible to every human society, an attitude they termed ahistoricism⁵.

Ricardo, on one hand, still got closer to value’s scientific truth than Smith since he got hold of the “force of abstraction” (Abstraktionskraft), a paramount tool for analysing economic forms, equated by Marx to the microscopes and chemical reagents of the natural sciences⁶. But he failed to effectively relate the abstract concepts and the reality he was trying to explain, something deeply concerning if we keep in mind that the abstract concepts in most cases contradicted the appearances they were derived from⁷ — exemplifying this,  we shall see soon how value already opens its way to inconsistencies.

Marx, on the other hand, knew abstraction was only the “starting point”⁸ of science, since it offers a way of isolating the simplest features of its objects, permitting then a reciprocal relation between the empirical and the theoretical domains. Here, then, it becomes impossible to ignore that abstraction, to be correctly used, needs an appropriate methodological approach. And Marx only succeeded in his attempt of illustrating the aforementioned movement from value to capital through his own, albeit somewhat indebted to Hegel⁹, dialectical method¹⁰. The true secret of this, still, is how Marx unravelled value.

In short, what he tried to do was to establish a means of reproducing the concrete inside our minds to advance our comprehension of the world. In his own words, “the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete”¹¹ is the only process through which thought manages to truly seize what could be called reality. Marx is notably clear about this on the Grundrisse. After getting hold of the simplest abstractions involving a concept, in this case that of population, “the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of the whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations.”¹² The method involves, therefore, going from concrete to abstract and then proceed from this abstract to the concrete-in-thought¹³.

In Capital this is done in the following way: Marx proceeds from the commodity, the seemingly most elementary object of the capitalist mode of production, to investigate value and then to arrive at increasingly complex social forms — the book final sections deal with manifold themes such as the so-called original accumulation and the theory of colonisation. 

So, the commodity is presented in its concrete form, as having a dual nature: it has a use-value as well as an exchange value; or, in other words, every commodity has a useful quality and a quantitative measure understood as its price that enables the process of exchange. At first glance, a contradiction is caused by the fact that exchange value appears as both relative measure and as an intrinsic characteristic of commodities: as something simultaneously absolute and relative. But Marx points out a given commodity is not exchangeable only for one other commodity; any commodity can be exchanged for any other commodity: a given quantity, let’s say x, of commodity A can be exchanged for y of commodity B and the same goes for z, α, β of commodities C, D, E etc¹⁴.

What, then, gives exchange value its essence? When we directly compare two commodities in determined quantities, for example, 2 kg of chocolate to 6 litres of milk, we want to express the establishment of an equivalence relation. But if chocolate and milk, two use-values with different characteristics, can be proportioned to be equal in a relation of 2:6, there must be something present behind their exchange values in both commodities. Through the process of abstraction, we perceive how both require human labour to extract them from nature as raw materials and transform them into commodities. With abstraction, however, chocolate and milk lose their qualities, they stop being use-values, since it does not matter anymore which form of labour created them, becoming a congealed residue of abstracted human labour, becoming value¹⁵.

A commodity’s value is then revealed to be measured according to the amount of socially necessary labour required for its production, which, in turn, is measured in time. Therefore, the magnitude of value of any commodity is quantified by the time necessary for its production given a specific level of productivity¹⁶ — a characteristic which actually welcomes change and difference instead of rejecting them¹⁷. So, besides being a social relation and not a substance found within commodities¹⁸, value is also intrinsically related to the state of the productive forces.

We have finally made the way to value starting from exchange value. As exchange value manifests itself commonly in the money form, what needs to be done then is to “solve the riddle presented by money”¹⁹ by working our way into the progressively complex forms of value until capital is reached. This journey starts, of course, with the simplest relation between commodities: that of one commodity of a kind with another of another kind, which Marx calls the elementary or accidental form of value: x commodity A = y commodity B.

