BIDET, Jacques - The dialecticians interpretation of Capital.pdf

Historical Materialism, volume 13:2 (121–146)© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005Also available online – www.brill.nl

1 Arthur 1979 already presented the same orientation and the principal themes ofthe present work.

2 Bidet 2000. This book has been translated into several languages, though notEnglish.

3 I developed this problematic in Bidet 1999; a first sketch was already made inBidet 1990.

Jacques Bidet

The Dialectician’s Interpretation of Capital

Chris Arthur offers a dialectical interpretation ofCapital that marks the culmination of several decadeswork.1 My first encounter with his approach datesfrom the time when I was working on a thesis onMarx’s great work, though in a very different spirit,extending the efforts of Althusser and his disciples.2

Since that time, by way of several books dealing withthis subject, I have embarked on a new line of researchcombining structuralism and dialectics,3 and I amcurrently finishing a work to be titled Explication et

reconstruction du ‘Capital’. This indicates the interestand attention with which I have read Arthur’s work.I shall say very little here as to my own interpretation,still less of the reconstruction I now propose. But thisclearly underlies my reading of Arthur’s book andthe questions I raise about it.

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122 • Jacques Bidet

4 The problematic that Sekine has developed with great refinement is that put forward by Kozo Uno, the most celebrated Japanese Marxist. I have provided a detailedcritique of this approach in Bidet 2001.

I. An interpretation appealing to Hegel’s Logic

Marx’s ‘Capital’ and Hegel’s ‘Logic’

Arthur’s interpretation falls within a current of thought described as the ‘NewHegelian Marxism’. This no longer seeks in Hegel the basis for a dialecticalgrand narrative in the service of historical materialism, but bases itself on his’systematic dialectic’, that of the Logic, in order to interpret Capital, understood asa theory of the capitalist ’system’. I would like to begin by noting a remarkablefeature of this current, its ecumenical character. Arthur displays this on page109, at the climax of his exposition, when he makes a direct parallel betweenHegel’s Logic and Marx’s Capital. To bring out the originality of his claim, Ishall simply add here a third column, corresponding to a different logicalHegelian interpretation of Capital, as offered by another dialectician of thisschool, and a very notable one, Thomas Sekine, who has argued it in voluminousworks.4

Table 1

Hegel’s Logic Arthur: Marx’s Capital Sekine: Marx’s Capital

I. BEING COMMODITY CIRCULATIONa. Quality Exchangeability of Commodity

commoditiesb. Quantity Quantity of commodities Money

exchangedc. Measure Exchange-value of Capital

commodities

II. ESSENCE MONEY PRODUCTIONa. Ground Value in itself Production of capitalb. Appearance Forms of value Circulation of capitalc. Actuality Money Reproduction

III. CONCEPT CAPITAL DISTRIBUTIONa. Subjective concept Price list Price of productionb. Objective concept Metamorphoses of Profit and rent

money and commoditiesc. Idea Self-valorisation Profit and interest

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The Dialectician’s Interpretation of Capital • 123

5 See Cesarale 2003. This writer champions an approach that is similar to Arthur’s.

What is particularly striking in such a table, the mere fragment of a familyportrait, is that not only do these two interpretations of Capital ‘in the lightof Hegel’s Logic’ lack any rigorous connection, but the correspondences theyrespectively assume are strictly incompatible. And there are others of the kindas well. Tony Smith, for example, another representative of this current, seesessence as corresponding with capitalism and the concept with communism.For others, quality – or the being/nothingness/becoming relationship – givesthe ‘analogical’ key to the figure commodity/money/circulation, which findsits resolution in quantity, figured by capital.5 I leave aside here readings, suchas that of Helmut Reichelt, that correctly relate Capital to Hegel’s Philosophy

of Right.How can such varied readings peacefully co-exist in a supposed ’scientific

community’? It would be wrong, I believe, to see in these diverse couplings nomore than mere party games. For, if it is possible to produce such quasi-musical variations on the basic Hegelian theme, this is for the reason givenby Arthur right at the start of his book, on page 9: it is very hard to sayanything about social things without using such concepts as quality andquantity, subject and object, essence and phenomenon, and so on. And wemay recall that Marx himself, in his early drafts, used similar articulations,in particular the tripartite Universal (Volume I), Particular (Volume II), Singular(Volume III), while the Soviet Academy of Sciences proposed, in 1971, thereverse order: Singular for Volume I, Particular for Volume II, and Universalfor Volume III. This should evidently suggest a certain caution, and a respectfulconsideration towards the ’special logic of the special object’. Chris Arthurputs forward the view that Hegelian logic, supposedly universal, offers adeep affinity with that of capitalism, despite this being such a singular formof society. I believe it is possible to defend such an idea. But debate on theinterpretation of Capital bears on what relevance Marx’s theory has for theunderstanding of modern and contemporary society. And it remains to beseen whether the Hegelian thematic of ‘totality’ and ’system’, that of thepresence of Spirit to itself, can be mobilised in such an immediate fashionfor the construction of supposed concepts of actual history.

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A philological remark

It is remarkable that this interpretation of Capital leans chiefly on the Grundrisse

and other preparatory texts for the work Marx which eventually publishedin 1867, and which underwent a far-reaching refashioning in its second edition,and again in the French translation corrected by Marx himself.

This procedure is that of a fairly large number of writers: German, Italian,French, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, and so forth. I call it the dialectician’sapproach. What these writers have in common is that they seek the truth of Capital in the texts that precede it, these being characterised by a far more intensive use of concepts drawn from the Hegelian tradition in Marx’selaboration of the theory of capitalism. For my part, without rejecting theidea that legitimate use might be made of such concepts, I see Marx as havingworked like any other scholar: between one version and the next, he constantlycorrected and suppressed what he saw as inadequate. My hypothesis is thathe had reasons, good ones at least to his eyes, for modifying his analysis. It is certainly necessary to check on each occasion if there was not, on thecontrary, some loss of meaning or step back. But Arthur seems to me to basehimself in a systematic way on analyses which Marx had developed in a so-to-speak spontaneous fashion from his philosophical tool-box (that of hisculture), and which he subsequently discarded as inappropriate, as witnessthe fact that he replaced them with new theorisations of a different kind.

