Ebook: Marxism and the Critique of Value

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Marxism and the Critique of Value is the first broadly representative
book-length collection in English translation of work from the
contemporary German-language school of Marxian critical theory
known as Wertkritik, or, as we have opted to translate the term,
value-critique or the critique of value.1 The critique of value itself
is understood in these pages as having begun with Marx, who
initiated a theoretical project that was as philosophically radical
as its implications were revolutionary; an incomplete project
that has been taken up only fitfully by Marxism after Marx.2 In
Marx’s critique of political economy, value and other categories
attendant on it are shown to be concepts both fundamental to the
functioning of capitalism and fundamentally incoherent, riddled
with contradictions as pure concepts and productive of crisis as
actually existing concepts operative in the day-to-day reproduction
of social life under capital. While this “esoteric” Marxian critique
has been rediscovered from time to time by post-Marxists who know
they’ve found something interesting but don’t quite know which end
is the handle, Anglophone Marxism, for reasons that will become clear
in the course of this book, has tended to bury this esoteric critique
beneath a more redistributionist understanding of Marx, imagining
that there could be a positive Marxist science of the economy, a science
that would be oriented toward devolving surplus value to the labor
that creates it.3 But what if the value relation does not constitute itself
in contradiction to labor, but rather encompasses labor as precisely
another of its forms of appearance — if labor is, to paraphrase and
echo what is perhaps Norbert Trenkle’s most direct challenge to
“traditional Marxism,” itself always already a “real abstraction” no
less than the commodity form? What then are, for a critical thought
still faithful to Marx, the implied forms of revolutionary practice and
agency?
The introductory remarks that follow are intended principally
for readers with little to no previous knowledge of Wertkritik. The
nearly universal absence of English translations that has prevailed up
until now — over a period of nearly three decades, in effect an entire
generation — has resulted in a virtually total absence of Wertkritik
from Anglophone critical theory — even as one of those spaces
marked “terra incognita” on the maps drawn up by the conquerors
and colonizers of the first phases of the capitalist world-system. Given
this absence, the need for a minimum of historical and bibliographical
information can hardly be more urgent — even as the context would
itself demand to be contextualized, ad infinitum. The bulk of this
introduction will consist of a series of interpretive summaries of the
thirteen texts selected for translation and conforming to a loosely
thematic sequence.4 These summaries, making up the most practical
segment of the introduction, are intended only to orient the reader
toward the esays themselves. The best introduction to Wertkritik as a
theoretical orientation is the essay that begins this collection, Norbert
Trenkle’s “Value and Crisis: Basic Questions.” There the reader will
find a concise presentation of the “what and why” of value-critique
(originally presented as a lecture for this purpose in 1998) that would
render an elaborate summary of fundamental tenets here superfluous.