But this elementary relation does not include any other interactions between commodities other than a one-to-one relation. However, what makes feasible equating A and B, one commodity to another, can be easily and intentionally expanded to include more of them, commodities C, D, E etc²⁰. Therefore, we have the total or expanded form of value: 

x commodity A = y commodity B

x commodity A = z commodity C

x commodity A = α commodity D

⁝

Here is presumed a kind of alterity: A can only be exchanged for B or exchanged for C or for D. On one hand, it seems like its value is not fixed but instantaneous, available at the exact moment of exchange and only at this precise moment. On the other hand, this is the first form in which value can — emphasis on can instead of will — be understood as “a congelation of undifferentiated human labour”²¹. The second form of value also negates the accidental appearance of the first form, says Marx, since it shows value actually defines exchange proportions while denying the opposite, that exchange process function as the determining factor for commodities’ values²².

Still, mimicking Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, this is a disjointed form of value insofar as it is an either…or relation; what we need is a truly connected and…and form. If we express what is contained hidden within that form, we get the general form of value: “All commodities now express their value (1) in an elementary form, because in a single commodity; (2) with unity, because in one and the same commodity. This form of value is elementary and the same for all, therefore general.”²³

It can be represented by the following:

x commodity A = y commodity B, z commodity C, α commodity D, …

Now value will finally be generalized as an expression of something shared by all commodities. The general form is a reciprocal form of value, meaning all commodities recognize each other as equivalents in its social relation. The magnitude of their values can be compared: if 2 kg of chocolate are equal to 6 litres of milk, and 6 litres of milk equate to 3 kg of coffee, 2 kg of chocolate = 6 litres of milk and 3 kg of coffee. Furthermore, the amount of labour contained in 1 litre of milk is ⅓ of the labour contained in 1 kg of chocolate and ½ of the labour contained in 1 kg of coffee.

Using linen as an example of universal equivalent (our commodity A at this point), Marx says the following: “The bodily form of the linen is now the form assumed in common by the values of all commodities; it therefore becomes directly exchangeable with all and every one of them. The substance linen becomes the visible incarnation, the social chrysalis state of every kind of human labour.”²⁴ But similar to the first form of value, the characterization of linen as a universal equivalent can be understood as something accidental.

Also, a contradiction arises from this form of value. Every commodity owner wants its commodity to be the universal equivalent, for any commodity can occupy such social place. But there cannot be more than one universal equivalent; if that were to happen, such category would be rendered useless. It is only through the commodity owners’ social action that a universal equivalent is chosen. Still, this is not done by them in a conscious manner²⁵. Nevertheless, at the end of this process, as soon as the social decision is made, the universal equivalent is taken out of its potent state and actualized. The general form of value transitions into the money form. To use Marx’s example, now 20 yds of linen, 1 coat, 10 lbs of tea, 40 lbs of coffee, 1 quarter of corn, ½ ton of iron and x commodity A = 2 oz. of gold²⁶. 

So, finally, we got back to money. We started with exchange value as the commodity’s price, discovered the social relation known as value within it, arrived again at its price and learned that commodities contain the potentiality of money²⁷. This means, then, that exchange value cannot be the origin of value; rather, as was shown, the opposite is true²⁸. Marx investigation also implies value is necessarily expressed as exchange value, i.e., exchange value is the only form through which value can be actualized, the moment of exchange being when this can happen. It is in such moment that commodities A and B face one another, showing explicitly how the internal contradiction between use-value and value is represented externally by their exchange values²⁹. The money form is here extremely crucial since it represents all commodities’ exchange values, also being described by Marx as “the socially recognised incarnation of human labour”³⁰, something crucial, for example, for Heinrich’s argument that Marx’s theory is not only a mere value theory but a monetary theory of value³¹.

Money also functions as a means of circulation of commodities, paving the way for the C-M-C circuit³²: a commodity is exchanged for money which is then exchanged for another commodity. But what we need to understand is how capital differentiates itself from money and also how money is transformed into capital. 

In the first place, money cannot act as capital in the aforementioned circuit since the goal there is consumption and money’s mere utility is derived from being the means of circulation. Capital, on the other hand, has its own circuit, M-C-M’, inside which money apparently figures at both extremes. Therefore, exchange value and not use-value stays at its centre, meaning money becomes the protagonist and commodities takes the place of money as essential condition for the whole process to occur³³.