Arthur’s double thesis

As we know, Marx presents at the start of Capital a theory of the logic of

commodity production in general, based on a relation of exchange of equivalents,before going on to show that it is not possible to understand capitalism inthis way, which is, on the contrary, based on exploitation. Yet this exploitationpresupposes the context of commodity production, which is simply, Marxsays, the ‘most abstract moment’ of the capitalist form of society, the momentat which only relations between individuals are recognised, not social classes.The problem that Marx has in mind here is that of the relationship betweenthe market and capitalism, and this raises crucial questions that we are stillfaced with today. Arthur finds the explanation unconvincing: ‘people rightlycomplain they do not find any proof there’.6 It seems to him that Marx’s

6 Arthur 2002, p. 12.

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7 Arthur 2002, p. 33.8 Arthur’s critique strikes me as denigrating the second reading unduly. The authors

he criticises do aim at a ‘theoretical’ construction of the concept of capital, even if itis true that the categories of simple and complex are completely inadequate for thispurpose.

9 Arthur 2002, p. 39.10 Arthur 2002, p. 23.11 Arthur 2002, p. 25.

beginning does not give a proof of the existence of value: ‘the key point is thatno proof of the existence of value is established at the first stage of simplecommodity relations’,7 no more than the context in which this concept couldbe developed.

Arthur starts his analysis by presenting two types of interpretation, againstwhich he constructs his own. On the one hand, the logico-historical reading,derived from Engels, that would have the theoretical exposition of Capital

broadly following an historical order: Part One of Volume I would thus represent a precapitalist stage, that of simple commodity production. On theother hand, there is a reading that Arthur attributes variously to Meek,Grossman and Sweezy, according to which the exposition is developed fromthe more simple to the more complex.8

By taking his distance from both these approaches, Arthur puts forwardtwo essential themes, strongly interconnected: a theory of the ‘value-form’and a ’systematic dialectic’ of exposition.

He claims that the ‘theory of value’ developed at the beginning of Capital

takes ’socially necessary labour time’ in a ‘technical sense’.9 And he opposesto this a ‘dialectical theory of the value-form’, that is, of the ’social form’.Such a theory has often been sought in Section 3 of the first chapter, whichis precisely titled ‘The Value-Form’. Arthur, for his part, proposes that sucha theory cannot be developed until the exposition of the concept of capitalhas been reached. It is, in fact, only in the conditions of capitalism that abstractlabour can be understood in the sense of ‘real abstraction’. And he adds thatthe full concept of value can only be provided by the exposition as a whole.The notion of value given at the start is ‘the overly simple, utterly abstract,appearance of the concept’,10 its validity deriving only from the results of theexposition as a whole.

In this light, Arthur proposes a dialectical mode of exposition, movingsimultaneously forward and backward.11 Capital can, in fact, only be understoodas the totality of relations that mutually define one another as moments of

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12 Arthur 2002, pp. 24–6.13 Arthur 2002, p. 41.14 Rubin 1978.15 Marx 1971, p. 60; see also Marx 1976, p. 173, n. 33.16 Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie in Marx and Engels 1956–, p. 45, and also Marx

1978, p. 62, note.

the ensemble that it forms. Any element taken in isolation can be definedonly in a provisional and under-determined sense. Capital as self-valorisationis too complex,12 the starting-point has to be value. But a full definition of valuecannot be given right away. Since capital is a totality, a ‘linear’ logic claimingto present it step by step is inappropriate, or so Arthur claims. The expositioncan thus commence only by extracting ‘violently’ (a recurrent expression)from the whole a concept that has no significance outside of the totality. Onlythe end defines the beginning.

2. The dialectician’s interpretation of the ‘value-form’

Forgetting commodity production

Arthur is forced to admit that there is here a ‘textual’ question,13 in as muchas Capital deals with the question of value only in Part One of Volume I. Aswe shall see, this is in no way a question of philology but a major theoreticalproblem concerning the interpretation of the capitalist form of society.

In his undertaking, Arthur claims to base himself on Rubin, who effectivelybrought to light this category of ‘form’, recalling Marx’s leitmotiv that economists had been interested only in the magnitude of value, but neglectedits ‘form’.14 Arthur reproaches Rubin however for staying with the forms of theexchange relation, whereas the ‘form’ to be considered is rather the capitalistrelationship. However, it is Rubin who is right here. When Marx in effectcomplained, in a certain context, that economists had failed to take an interestin the form, what he had in mind above all was indeed the commodity-formas such. It is actually at this ‘abstract’ level of exposition that he voices hiscriticisms.15 Ricardo, says Marx, ‘neatly sets forth the determination of thevalue of commodities by labour-time’,16 but is ‘concerned exclusively withthe magnitude of value’. He did indeed suspect, Marx continues, that thisassumed definite historical conditions, that is, large-scale industry andunrestricted competition. But, he adds,

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17 Ibid. See also Marx 1978, the French version revised by Marx, p. 62.

[t]his in fact means that the full development of the law of value presupposes

a society in which large-scale industrial production and free competition

obtain, in other words, modern bourgeois society.17

Thus, in order for the law of value to prevail – that is, the law of the determination of value by socially necessary labour time – it is necessary tohave reached the full development of capitalism, large-scale competitiveindustry. Arthur believes he can conclude from this that the concepts ofcommodity or value cannot be expounded before the concept of capital. Wemight believe Arthur is guilty of the same confusion as that for which hereproaches the logico-historical procedure, but in the opposite sense. This isnot exactly correct, as he constructs a form that is purely synchronic. But hestill appears to put forward a historical consideration to argue a theoreticalorder, more precisely to support the idea that the starting-point of the expositioncannot be an adequate representation of the social ‘form’ which is that ofvalue. We know, however, that Marx, on the contrary, in treating capital inits historically developed form, began all the same with an exposition of thevalue-form (that is, the commodity form of production in general), which heconsidered as theoretically complete, and that he saw in this an indispensabletheoretical constraint.

It is not therefore just a matter of philology, but a central and decisive point,determinant for the understanding of Marx’s theory, its object, and the usethat can be made of it. Marx not only believed that one could and shouldstart from the value-form, he actually gave a full exposition of this in the firstpart of Capital. And, when he returned to this question, as he did at manypoints in the course of this work, the adjustments he added owed nothing tothe concept of capital, nor to the determinations that bear on it. (For instance,when Marx comes to the ‘transformation of value into price of production’,he introduces a new category of price, not of value.)

Arthur, whose critique is directed against two interpretations, of which oneis erroneous and the other defective, ignores, in fact, a third interpretation,the reading that I shall term ‘theoretical’, but which seems to me both themost obvious and the most common; this is, in reality, the only truly acceptableinterpretation, despite the fact that it opens up problems that are extremelyhard to resolve. But these are real problems that we have to confront, not justin theory, but in real history and practice. What Arthur somehow fails to

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18 Arthur 2002, p. 81.19 Arthur 2002, p. 86.

appreciate is that the first chapter of Capital presents the concept of commodity

production in its pure abstraction, in as much as it differs from specificallycapitalist production, according to a distinction which is, however, made veryclearly in Capital itself. And this has nothing to do with the idea of precapitalist

commodity production, no more than with a simple model as opposed to amore complex model.

