Exploring Marx's Capital philosophical, economic and political dimensions

352 Pages·2007·1.457 MB·English

by  Bidet, Jacques

Exploring Marx’s Capital
Historical
Materialism
Book Series
Editorial Board
Paul Blackledge, Leeds – Sebastian Budgen, Paris
Stathis Kouvelakis, Paris – Michael Krätke, Amsterdam
Marcel van der Linden, Amsterdam
China Miéville, London – Paul Reynolds, Lancashire
Peter Thomas, Amsterdam
VOLUME 14
Exploring Marx’s Capital
Philosophical, Economic and
Political Dimensions
by
Jacques Bidet
Translated by
David Fernbach
Foreword to the English Edition by
Alex Callinicos
LEIDEN•BOSTON
2007
This book is an English translation of Jacques Bidet, Que faire du capital? Philosophie,
économie et politique dansLe Capital de Marx. © Presses Universitaires de France,
Paris, 2000
This book has been published with financial aid of the French Ministry
of Culture – CNL(Centre National du Livre)
Ouvrage publié avec le concours du Ministère français chargé de la
culture – Centre national du livre
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Bidet, Jacques.
[Que faire du Capital? English]
Exploring Marx’s Capital : philosophical, economic, and political dimensions /
by Jacques Bidet ; translated by David Fernbach ; preface to the English edition by
Alex Callinicos.
p. cm. — (Historical materialism book series, ISSN 1570-1522 ; v. 14)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-90-04-14937-6 (hc : alk. paper) 1. Marx, Karl, 1818–1883. Kapital.
2. Marxist criticism—France. I. Title.
HB501.B49313 2006
335.4'12—dc22
2006050914
ISSN 1570-1522
ISBN-13: 90 04 14937 6
ISBN-10: 978 90 04 14937 3
© Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill Academic Publishers,
Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated,
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PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS
Contents
Foreword to the English Translation of Jacques Bidet’s
Que faire du ‘Capital’? by ALEX CALLINICOS ............................................ ix
Author’s Preface to the English Edition .................................................. xvii
Introduction .................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 1
Preliminary Methodological Remarks ...................................................... 5
1. Pathways: 1857 to 1875 .............................................................................. 5
2. The history of science perspective ................................................................ 8
3. The perspective of reconstruction of the system ........................................ 9
Chapter 2
Value as Quantity .......................................................................................... 11
1. Constructing a homogeneous economic space: a Marxian project
that breaks with political economy .............................................................. 12
2. Paralogisms of Marx the measurer ............................................................ 14
3. Capital: the categories of measurement undermine the theorisation
of the substance to be measured .................................................................. 16
4. In what sense does more productive labour produce more value?
The articulation of structure and dynamic ................................................ 20
5. Skilled labour as a zone of paralogism ........................................................ 21
6. Intensity: closure and fracture of the quantitative space ............................ 30
Conclusion .................................................................................................... 35
Chapter 3
Value as Sociopolitical Concept .................................................................. 37
1. Value as expenditure .................................................................................... 38
vi • Contents
2. ‘Transformation of expenditure into consumption of labour-power’ .......... 45
3. Money and labour-value constitute one and the same point of
rupture between Marx and Ricardo ............................................................ 52
4. Value and capital as semi-concepts ............................................................ 56
5. Value and socialisation of labour: Marx’s inconsistent socialism ............ 62
6. Labour-value and the state .......................................................................... 67
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 70
Chapter 4
Value and Price of Labour-Power .............................................................. 74
1. Anon-normative problematic of the norm ................................................ 77
2. Movements of value and movements of price ............................................ 84
3. The non-functionalist character of the system: its ‘openness’ .................. 91
4. Ahierarchy of values of labour-power? ...................................................... 94
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 99
Chapter 5
Relations of Production and Class Relations ........................................ 103
1. Productive and unproductive labour .......................................................... 104
2. Production and social classes ...................................................................... 123
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 129
Chapter 6
The Start of the Exposition and Its Development .................................. 132
1. The question of the initial moment of Capital .......................................... 133
2. The ‘transition to capital’ .......................................................................... 153
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 166
Chapter 7
The Method of Exposition and the Hegelian Heritage .......................... 169
1. On the method of exposition of Capital .................................................... 170
2. Hegel, an epistemological support/obstacle ................................................ 183
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 193
Chapter 8
The Theorisation of the Ideological in Capital ...................................... 196
1. The place of everyday consciousness: Volume 3 ........................................ 197
Contents • vii
2. The uncertainties in Marx’s exposition ...................................................... 209
3. The ‘raisons d’être’of the form of appearance (in Volume One) .............. 217
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 228
Chapter 9
The Theory of the Value-Form .................................................................... 231
1. Why the historical or logico-historical interpretation cannot
be relevant .................................................................................................... 232
2. The notion of form or expression of value, as distinct from the
notion of relative value .............................................................................. 235
3. Epistemological history of Chapter 1, Section 3 ........................................ 244
4. What dialectic of the form of value? .......................................................... 250
5. The expression of value ‘in use-value’ ...................................................... 255
6. Fetishism, a structural category of the ideology of commodity
production .................................................................................................... 260
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 269
Chapter 10
The Economy in General and Historical Materialism .......................... 272
1. The various generalities that Capital presupposes .................................... 273
2. Labour-value in pure economics and in historical materialism ................ 288
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 304
General Conclusions .................................................................................... 307
References ...................................................................................................... 319

Foreword to the English Translation of
Jacques Bidet’s Que faire du ‘Capital’?
Alex Callinicos
The appearance in English of Jacques Bidet’s outstanding study of Marx’s
Capital, first published in 1985 as Que faire du ‘Capital’?, is an important
intellectual event. It makes available to the English-speaking world the first
book by one of continental Europe’s most important and influential left-wing
political philosophers. Moreover, occurring as it does at a time of renewed
intellectual interest in Capital, it is likely to help shape Anglophone discussion
of the nature and future of the Marxist critique of political economy.
Bidet’s book, drawn from an 800–page doctoral thesis entitled ‘Economie
et dialectique dans Le Capital’ and submitted at the University of Paris-X
Nanterre in 1983, came at the end of one great wave of attention to Marx’s
masterpiece. This gathered strength in the course of the 1960s – important
landmarks are the collective work by Louis Althusser and his collaborators,
Reading ‘Capital’(1965), and Roman Rosdolsky’s great commentary on Marx’s
Grundrisse,The Making of Marx’s ‘Capital’(1968). Though serious critical scrutiny
ofCapitaland its manuscripts preceded the political radicalisation of the late
1960s and early 1970s (and in some cases, at least, cannot be taken as in any
serious sense an anticipation of this development),1 one dimension of the
renaissance of Marxist theory that the events of 1968 and after helped to
stimulate was an exploration of the philosophical and political significance
of Marx’s economic writings. Finding one’s away around the conceptual
architecture of Capital was widely taken to be a precondition of being able
to engage in more concrete enquiries: this was, for example, a feature of the
‘state-derivation’ debate in Germany and Britain during the 1960s and 1970s.2
1 For example, Ilienkov 1982
2 See Holloway and Picciotto 1978 and Clarke 1991.