But the major change between both circuits is derived precisely from what means for money to be at the end of the second circuit — and of course, for it to be M’ and not pure M. As mentioned above, consumption is the end and the goal in the C-M-C circuit. This means said movement can cease to exist as soon as the commodity is consumed. For M-C-M’, however, the situation changes. Money is at the start, which is used to buy a commodity capable of providing more value than it was purchased for. The M’ at the end has more value than the M opening the circuit. The equivalence of C-M-C is exchanged for the M-C-M’ imbalance since the value changes through the latter while being the same for all phases of the former³⁴. It is precisely this M’ which is capital, being nothing more than M+ΔM: the initial value plus a surplus-value³⁵. No wonder the mercantilists characterised capital as “money which begets money”³⁶. 

Unlike what happens in the C-M-C circuit, there is no way to ‘consume’ money but to use it to purchase more commodities. In other words, M-C-M’ as a circuit is theoretically infinite; nay, it’s even more than this: the process of exchange represented by it propels its own continuous propagation to infinity. Instead of a uniform motion, whose acceleration always equals 0, the circulation of capital comes closer to an accelerated motion³⁷. The history of capitalism, from its inception to its current version, shows how much truth the previous statement has since the capitalist mode of production has successfully expanded itself in a continuous manner, both spatially and temporally³⁸.

If we take a closer look at M-C-M’ we perceive how it explicitly refers to the commodity in the middle as the gateway for the expansion of value. Only after the consumption of some specific commodity can value be increased. In other words, only through the purchase and consequent use of some commodity whose use-value is capable of producing a surplus-value that money becomes capital. Since value is an expression of the expenditure of human labour power, being exclusively determined through the labour process, such commodity is nothing more than commoditized³⁹ labour power⁴⁰. 

We have successfully retraced how Marx proceeds from value to capital, something he did in a truly novel way in his own epoch. Instead of being solely a methodical prowess that broke with preceding economic theory, his account of the internal logic of capital demonstrated how social relations gave way to capitalism and how capital on the other hand was able to set its own set of social interactions. 

(II) From value to value-dissociation

Capital establishes a social world based entirely on the production of value, on the continuous repetition of accelerated self-valorisation, something which partially explains why the regime of labour suffers a prolonged process of change when the pre-capitalist and capitalist periods are compared. Production for profit dominates capitalist society while capital paints itself as the source of all value, and consequently, of all wealth. Capital, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, “falls back on (il se rabat sur) all production, constituting a surface over which the forces and agents of production are distributed, thereby appropriating for itself all surplus production and arrogating to itself both the whole and the parts of the process, which now seem to emanate from it as a quasi cause.”⁴¹

The automatization of capital brings an interesting relation between it and the capitalist. As it does with the production of commodities, capital is able to invert its relationship with the capitalist: he starts as capital’s master, initiating the movement of self-valorisation by his free-willed choice until a moment is reached when capital takes the wheel and dissociates itself from its previous owner, dominating him.

The referred scenario can be comprehended as a revelation of capital’s true nature, meaning capital only effectively exists if it succeeds in using the capitalist as a medium for the valorisation of value, something which presents the capitalist in a fatalist veneer. He does not choose to explore the proletariat. He is, instead, necessarily obliged to do it being not a true subject, but just another object working for the maintenance of the regime of capital. In the words of Robert Kurz: “Even the rulers are ruled”⁴².

In Making it with Death, Nick Land proposes capital does not only detach itself from being subjected by the capitalist, but that it actively starts trying to destroy bourgeois society. Land explicitly argues capital-as-process, as he calls it, is incommensurable with bourgeois civilisation even if it initially seems like the opposite. We can say capital uses bourgeois society to be born, first accepting it but then rejecting it as soon as it proves to be an impediment for the infinite expansion of value. Capital would then exchange production for profit for production for production — an idea associated with the works of Deleuze and Guattari — while effectively expressing the character of death within itself⁴³. The automatic process becomes autonomous. 

Through this movement we perceive a tentative to revaluate and reassess what Marx wrote with a contemporary lens. Not only the abstracted detachment of capital from its prima society indicates the need for this, but also the history of the 20th century. The crises of Fordism and Keynesianism, with its results being a weakening of trade unions’ power mixed with incredible scientific and technological developments in favour of capital⁴⁴, resulted in a quite different scenario from that of 19th century English society that Marx took as a model.