Arthur makes his ‘dialectical’ task singularly more easy by presenting thisinitial moment as that of simple circulation, not of production for commoditycirculation. He takes the commodity as it is supposedly already in place: incommodities brought to market.18 His ‘presentation starts with the form ofexchange, bracketing entirely the question of the mode of production, if any,of the objects of exchange’.19 He also confuses, a few lines earlier, the ‘generalcategories of production’ with those of commodity production in general. Hedoes not seem to understand the reason why Marx starts his theoretical construction with the social conditions in which (and because of which) wealthis produced for a market, produced as commodities.

Arthur seems unaware, in fact, that the abstract context in which Marx circumscribes a ’simple circulation’ is constructed only by way of the conceptualdeterminations of commodity production in general: ‘private property’, ‘production for exchange’, ‘commodity division of labour’, concrete ‘labour’and abstract ‘labour’, ‘productivity’ as a relationship between use-valueproduced and value, and the ’socially necessary labour’ that the marketidentifies within a particular branch as the labour required on average, andbetween branches as abstract labour. All these categories of the market as arelation of production in their differences from specifically capitalist categories– and these are repeated and explained in a rather more technical fashion inChapter 10 of Volume III for the analysis of the ‘transformation of value into price of production’ – are already those forming the framework of theformulations and arguments of Volume I, Chapter One. The commodity thatis discussed in Chapter One is characterised by the ’social relation of production’specific to it. The characteristic chiasmus of the value-form is that of production

for exchange.In short, for Arthur, all the categories forming the dense tissue of Chapter

One disappear into the neutralising category of ’simple circulation’ – that is,commodity exchange – which, however, as distinct from production, precisely

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20 As Marx 1978, p. 73, ‘translated’ Warenbesitzen in the French edition.21 Arthur 2002, p. 24.

forms the object of Chapter Two and especially Chapter Three – these presupposing and completing the theorisation of Chapter One.

It is pertinent here to make clear once more, against certain dialectician’sreadings, that the ‘value-form’ expounded in Section 3 of Chapter One bearson the commodity logic of production expounded in the first two sections, as Marxconstantly emphasises. Still more precisely, as he says here in his famous reference to Aristotle, it bears on ‘the relationship of men among themselvesas producers and exchangers of commodities’.20 And this has so little in commonwith a purely ‘technical’ relationship that, he makes clear, its secret ‘couldnot be deciphered until the concept of human equality had already acquiredthe permanence of a fixed popular opinion’. This is, indeed, the root of thequestion.

The logico-historical analogy in Chris Arthur

Arthur seems, I have said, to develop throughout his book a subtle versionof the logico-historical approach. We see this,21 when he says that, because onlycapitalism produces the value-form in its full development, this could not befully formulated conceptually at the start of the exposition. Now, Marx certainlysays that only the capitalist mode of production as historically developedproduces value in the pure sense of the concept, but it is precisely value thatforms the beginning of the theoretical exposition. For the very object of ChapterOne, in its different moments, is the exposition of the commodity-form as asocial relation of production and exchange, in the very purity of its concept,as an abstract moment of the capitalist social form. Marx thus raises abruptlythe problem to be faced: the market is not capitalism. And this is indispensableto his next thesis: capitalism is not the market (contrary to what liberalismsays). The market, however, does give rise [donne lieu] to capitalism. It is thebroader space, the more abstract moment, ‘from which’ (in the theoretical,not the historical sense) capitalism comes into being.

This is the structural-theoretical problem that Arthur retranscribes intoterms analogous, in a certain way, to those of the logico-historical approach:

If value depends for its reality on the full development of capitalist production,

then the concepts of Marx’s first chapter can only have an abstract character,

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22 Arthur 2002, p. 26 (emphasis added).

and the argument as it advances develops the meanings of these concepts,

through grounding them adequately in the comprehended whole.22

Arthur, here, seems to confuse two questions. The first is an historical question:it is only when capitalism is fully developed that value actually becomes acategory that universally governs production. The second is a theoreticalquestion: he concludes that, in the course of the exposition, the concept ofvalue cannot be fully developed before the specifically capitalist form.

Now, it is clear that what Marx successively presents are two social ‘forms’.On the one hand, the value-form, that is, the ensemble formed by the relationsof commodity production-circulation as such, with all the categories thatspecifically belong to it: private property, production for exchange, value,money, exchange, commodity competition, market value and market price.These categories could pass for purely ‘technical’ ones, or in that sense ‘economic’ ones, if they were not interwoven with juridico-political categories(property, the freedom and equality of producer-exchangers – I say this without wishing to conceal the difficulties inherent to all these notions, discussion of which would involve long development – but those are other

difficulties) that Marx expounds precisely in the first part of Volume I, including the ’state’ categories that pepper Chapter Three.

On the other hand, there is what he denotes as the capital form as such,exposition of which begins in Part Three, with Part Two forming the problematic‘transition’ from one to the other. It results from this that commodity logicas such, though it effectively dominates capitalism, is not an adequate basisfor understanding it. For this (abstract) commodity context is the social formwithin which a non-commodity relationship is determined, which is no longera relation between individuals but between social classes (at the end of which,as we know, commodities are exchanged in the last instance not at their valuebut at prices that differ from this), without, however, the commodity logicever being jettisoned. It is at this point that difficult theoretical problemsbegin. But these are genuine problems of capitalism.

The same slippage can be found on page 45. Arthur says here that it isonly with modern industry that capitalism aims at valorisation and the policingof labour: previously, all that was involved was the value-form. And he drawsthe conclusion that an exposition of the latter is not possible before one ofthe social form of capital.

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23 Arthur 2002, p. 45.

Since generalised commodity circulation exists only on the basis of capitalist

production, value becomes determinate only with capitalistically produced

commodities.23

Indeed, but it does not follow from this that the value-form cannot be expounded

before the capital-form. On the contrary, the problem that Marx confronts is that commodity production as such is something other than capitalist production: the market is not capital. And the first major challenge in theexposition of the theory is precisely that of thinking the transition [Übergang]and transformation [Verwandlung] from one to the other.

The same slippage again on page 72, where Arthur claims that the (theoretical) introduction of the commodity labour-power does not presupposea labour market. But, here again, I believe he confuses the historical conditionsnecessary for the existence of the labour market, which, in the strict sense,derive from capitalism, with the conceptual presuppositions of the commodity-form of labour-power. The concept of the labour-power commodity quitesimply has no meaning outside of that of the labour market.