One interesting development in critical theory regarding this actualization was Krisis, a radical political journal and group of discussion from Germany, founded in 1986. Krisis initiated the movement known as Wertkritik (value-critique) by proposing an alternative for the interpretations of Marxist theory and functioning as a “theoretical review of German Marxism”⁴⁵. One of its most notable members, the aforementioned Robert Kurz, argued for a ‘desontologization’⁴⁶ of labour qua category in response to preceding authors’ view on value. From Krisis also emerged a novel theory of value, so to speak: Roswitha Scholz’s theory of value dissociation. Before we engage with it, however, we need some context.

Scholz engagement with philosophy began in her teenage years, when she read Sartre and Camus. Although she was not initially impressed by Marxism, as her first contact with it had been through its Soviet variant, she became interested in studying it after she attended a college seminar on the Frankfurt School. She had become convinced Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment could provide crucial critical power for the development of feminist thought — before this, Scholz kept trying to understand which non-Marxist theories would be useful for feminism, a political stance she was involved with since her adolescence. Later, she engaged directly with Marx’s texts through a group of studies in which Kurz participated, seeing how Marxian thought successfully solved some theoretical problems encountered in Existentialism. Together with Kurz, whom she had married, Norbert Trenkle and Ernst Lohoff, Scholz founded what would later become Krisis⁴⁷.

But in 2004 she and Kurz were expelled from Krisis. Along with this, some other members also announced their departure from the journal in support of the two authors⁴⁸. As Scholz was proposing value to be essentially masculine since the 90s while being part of a predominantly masculine group, with Kurz adhering to her theoretical critique, it is hard to argue against the gendered aspect of her dismissal. But what kind of theoretical construction could outcast someone from a journal whose objective was to be even more critical than all preceding Marxist interpretations? Was Scholz so an exceptional critic that the other critics were beginning to fear her?

In the words of Taylisi Leite, “Roswitha’s great radicality comes from pointing out that the gender debate is not an appendix or an accessory to the critiques of capital and class society. It is, in truth, crucial to such critiques: capitalism cannot be comprehended without bourgeois patriarchy, meaning that any kind of non-feminist Marxism is incomplete. It is not only radically Marxist but also radically feminist.”⁴⁹

As proof of this, in her 1992 article The value is the man, Scholz describes the relationship between capital and patriarchy as an open question, since feminist authors within Marxism only tried to deal with such complicated correlation through a traditional Marxist perspective. More specifically, borrowing from the Marxism of the labour movement, responsible for understanding the ‘evil’ of capitalism as being capital’s appropriation of labour surplus-value⁵⁰.

Moreover, in the same way Wertkritik postulates value was understood wrongly by 20th century Marxists, Scholz argues value was always treated in a neutral way regarding gender and sex by them. All Marxist authors preceding her were, of course, critics of capitalism. In her view, however, there was an absence regarding the masculine aspect of value in their analyses. And even when some authors tried to equate abstract labour and domestic work, in an attempt to address this question, one could notice how domestic work would still be invariantly subservient to abstract labour, since the categories used for this comparison are tools inherited from the world of commodity production⁵¹.

The following argument is not proposed by Scholz in the article, but the absence she mentions could be expected given the fact that most well-known Marxist authors were male. For a practical example, if you would ask radical leftists, a social group represented mostly by men, to name female Marxists, most of them would list Silvia Federici, Angela Davis, Alexandra Kollontai, Rosa Luxemburg, Nadezhda Krupskaya and would maybe stop right there — if they can even get to Krupskaya. As an attempt to refute this thought experiment, one could argue that there is a small number of known female Marxist thinkers, so the chances of knowing male and female authors are at different odds. But if we think for a bit about what could be the origin of this situation, does it not relate to the way in which the nature of knowledge is understood in our society? Knowledge, principally formal knowledge, is seen as a masculine trait: the capacity for reflection and thought is still considered a masculine aptitude. Later, Scholz will present what she considers the motives behind this situation.

One could say intelligence being considered masculine stems from male domination, which is not something new in History. It is nonsense to point that out, however. As we have already seen, capital dominates society’s labour power, rules over it and reorganises labour expenditure to suit the expansion of value. In other words, although it only takes effect in bourgeois society, capital precedes the society in which it is born, and becomes its future. Therefore, capital dominates previously established social relations, which do not remain as they were because they are now subjected to the whims of value, which ceaselessly revolutionises them in its favour. Scholz will also address this later.

A similar movement describes what happens with machines as means of production: their construction and emergence occur in the manufacturing period, by the hands of skilful artisans, meaning their material base is inherited from said production system. But afterwards the machines become responsible for the destruction of preceding production systems and their consequent replacement by the machinery system. According to Marx,

“The factory system was therefore raised, in the natural course of things, on an inadequate foundation. When the system attained to a certain degree of development, it had to root up this ready-made foundation, which in the meantime had been elaborated on the old lines, and to build up for itself a basis that should correspond to its methods of production.”⁵²

But let us get back to Scholz. In the 1992 article, she points out how even Krisis suffered from the same asexualizing illness that affected virtually all of Marxist theory⁵³. For her colleagues, the concept of patriarchy was nothing more than a mere consequence of capitalist society’s fetishist character⁵⁴, i.e., for them, value and abstract labour were still the predominant force behind capital and patriarchy could not be held to the same standard as the aforementioned elements⁵⁵. 

Against this, Scholz argues we need to take into consideration how certain activities, the ones associated with reproduction and not production, are attributed to women. More so, Scholz sees the basic contradiction of “the commodity-producing patriarchy” between matter and form, economy and culture, to be determined by gender or sex⁵⁶. This means every presupposition of social reproduction not reducible to abstract value will be ascribed to women: “value dissociation means that capitalism contains a core of female-determined reproductive activities and the affects, characteristics, and attitudes (emotionality, sensuality, and female or motherly caring) that are dissociated from value and abstract labour.”⁵⁷ 

Accordingly, the reason why trying to define or reflect upon domestic work or female reproductive activities using traditional conceptual tools from Marxism fails becomes clearer: the productive and reproductive aspects of society cannot necessarily be equalled, since their relationship with capital differs too much in nature. Scholz goes so far as to mention that although dissociation functions to maintain value as a social relation, being partially within it, it also has elements occupying the outside of the logic of value⁵⁸. 

Value dissociation moreover “implies a particular socio-psychological relation”, according to Scholz. The categories of political economy cannot help us here, since their literal transposition to the realm of psychology would render worthless results⁵⁹. In the same manner intelligence is considered masculine, as discussed earlier, value actually undervalues sensitivity and emotionality by considering them feminine traits⁶⁰. As the ideal modern subject is male, white, neurotypical, absent of physical disabilities, cisgender and heterosexual, not only women are disfavoured but also non-whites, neurodivergents, people with disabilities, transgender people and homosexuals. It is important to notice here, however, that Scholz subscribe to Kurz idea of domination without a subject⁶¹.

History must be handled with care too. The author suggests we should not try to uncover capitalist gender relations as mere residue from preceding epochs: “The small, nuclear family as we know it, for example, only emerged in the eighteenth century, just as the public and private spheres as we understand them today only emerged in modernity.”⁶² The birth of modernity did not saw only the rise of capital, then, but “it also saw the emergence of a social dynamism that rests on the basis of the relations of value dissociation.”⁶³

In short, Roswitha Scholz’s interpretation of the gender dynamics within and without the capitalist mode of production can be seen as an attempt to understand how women can be held responsible for themselves and for all of humanity, since they occupy forcibly the position of carers, while their social power, their true potential of action within society, is at the same time so undervalued.

In the novel Torto Arado⁶⁴, after running away from home with Tobias, Belonísia for the first time feels the weight of her social role. She encounters a house fully disorganised, with dirty laundry scattered on the floor and flies everywhere. Our female protagonist has no choice but to start cleaning and organising her new home. When Tobias returns from work in the fields, Belonísia fears his reaction but he instead seems to appreciate what she had done — although he feels no obligation whatsoever to thank her: “He did not say thank you, he was a man, why would he say thank you?”⁶⁵ 

Later, she starts to understand how she is obliged to cook, clean, and be sexually available whenever Tobias wants to. All of these activities are seen by her as work, a thought she reveals on the first time Tobias use her body for sexual pleasure⁶⁶. But just as we saw regarding Scholz’s theory, even though she is responsible for so much, she has no right to expect any kind of retribution. In fact, the opposite is true. Tobias starts complaining more and more about Belonísia’s food, about how he cannot find anything he needs because of the way she organises their place, until he starts being violent. One night, he arrives at the house completely drunk and while complaining about the dinner, throws the plate at Belonísia. He then starts insulting her but Belonísia goes to the vegetable garden to clear her head⁶⁷. Belonísia’s ordeal ends only with the death of Tobias a few months later⁶⁸. 