In sum, the author seems constantly to confuse the idea that only capitalismestablishes the generalised market with the fact that this latter constitutes thesystem of constraints denoted as the ‘law of value’ (it is significant that, onpage 28, he expresses the idea that capital promotes the market by sayingthat it produces the commodity). It is, however, because these two facts (andthese two ideas) must not be confused that Marx can exhaustively define themarket as ‘relation of production’ before saying a single word on the specificallycapitalist relation (nor on the market as a determinant of the latter).

Capitalism viewed as a system

This procedure, however, is not reducible to an inverted logico-historicalapproach. It exhibits a coherence that is specifically systemic in kind. Arthuris even, in a certain sense, justified to say that the discourse on abstract labourand value is not completed in Part One, continuing and culminating in theexposition of what is specifically capitalist. His formal error, to my mind, isto devalue (so to speak) the theory of value presented in the first part, toreduce it to a ‘technical’ discourse leading to a figure of ‘circulation’. Accordingto him, it is not possible to speak of value without considering the ‘moment

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24 Arthur 2002, p. 34.

of capital’ – a moment that would be ‘negated’ in the sense of the Hegeliandialectic by consideration of the status of value and abstract labour undercapital. This thesis might seem to pertain just to the realm of philology, if itdid not point to more fundamental problems in the interpretation of Capital,involving the very meaning of ‘Marxism’ today. The mistake, to my mind,lies in the attempt to represent capitalism as a ’system’, whereas it can onlybe conceived in fact as a ’structure’, a ’structural’ form. I cannot, of course,explain this conception in a few pages, but shall confine myself to suggestingit via the present critique of Chris Arthur. If capital is conceived as a systemictotality, all the terms of the system mutually imply one another. The first termwith which the argument starts is only justified at the end. Now, the morefundamental problem raised by Marx is indicated by the fact that there is, inCapital, a genuine beginning, and a genuine first ‘abstract’ moment, not in thestandard sense in which ‘abstract’ means ’separated from the conceptualwhole’, but rather as a moment possessing its own coherence and completion,to which it is necessary to return as to the first moment, which is not modifiedby the capitalist order, that, on the contrary, refers constantly to it. And thisis incompatible with the Hegelian concept of system. It is this idea I wouldlike to introduce in examining the idea of systematic dialectic proposed byArthur.

III. The limits of the ‘systematic dialectic’

The concepts of the fluid are not fluid

I shall start with a general remark concerning Arthur’s project of developingthe ‘value-form’ by way of a systematic dialectic and the idea of dialecticaldetermination. In the beginning, as immediacy, Arthur says that value is onlyan abstraction, thus is not adequately known.24 It is not possible to keep tothe ‘fixed definition of terms’, that is, a fixed definition of value, since thisacquires new determinations at each stage. Its concept is complete only whenwe understand that it is reproduced by the dynamic production process ofcapital.

I agree that the continuation of Capital can indeed be viewed as a sequenceof determinations of the social form presented in Part One. Capital elaborates

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25 Arthur 2002, pp. 83–5.26 Arthur 2002, p. 29.27 Arthur 2002, p. 31.

the concept of capitalist society, of which the commodity-form (value, inArthur’s approach) does not give an adequate idea. But this means that wemove on to other concepts, and the (difficult) question is to know how thistakes place. It is clear that it is not because the concepts are ‘fluid’ or flexible,rather than ‘fixed’. What is involved, in my view, is a suspect metaphor: itis not the concept that changes; rather, there is a change of concept, throughconceptual determinations. The concepts are concepts of fluid and dialecticalrelations. But the concept of movement is not itself in motion, nor is the concept of contradiction itself contradictory, any more than the concept ofred is red. Marx presents a transformation ‘from money to capital’ – it wouldbe better to say, as we have seen, ‘from the market to capital’, that is, fromthe moment of value to the moment of surplus-value. But the ‘theory of value’is in no way transformed by the theory of surplus-value, which, on thecontrary, expressly presupposes it, unchanged, in the pure and perfect formthat Marx has given it in his exposition in Part One. It is, thus, in no way‘flexible’. And this term operates as an epistemological obstacle which in the unity of the category of ‘determination’, understood as expression of a‘dialectical movement’, confuses various kind of heterogeneous conceptualrelations, as we shall come on to see.

The exposition of ‘Capital’ does not begin with the immediate or the simple

Let us begin at the ‘beginning’. Arthur starts, ‘from everyday experience’,from the exchange of commodities.25 True, Marx does not start with the ‘capitalist mode of production’. But he starts, for good reason, with its mostabstract moment as a ‘relation of production’ (or, again, see the start of ChapterTwo, as an ‘economic relation’): the ‘commodity division of labour’ and thesocial form of production it defines. In Chapter One, however, it is only aquestion of ‘production’.

It is necessary, therefore, to reject this notion of immediacy, the supposedimmediacy of the value-form, taken as an ‘immediacy in our experience’,26

which would justify its position at the start of the exposition.27 Marx nowherestarts with an immediacy that is supposed to be that of spontaneousconsciousness, of everyday experience. He starts with a beginning which isthe exposition of the theory of value, that is, of the commodity form of

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28 Arthur 2002, p. 27.29 Arthur 2002, p. 25 and passim.

production, and what distinguishes this from production in general. Such isthe effective object of the first two sections of the first chapter of Volume I:the specificity of a commodity form of production, and a society in which thiscommodity-form prevails (that is, private property, production for exchange),with the categories of proclaimed (supposed) ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ thatattach to it. It is true that Marx presents the question only in a rather obliquefashion, in the form of an ‘analysis of the commodity’. But he produces thisanalysis only by deploying the concept of commodity production in general,which is something quite other than a postulation of immediacy. He doesindeed start by evoking the immediate (trivial) notion of exchange-value, buthis theoretical work immediately begins with the deconstruction of this triviality(shown as a contradiction in terms, following a form of argument commonin the social-scientific field), and the construction of the concept of commodityproduction, thus of value, a construction which, to his mind, is complete atthe end of Part One.

It is hard to see, therefore, what enables Arthur to say that the beginninghas to be simple, ‘to be grasped immediately by thought’,28 which he deems incapable of raising at the start the ‘complexity’ of value that valorisesitself.29 Here, we see how the strategy of ‘from simple to complex’, chasedout of the door, returns through the window. Marx’s construction of the‘abstract’ beginning, to my mind, is anything but simple, unless we deem’simple’ the theorisation of the ‘value-form’ (Section 3 of Chapter One) thatMarx presents, without possible ambiguity, as an essential element of thebeginning, that is, of the theory of commodity production as such.

Part of the secret of the effectiveness of this kind of dialectician’s interpretationbears on the very particular usage it makes of the notion of ’simple circulation’,which is indeed found in Capital, but in a completely different theoretical context. For the author, ’simple circulation’ is an initial and immediate givenof everyday experience, from which analysis can thus begin. Marx, on thecontrary, introduces this notion only on the basis of the concept of commodityproduction/circulation in general, the object of Part One: it is only after avery ‘complex’ construction of this concept that he comes to the notion of’simple circulation’ (which certainly has nothing in common with ’simplecommodity production’). It is significant that the term ‘circulation’ appearsonly once in the first chapter of Capital, which is, indeed, devoted to commodity

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30 Arthur 2002, pp. 65–6.

production, and once in the second chapter devoted to the process of exchange.It recurs, however, on every line of Chapter Three, of which it is the object,though only on four occasions is it characterised as ’simple’, despite the factthat it always has this sense, that of ’simply commodity circulation’. Thisdenomination of ’simple’, on the other hand, comes to the fore in the secondpart, leading to the idea that capitalist circulation, as heralded in the ideological‘formula’ of capital (M–C–M’) cannot be deduced, in any sense of the term,from simple circulation, simply commodity circulation, C–M–C, analysable atthe level of abstraction which is that of commodity production in general. Itis clear, here, that the concept of simple circulation has nothing simple aboutit, that it is just as complex as that of capitalist circulation: it is ’simply’ moreabstract, in the sense that it targets the most abstract moment of the ‘capitalistmode of production’. No more is there anything immediate about it, and itis for quite other reasons that it has to be the point of departure, and a pointof regular return. If it is necessary to abandon any idea of ‘foundation’, asArthur rightly points out, this does not authorise the neutralising and trivialisingof the idea of beginning.30 It remains to be seen how this beginning shouldbe understood, in what sense it is ineffaceable, irreducible, through the varioustransformations that its systematic exposition develops, as also through therevolutions that real history inflicts on it. In the last resort, the question is toknow what kind of relations exist between the market and capitalism, orbetween the market and an alternative form of society. My analysis in noway aims to rally the reader to some idea of ‘market socialism’, but simplyto display the theoretical inconsistency of the ‘fundamentalist’ treatment ofthe question that this kind of systematic dialectic proposes.

The return of the Hegelian dialectic as discourse of totality

The problem we have noted with the point of departure derives, in fact, fromthe very notion of systematic dialectic, which is dependent on the concept ofsystem. This concept of system may, on first reading and in various senses,refer to the coherence of a social form, that is, the congruence of the ensembleof determinations that constitute it. This is the case, for example, with theconcept of commodity production in general, as presented in Part One ofVolume I, or, again, the concept of exploitation presented in Part Three. InVolume III, once more, there is the system formed by the various ‘fractions’

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31 Arthur 2002, p. 66.32 Arthur 2002, p. 31.33 Ibid.34 Arthur 2002, p. 66.35 Arthur 2002, p. 67.

of capital. In this sense, the capitalist mode of production, by virtue of beinga mode of production, is a figure reproducing itself on the basis of its overallcoherence, in other words of a set of determinations which, in fact, all mutuallypresuppose one another, in such a way that each one of them can only beanalysed in terms of the set of its relations with all the others. As Arthur saysat the start of Chapter 4 of his book, both Hegel and Marx deal with a totality,and they treat it as a system whose categories express synchronic momentsthat form a circuit, mutually presupposing each other, and each one beingdefined in its relation to all the others. If this is the sense in which we are tounderstand the declaration that ‘only the end proves the beginning’,31 onecan only agree – a ‘diplomatic’ agreement, undoubtedly, on formulae thatcan be understood in different ways.

But what is involved, it seems, is something quite different. In this proposedreading of Capital, revalorised by recourse to the Grundrisse (Arthur takes upthe somewhat contradictory arguments of this text, which were abandonedin Capital), what is introduced is the dialectic of a great subject that deliversitself in what it is only through the alterity of its various moments. The presentation, as we see on page 26, is supposed to progress from one levelto another, as ‘demanded by the logic of the exposition’, and not by ‘decisions’that would add determinations, arbitrarily one must assume. And this demandpertains to the concepts themselves at the same time as to their object, as wesee on the very same page: what only existed in itself tends to become ‘foritself’, the concept of value demands to be ‘actualised’ in an autonomousform (‘to actualise the concept’32). Nothing less is involved here than the ‘realisation’ of this concept. We see money ’striving to be value for itself’,33

vainly, at first, in hoarding, before eventually putting itself in circulation withthe aim of increase. This movement is driven by the ‘tendency’ of the categories(‘the tendency of the finite category’34). At the start, to be sure, it seems thatarbitrariness cannot be avoided: the mysterious ‘violent abstraction’35 by whichone category is selected, isolating it from its conditions of existence. But, fromthis point on, we go forward, propelled by the ‘insufficiency’ of each stageand its inability to understand its presuppositions. There is, at the same time,

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36 Ibid.

both a push and a (teleological) pull,36 continuing until the system is displayedas totality.

The reader will doubtless recall here the critique that Althusser developedin For Marx. In the Hegelian dialectic, beneath all differences, and by way ofthe movement of concepts, it is ‘the same’ thing that is present, that movesout, returns, is alienated and rediscovers itself. The initial abstraction, justlike the abstraction of each moment (and Arthur, as we see, plays on thesetwo senses of the word ‘abstraction’), finds its truth in the whole. Above all,the end is the truth of the beginning, which only acquires its full sense in aretroactive way. In each moment, the whole is expressed. To which Althusseropposed overdetermination, unequal development, and gaps.

Without necessarily adopting all Althusser’s categories, nor taking themas sufficient, we can observe that the mode of dialectical development –uniform and univocal – adopted by Arthur is of such kind as to make itimpossible to understand the gaps without which Marx’s theory dissolvesinto the Hegelian form, losing its specific operational capacity. Arthur’s meta-theory, in fact, proposes qualitatively identical instruments for thinkingdistinct objects: the market form, the capital form, the transition from one tothe other, the relationship between structure and tendencies, between structureand system (in the specific sense that, in my view, has to be given to theseterms).