The exclusive positioning of the feminine in activities related to reproduction can even be seen in the end-of-year festivities. Actually, my attention turned to the profound character of male domination precisely on this occasion, when I noticed how the men’s role was to remain in a corner of the house chatting, drinking, while the women were in charge of the food and organization of the festive family gathering. It does not take much to realize how divergent the social expectations are regarding the way men and women should behave. The coronavirus pandemic, with all its apparent transformation of society, has not been able to alter the logic of value-dissociation even minimally.

Before, during and maybe after the pandemic, women will be obligated to continue taking care of their children and their husbands during the holidays or not. Men, on the other hand, do not really have this obligation even during the extra-festive period; during the festivities, then, they can pretend they are absolutely free of responsibilities. When men are not participating in the process of production, all that remains is fun and pleasure since they cannot engage in female activities. Hence the importance of understanding both capitalist domination and patriarchal domination as dominations without a subject. Otherwise, it is too easy to fall into the traps of moralisation.

References

Callinicos, Alex. “Marx’s Method.” In The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx, 70-91. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011.

Carchedi, Guglielmo. “Method.” In Behind the Crisis: Marx’s Dialectics of Value and Knowledge, 1-52. Leiden: Brill, 2011.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Grespan, Jorge. O negativo do Capital: o conceito de crise na crítica de Marx à economia política. São Paulo: Expressão Popular, 2012.

Heinrich, Michael. An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012. 

Heinrich, Michael, and Rômulo Lima. “Objetividade valor e forma valor. Apontamentos de Marx para a segunda edição de O Capital.” Revista de Economia Política 38, no. 1 (March 2018): 201-214. https://doi.org/10.1590/0101-31572018v38n01a12.

Junior, Itamar Vieira. Torto Arado. São Paulo: Todavia, 2019.

Kurz, Robert. “Dominação sem sujeito: sobre a superação de uma crítica social redutora.” Seminar, Seminário Internacional “A Teoria Crítica Radical, Superação do Capitalismo e a Emancipação Humana”, Fortaleza, October 29, 2000. https://www.marxists.org/portugues/kurz/1993/mes/90.htm [Available in English in two parts: for part 1: https://libcom.org/library/domination-without-subject-part-one-robert-kurz; for part 2: https://libcom.org/library/domination-without-subject-part-two-robert-kurz]. 

Land, Nick. “Making it with Death: Remarks on Thanatos and Desiring-Production.” In Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, edited by Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, 261-287. Windsor Quarry: Urbanomic; New York: Sequence Press, 2012.

Leite, Taylisi. Crítica ao feminismo liberal: valor-clivagem e marxismo feminista. São Paulo: Contracorrente, 2020.

Mariutti, Eduardo Barros. “Capital mercantil e autônomo e a transição ao capitalismo: a polêmica sobre as duas vias e o papel das cidades.” Revista Brasileira de Desenvolvimento Regional 8, no. 2 (August 2020): 7-32. http://dx.doi.org/10.7867/2317-5443.2020v8n2p7-32. 

Marx, Karl. “Volume I: Capitalist Production.” In Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, 2-542. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2013.

Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). Translated by Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin Books, 1993.

Müller, Marcos Lutz. “Exposição e método dialético em ‘O Capital’.” Boletim SEAF, no. 2 (1982). https://eleuterioprado.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/muller-exposic3a7c3a3o-e-mc3a9todo-dialc3a9tico-em-marx.pdf.

Netto, José Paulo, and Marcelo Braz. Economia política: uma introdução crítica. São Paulo: Cortez Editora, 2012.

Scholz, Roswitha. “O valor é o homem: teses sobre a socialização pelo valor e a relação entre os sexos.” Novos Estudos – CEBRAP 2, no. 45 (July 1996): 15-36. Translated by José Marcos Macedo. http://novosestudos.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/13_o_valor_e_o_homem.pdf.zip [Available in German at: http://wkb.blogsport.de/images/RoswithaScholzDerWertIstDerMann.pdf].