The systematic dialectic ignores the structure/tendency gap

This uniform and supposedly totalising character of dialectical developmentmakes it impossible, for a start, to think the relationship of structure and tendency. True, the concept of capital is the concept of the reproduction of astructural totality (I shall explain why I speak of structure and not system),on the basis of a set of conditions for it. And the reproduction of capital isthat of a social form that undergoes transformations. This is the very objectof Capital. But, if that is the case, it is important to distinguish two questions,and Marx attaches great importance to this distinction. It is one thing toanalyse a social structure on the basis of moments, of synchronic conditionsthat mutually presuppose one another and constitute it as a totality, somethingelse again to analyse the tendencies of this structure. This second kind of analysis can in no way proceed dialectically from the ‘insufficiencies’ of the

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37 The same holds for the question of genesis, that is, the beginning and also theend of the historical era. Arthur does indeed divide off the historical question by taking as his object the supposedly systemic form of capitalism. But it remains to beseen whether this systemic understanding makes it possible to raise the problem ofhistorical origin or that of historic ending. I leave this point aside here.

38 Arthur 2002, p. 76.39 Arthur 2002, p. 77.

structural form. It displays the relationships between the technological andsocial conditions that the structural analysis has brought to light. It is necessaryto begin with the structural analysis, which may be represented, partly atleast, in the terms described by Arthur. (Only partly, however, for, as we haveseen, it is impossible to pass in this way from Part One to Part Three, and,in a more general sense, it is impossible to give such a ’systemic’ descriptionof the structure as a whole.)

The nature of the distinction between structure and tendency, a notion,moreover, which is well established in the Marxist tradition, seems to haveescaped Chris Arthur. The idea in itself cannot be completely foreign to him,but it is clear that this systematic dialectic, deployed in a pure synchrony,cannot give an account of it.37 This is verified on pages 75–6, where the tendential processes of capitalism as expounded in Capital are curiously takenas ‘actualisations’ of the concept of capital. The question here is of the newconcepts needed to account for the transition from manufacture to large-scaleindustry.

I account for this by making a distinction between the truth of a concept

and its actualisation. It is inherent to the concept of capital that it must

reproduce and accumulate, and in this it seeks to overcome all obstacles

and to make the material reality it engages with conform as perfectly as

possible to its requirements.38

It is, thus, the same dialectic that the author believes he can show at workwhen he describes how this capital ’seeks to negate itself’ through a real his-torical process, and when he describes how the commodity tends towardsthe concept of money, and the concept of money towards that of capital, asa function of the ‘tendency of the finite category’. Moreover, ‘One can usethe notion of a drive to overcome contradictions in order to motivate transitionfrom one category to another’,39 within the system viewed in its specificcoherence, just as in its historical development from one stage to another.Once again, ‘the argument of Capital is generally logical with historical material

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40 Ibid.41 We should not forget the famous warning that Marx addresses to himself in the

Grundrisse (Marx 1973, pp. 100ff.), that it is necessary to correct the idealist mannerof presentation that wrongly makes the whole question into one of conceptualdeterminations and the dialectic of these concepts. As far as structural analysis goes,such ‘correction’ will sometimes be sufficient, as it is easy to understand the sense inwhich one form ‘passes’ into another in analysis of the ‘value-form’, for instance, howone arrives at Form II starting from the ‘insufficiency’ of Form I. But (without speakingof the fact that it is impossible to ‘pass’, in this way, dialectically, from the market tocapital) the tendential processes which the theory is supposed to describe in theirabstraction cannot be theorised in this dialectical fashion.

indicating how certain tendencies inherent to the concept were played outin reality’.40 This used to be called idealism, and appears here again with thefeatures of the logico-historical. It is because the movement is transferred byact of the imagination from the empirical real to the concepts themselves,become ‘fluid’, that this theoretical discourse is incapable of distinguishingformulations aiming to describe the structure (at its various levels) from thoseaiming to describe the tendencies immanent to this structure (according toits various levels).41 An incalculable epistemological and scientific injury.

The ’systematic dialectic’ ignores the gap between market and capital

There is also another radical gap for which this univocal dialectical developmentis incapable of accounting. This is the transition that Marx denotes as thatfrom money to capital, and which we have seen is, in actual fact, the transitionfrom the market to capital, that is, from the commodity form of productionin general to the specifically capitalist form, a transition understood as thatfrom the most ‘abstract’ moment, at which all that exists are individuals whoare taken to be producers for exchange, free and equal, to the more ‘concrete’moment at which it is a question of the class relation, the social relation ofexploitation. And it is on this essential point, that of the articulation betweeninter-individual relationships (as legally defined) and class relations, that thesystematic dialectic – with its universal concept of a forward march spurredby the ‘insufficiencies’ of logically prior forms – displays its incompetence.

Arthur’s dialectical concept leads him to privilege the kind of procedurethat Marx followed in the Grundrisse, when he sought a dialectical form thatcould figure the final moment of money and the first moment of capital. As is known, he approached this from various sides, especially the side ofcommerce, which goes from money to money via the commodity (M–C–M),without however managing to provide the source of increase of value, as well

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42 I have particularly developed this points Bidet 2000, pp. 225ff.43 Arthur 2002, p. 31.

as from the side of hoarding, a practice aimed at the pure accumulation ofabstract wealth.

For reasons that are clear enough, Marx abandoned this kind of argumentin Capital.42 He resorts, here, to a quite different procedure, which consists ofstarting (in anticipation) from the formula of capital as it appears in ordinaryconsciousness (M–C–M’). He shows the contradictory character of this, thatof a sequence of equivalents leading to an increase, and provides the solutionfor this contradiction in the ideological formula: there exists a commodity,labour-power, which produces more value than it possesses. It is clear that,in reality, here the exposition of Capital in no way responds to a programmeof dialectical development such as Arthur defines (and it is not the place hereto show why this would actually be impossible). In this final version, Marxbreaks deliberately with the procedure that seeks a basis in the supposed

contradiction of the money-form in order to ‘pass on’ to capital. He starts hisexposition of the new stage by analysing the ‘contradiction of the formula’ ofcapital, that is, the ideological and spontaneous formula. And he shows, onthis basis, the difference between the capital-form and the commodity-form –in no way, therefore, on the basis of some kind of supposed ‘deficiency’ of thelatter that would then seek to negate itself.

It is remarkable how Arthur’s entire effort consists on the contrary inexercising himself over this transition, understood as capital negating thecontradictions and insufficiencies of money. It is in this spirit, for instance,on the subject of ’simple circulation’ in the sense that he understands it,43 thathe says that value still presents its universality here only as something purelyimmanent in the relations between commodities. This contradiction is relievedby the money-form, in which value, up till then implicit, appears explicitlyas value ‘for itself’. Up to that point, there is at least a reasoned argument,moreover that of Marx: the market-form, as such, requires money. But Arthurcontinues with the observation that if the concept is realised by hoarding,then there is no more money. Indeed. The solution, he concludes, is to alienatemoney to get more money, to take itself as object, and then we get capital!This is what is really surprising. For what is remarkable here, in the author’spresentation, is that capitalism intervenes as solution to the supposed problem

of ’simple circulation’, that is, of the exchange system implicit in the commodity

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44 Arthur 2002, p. 66.

relation of production – something that clearly does not contain in itself any‘problem’.

It is easy to understand, therefore, the totally inadequate character of thiskind of analysis. The formula M–C–M, in fact, figures the specific coherence

of the commodity system as such, the value-form of the commodity in so faras it is specific to the commodity system of production as such, which impliesmoney. This displays no contradiction that would require a dialectical negation,in the sense that Arthur maintains that the exposition proceeds by negationof the deficiencies of the earlier categories, according to their tendency todeny and complete one another.44 There is no deficiency of the money-formdiscernible here, still less a ‘tendency to transform itself’ into something else.

We may note on this subject that Marx’s reference in Capital to hoarding isnot introduced to exhibit any tension ‘demanding’ a dialectical development.It is evoked, in Chapter Three, both as a perfectly rational functional practice(commodity production, for this is what is involved, implies, Marx says, thatthe rational producer, like the rational state evoked as such, builds up a moneyreserve), and as a pathological conduct possible in this context. But it isimpossible to see what kind of ‘demand’ for transition to capital this mightcontain, nor what conceptual ‘tendency’. The capitalist is certainly comparedin Chapter Six to a rational hoarder, but neither does this analogy makehoarding a figure of dialectical transition to capital (unless our world is tobe read as a ‘great book of analogies’, as the Renaissance philosopherssuggested). Hoarding does not form a ‘dialectical moment’ of the concept’sexposition, but a moment of argument ad absurdum, displaying, on thecontrary, the closure on itself of commodity production as such, the impossibleof conceiving a surplus in a purely commodity context.

The dialectician’s dialectic likes to feed on philological mirages. What isbasically at issue in Capital is the relation between two forms, the market-form and the capital-form. The dialectical question (and we still have to knowwhat is meant by this) of their relationship is a formidable global question.Not only does it not take place by some kind of formal dialectical transition(at a point, narratively) from one to the other – and this is a key point thatgenerally seems to escape the dialecticians – such as the M–C–M of commerceor hoarding, which, moreover, are practices and not forms, in the sense thatthe market and capital are in this theoretical context. But there is, in reality,

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45 Among other points that could be added here is that this analysis in terms ofsystem prevents one from thinking the articulation between structure and system, inthe sense in which there indeed is a world system, marked by the articulation of centreversus peripheries, in opposition to the class structure, which as such develops in thecontext of particular states. This ensemble is indeed a system and not a structurebecause, though it presents its own functional superstructures, there is no ‘meta-structure’ corresponding to it in the sense that I have given this term. What is lackingto it is this assumption of freedom-equality-rationality in the form of both proclamationand denial, which Marx showed is specifically posed by the modern class structure.

no conceivable dialectical transition. And it is for this reason that Marx finallyhad to abandon any such enterprise in Capital. He had to recognise that hecould not proceed by transition, but only by rupture: by an anticipation ofwhat had to follow, by this appeal to the ideological ‘formula’ of capital,which owes nothing to the ‘insufficiencies’ of the money- or commodity-formthat precedes it. The form of ‘capitalism’ cannot so readily be assimilated toa development of the ‘market’-form.45 It is not in this fashion that the problembetween the two terms can be raised.

IV. Concluding remarks

However, it might be, with all the criticisms I have offered above, that I amquite ready to accept a large part of Chris Arthur’s discourse. After all, weshare the same interest in Marxism. He is completely justified, for example,in employing a concept like real abstraction – on condition of being clearwhat is meant by this. One should, in fact, distinguish two things. On theone hand, the fact that any abstraction, like that which in Part One characteriseslabour as abstract labour, is indeed real: abstract labour as a concept is a concept of the real. On the other hand, under capitalism, the accumulationof surplus-value becomes the objective, in such a way that production takesplace in a horizon of abstraction, of accumulation of abstract wealth. Itsstructural logic of production is not the concrete wealth that labour in generalsupposedly aims at (just as commodity production as such is supposedly, byway of productive chiasmus, production for concrete wealth by means ofexchange), but, rather, surplus-value: that is, a logic of accumulation of powerover labour with a view to accumulating still more power, whatever may be the consequences for producers, nature and culture. We are, here, at theheart of what one may denote as real abstraction. I imagine that Arthur willagree with this. But, for this, Marx has no need of another theory of the value-form, nor of abstract labour. On the contrary, he precisely needs to maintain

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46 Arthur 2002, p. 58.

unchanged the theory of value presented in Part One. (I say this as firstapproximation, for there are, indeed, objections that can be raised, but theseare different objections.)

In other words, Arthur has no need to trivialise the theory of value (of thevalue-form, the commodity social form of production) – as he does on page55 when he says that any theory that equalises value and labour sees themin a positive light – to arrive at his suggestive formulation according to whichthe magnitude of value is determined by ’socially necessary exploitation time’.I happen to have expressed things in a rather similar way in my book Que

faire du ‘Capital’? I said there, but taking care not to ‘negate’ in this way Marx’stheory in Part One, that, if value is determined by socially necessary labourtime, this latter is determined in turn by class struggle. Arthur makes outthat at the beginning of Capital the meaning of ’socially necessary labour’ ispurely technical. Now, at the beginning of Capital, classes have certainly notyet made their appearance, but this does not mean that we remain in a purely‘technical’ universe. We are simply still at the abstract level of commodityproduction as such, with all its juridico-political presuppositions. This, however,remains presupposed right the way through. (And, when this presuppositionis given its full extension, what I call its ‘metastructure’, it is understandablethat this is the heart of the contradiction of capitalism as class contradiction– though this needs to be presented analytically.)

I cannot see, therefore, what permits Arthur to conclude that abstract labourcan no longer be understood in the abstract fashion given at the beginningof Capital, but only as ‘internal to the capital relation’.46 For the second consideration does not abolish the first, it presupposes and maintains it. (I say this, here again, without wishing to conceal the many theoretical problems attaching to the notion of ‘labour value’, but which, precisely, aredifferent problems.)

This is why propositions such as that labour now counts only as anabstraction of itself – labour as non-value, or value as the result of alienatedlabour – the labour theory of value changing into a ‘dialectic of negativity’,strike me as having a sense that is more imprecatory than dialectical. Forlabour under capitalism always remains perfectly concrete labour. And theworkers do not just ‘challenge’ and ‘resist’ it. They do so with all the forceof their concrete intention, and their power is measured by the concrete influence

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47 See for example, Arthur 2002, p. 52.48 Arthur 2002, p. 53.49 Arthur 2002, p. 51.50 Ibid.

that they manage to exert on the global process of social production. This is,indeed, the contradiction of capitalism.