Scholz, Roswitha. “Patriarchy and Commodity Society: Gender without the Body.” In Marxism and the Critique of Value, 123-142. Edited by Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson, and Nicholas Brown. Chicago: MCM’ Publishing, 2014.

1. If we are to accept liberal democracy as equivalent to a bourgeois dictatorship, mainstream media stands at the ideological frontline, securing the status quo maintenance and assuring the capitalist discourse is left for the most part unquestioned.

2. Ironically, Marx saying he was not a Marxist was not sufficient to impede an equivalence between his method and dogma during most part of the 20th century — for more on this, check Michael Heinrich, “Je ne suis pas marxiste”, available at https://libcom.org/library/%E2%80%9Eje-ne-suis-pas-marxiste%E2%80%9C. However, Benjamin fortuitously critiqued this association in a well-known aphorism: Walter Benjamin, “I,” in On the Concept of History, trans. Dennis Redmond (2005), available at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm. 

3. Marcos Lutz Müller, “Exposição e método dialético em ‘O Capital’,” Boletim SEAF, no. 2 (1982): 4-5.

4. Alex Callinicos, “Marx’s Method,” in The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011), 75, 83.

5. Michael Heinrich and Rômulo Lima, “Objetividade valor e forma valor. Apontamentos de Marx para a segunda edição de O Capital,” Revista de Economia Política 38, no. 1 (March 2018): 211-212, https://doi.org/10.1590/0101-31572018v38n01a12

6. Karl Marx, “Volume I: Capitalist Production,” in Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2013), 7. 

7. Callinicos, “Marx’s Method,” 81.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., 77, 79, 83; Guglielmo Carchedi, “Method,” In Behind the Crisis: Marx’s Dialectics of Value and Knowledge (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 1.

10. Nowadays, dialectical, dialectics and related concepts are either enveloped in mysticism or used as a catch-all term when one does not know how to explain complexity. For a short but comprehensible discussion on this, see Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), 36-38.

11. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft) (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 101.

12. Marx, Grundrisse, 100.

13. Carchedi, “Method,” 44-47.

14. Marx, “Volume I,” 17-18.

15. Ibid., 19.

16. Ibid., 20-21.

17. For a thorough discussion on the nature of social relations, including its potential and actual forms, see Carchedi, “Method”, 3-8.

18. Marx, “Volume 1,” 27, 42; Heinrich, An Introduction, 64.

19. Ibid., 27.

20. Ibid., 39.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., 40.

23. Ibid., 41.

24. Ibid., 43.

25. Heinrich, and Lima, “Objetividade valor,” 208-209.

26. Marx, “Volume 1,” 45.

27. Ibid., 46.

28. Ibid., 37.

29. Ibid., 38; Jorge Grespan, O negativo do Capital (São Paulo: Expressão Popular, 2012), 43-45.

30. Marx, “Volume 1,” 64.

31. Heinrich, An Introduction, 63.

32. Marx, “Volume 1,” 77.

33. Grespan, O negativo, 69.

34. Marx, “Volume 1,” 105-107.

35. The transformation of value basically means capital’s origin cannot be the result of a surplus exchange value. In other words, capital cannot be born out of the circulation process, of commerce, since what changes inside this process is price and not value. José Paulo Netto and Marcelo Braz even posit commercial capital’s circuit as being M-C-M+ instead of M-C-M’ to illustrate their difference. As for the historical reason behind such contrasting circuits, Eduardo Barros Mariutti argues merchant capital was incapable of ruling commodity production, limiting itself to exchanging and selling commodities. José Paulo Netto and Marcelo Braz, Economia política: uma introdução crítica (São Paulo: Cortez Editora, 2012), 94-97; Eduardo Barros Mariutti, “Capital mercantil e autônomo e a transição ao capitalismo: a polêmica sobre as duas vias e o papel das cidades,” Revista Brasileira de Desenvolvimento Regional 8, no. 2 (August 2020): 8-9. http://dx.doi.org/10.7867/2317-5443.2020v8n2p7-32.

36. Marx, “Volume 1,” 104.

37. Ibid., 102.

38. Two outdated but classical works that addresses this are Maurice Dobb’s Studies on the Development of Capitalism and Leo Huberman’s Man’s Worldly Goods: The Story of the Wealth of Nations.

39. The stylisation of ‘commoditized’ is no accident. The relation between labour power and both slavery and feudalism are explicitly different from the one which takes place in the capitalist mode of production. A number of reasons as to why that is are offered a little later in the book: on page 114 of the first volume of Capital, Marx says the following:

“For the conversion of his money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must meet in the market with the free labourer, free in the double sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale, is short of everything necessary for the realisation of his labour power […] This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older forms of social production.”

40. Ibid., 113; Grespan, O negativo, 72.

41. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 10.

42. Kurz, Robert, “Dominação sem sujeito: sobre a superação de uma crítica social redutora,” Seminar, Seminário Internacional “A Teoria Crítica Radical, Superação do Capitalismo e a Emancipação Humana”, Fortaleza, October 29, 2000. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/portugues/kurz/1993/mes/90.htm. 

43.  Land, Nick, “Making it with Death: Remarks on Thanatos and Desiring-Production,” In Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, eds. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Windsor Quarry: Urbanomic; New York: Sequence Press, 2012), 265-266.

44. Marx reveals in Capital how labour becomes more and more an objective process through the implementation of machines since “in its machinery system, modern industry has a productive organism that is purely objective, in which the labourer becomes a mere appendage to an already existing material condition of production.” (“Volume 1,” 267). This, in turn, is only possible because capital usurps technical advances to its vantage in an analogous way to how it appropriates labour: “Science, generally speaking, costs the capitalist nothing, a fact that by no means hinders him from exploiting it.” (“Volume 1,” Note 23, 1068).

45. Taylisi Leite, Crítica ao feminismo liberal: valor-clivagem e marxismo feminista (São Paulo: Contracorrente, 2020): 184.

46. Authors such as György Lukács and Moishe Postone in one way or another transformed labour in an ontological category, an interpretation seen by Kurz as transhistorical.

47. Taylisi Leite, Crítica ao feminismo liberal: valor-clivagem e marxismo feminista (São Paulo: Contracorrente, 2020): 185.

48. Leite, Crítica ao feminismo liberal, 189.

49.  Ibid., 192. The original is as it follows:

“A grande radicalidade de Roswitha está em apontar que o debate de gênero não é um apêndice ou um complemento às críticas ao capital e à sociedade de classes, mas crucial: não se compreende o capitalismo sem o patriarcado burguês, de modo que qualquer marxismo não feminista é deficitário. É radicalmente marxista, mas também é radicalmente feminista.”

50.  Roswitha Scholz, “O valor é o homem: teses sobre a socialização pelo valor e a relação entre os sexos,” Novos Estudos – CEBRAP 2, no. 45 (July 1996): 15. Trans. by José Marcos Macedo. Available at: http://novosestudos.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/13_o_valor_e_o_homem.pdf.zip 

51.  Scholz, “O valor,” 16.

52. Marx, “Volume 1,” 264.

53. Leite, Crítica ao feminismo liberal, 210.

54. Scholz, “O valor,” 16-17.

55. Roswitha Scholz, “Patriarchy and Commodity Society: Gender without the Body,” In Marxism and the Critique of Value, eds. Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson, and Nicholas Brown (Chicago: MCM’ Publishing, 2014): 127.

56. Scholz, “O valor,” 18; Scholz, “Patriarchy,” 125.

57. Scholz, “Patriarchy,” 127.

58. Scholz, “O valor,” 18; Scholz, “Patriarchy,” 128.

59. Deleuze and Guattari, for example, knew they could not simply alternate between psychoanalytic and Marxist terminology and call this a solid theoretical construction. What they did in Anti-Oedipus needed at least a reworking of common understandings of desire and production, for example.

60. Scholz, “Patriarchy,” 128.

61. Scholz, “O valor,” 17.

62. Ibid., 129.

63. Ibid.

64. Itamar Vieira Junior, Torto Arado (São Paulo: Todavia, 2019).

65. Vieira Junior, Torto Arado, 83.

66. Ibid., 84.

67. Ibid., 88-89.

68. Ibid., 101.