It is true that Arthur develops, in this sense, the idea that capital dominatesthe subjectivities that produce and act.47 Labour is not a use-value like anyother, as it resists: capital produces only by opposing and subsuming theworker, but the latter maintains a ‘residual subjectivity’.48 To my mind, however,this says very little, and the conceptualisation strikes me as poorly constructed,for what is proposed here as specific to capitalism is the contradiction between,on the one hand, ‘valorisation’, which is the ‘ideal reality’49 of capitalistproduction, and, on the other hand, the ‘mundane materiality’ of labour andmachinery, which pertain to ‘natural laws’ that capital cannot abolish. Thoughthe workers are ‘possessed’,50 they maintain their subjectivity (a natural one,like the ‘life’ of ‘living labour’ that is invoked here?). This construction strikesme as profoundly different from that of Capital. The workers are not ‘possessed’:they are and remain owners of their labour-power. And the wage relationcertainly defines a ‘transformation’ which is a reversal (theoretico-dialectical,and not historical). But this is not a reversal of ‘nature’ into ‘capital’, but ofthe ‘capital market’, figured by that of ‘money into capital’: it is the reversalof production according to commodity logic (expounded in Part One), thegoal of which is use-value by way of exchange, into ‘capital’, the goal ofwhich is surplus-value. The ’subjectivity’ of the modern worker, who is in aposition to sell her labour-power while remaining its owner, is a form of ‘life’inseparable from the ’social form’ defined in Part One. (And, here again,difficult and real problems begin.)

Chris Arthur does indeed give Part One a status that is both technical andmetaphysical, its secret not being revealed until Part Three: the process of valueis reification. But this construction does not strike me as satisfactory. Onemust certainly distinguish, I agree, between labour as it appears in Part One,labour taken simply in terms of its commodity content, and that of the subsequent parts, where it is envisaged as producing surplus-value. This,however, does not authorise Arthur in thinking the second conceptualisationas the dialectical realisation of the first. The author bases himself, here, onthe confused considerations of the Grundrisse. What specifically generates the

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51 Arthur 2002, p. 54.52 As he says in the French edition of Capital, Marx 1978, p. 111.

confusion here is the category of ‘reification’, supposedly acquired in thecommodity relation, but which, in fact, only capital realises.

Thus, whereas at the start of Capital Marx assumes there is no problem about

labour appearing as (reified in) value, we now discover that this is consequent

only on the success (partial and always contested) of the struggle to subsume

labour under capital.51

And this, to my mind, prevents him from understanding what is specific tocapital, which is something quite other than realising the ‘reification’ inherentto the market.

What, it seems to me, Arthur does not understand is that ‘abstract labour’is a category that does not cease to belong to the rationality of the commodity-form when it comes to figure the irrationality of capital. The dynamic characterof capitalism, which Marx refers to throughout Capital, naturally goes togetherwith what he calls ‘the beauty of this (value) form’, that of the market.52 Andthe seductive beauty of the organised plan in common is not less than thatof the market, nor less inherent to it.

By trivialising from the start the theory of value, reducing it to a technicalgiven (recoded in parallel into reification), we are deprived of the means ofthinking the ‘resistance’ that is referred to here. For this has a lot to do withthe characterisations, both economic and juridico-political, of the most abstractmoment (and this, once again, even if all these questions have to be takenup again in different terms, for, to my mind, this moment is not simply ‘themarket’). And we are also prevented from linking philosophical reflection toother forms of knowledge, specific to economics, sociology, law and history,despite these being involved in the understanding of the same object.

It would go beyond the scope of this article to show how the contradictions ofcapitalism have to be understood on the basis of this beginning. I would needfirst of all to advance a number of presuppositions, without which it isimpossible, in my view, to tackle these questions afresh today. I shall thustake the liberty, therefore, in order at least to avoid certain confusions, ofpointing out that I do not think it possible to begin the theoretical expositionwith the market alone (still less by completing it with some kind of ‘marketsocialism’): the beginning of the theoretical exposition, this ‘abstract’ momentthat precedes the class structure and which I call, for this reason, the

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‘metastructure’, requires, at the same time, the other figure, its polar opposite,that of ‘organisation’, and their common implication in the antagonisticjuridico-political form specific to the modern era – outside of which the specific ‘dialectic’ of this form of society cannot be thought. Both these polar opposite‘mediations’ are, in an analogous fashion, despite being concealable and basically unequal, the class factors that, woven intimately together, structurecapitalism. And a structure of this kind indicates, through the struggles towhich it gives rise (in the chaos of conjunctures), an unceasing transformationof this beginning, which we are faced with as the ‘most abstract’ moment, tobe understood as an ever open challenge.

References

Arthur, Christopher J. 1979, ‘Dialectics and Labour’, in Issues in Marxist Philosophy,Volume 1: Dialectics and Method, edited by John Mepham and Ruben David-Hillel,London: Harvester.

Arthur, Christopher J. 2002, The New Dialectic and Marx’s ‘Capital’, HM Book Series,Leiden: Brill Academic Press.

Bidet, Jacques 1990, Théorie de la modernité, Paris: PUF.

Bidet, Jacques 1999, Théorie générale, Paris: PUF.

Bidet, Jacques 2000, Que faire du ‘Capital’?, Second Edition, Paris: PUF.

Bidet, Jacques 2001, ‘Kozo Uno et son école. Une théorie pure du capitalisme’, inDictionnaire Marx contemporain, edited by Jacques Bidet and Eustache Kouvelakis,Paris: PUF.

Bidet, Jacques 2004a, Explication et reconstruction du ‘Capital’, Paris: PUF.

Bidet, Jacques 2004b, ‘Marx critico del mercato. I pro e i contro dell’approcio francofortese al “Capitale”’, Critica Marxista, 6, Nov.–Dec.

Cesarale, Georgio 2003, ‘Fra Marx e Althusser. La ricostruzione proposta da JacquesBidet del passagio marxiano dal mercato al capitale’, in Actuel/Marx en ligne:<http://netx.u-paris10.fr/actuelmarx/indexm.htm>.

Marx, Karl 1973 [1857], Grundrisse, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Marx, Karl 1971 [1859], A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, London:Lawrence & Wishart.

Marx, Karl 1976 [1867], Capital, Volume 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Marx, Karl 1978 [1872], Le Capital, Volume 1, Paris: Editions Sociales.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1956–, Marx Engels Werke, Volume 7, Berlin: Dietz.

Rubin, Isaak Illich 1978 [1928], Essais sur la théorie de la valeur de Marx, Paris: Maspero.

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