Chapter 6

THE TRANSCENDENTAL GENESIS
OF THE ECONOMY

The essential possibility of exchange: real labor and abstract labor

To the question, What is the object of Capital? Marx himself replied in the Preface to Book One, which he wrote in London on July 25, 1867: “In this work I have to examine the capitalist mode of production, and the conditions of production and exchange corresponding to that mode.”¹ One would be greatly mistaken, however, in thinking that Marx’s problematic could be reduced to an economic analysis. If the capitalist system does indeed constitute the dominant and constant theme of the economic writings, that is to say, of the quasi-totality of his work after 1846, an attentive reading of the first chapters of Capital suffices to show that the aim of the inquiry is something altogether different from constructing a science in the ordinary sense of the word, that is, the acquisition and the systematic formulation of a certain amount of positive knowledge concerning a specific domain of being. For if this were the case, if the study of the capitalist system and its laws constituted the sole theme of his inquiry, Marx would be no more than the last representative of the English economic school; and whatever the importance of the modifications made in the theses of Smith and of Ricardo, this work would indeed amount to no more than “modifications,” no more than theories, which might perhaps be “different” but which would be situated within the framework of one and the same interrogation and of, precisely, one and the same science. This is, moreover, an inauthentic science despite its abundant results, to the extent that, just as every science, it relies on the positive character of the knowledge it produces without first questioning the very possibility of this production, without questioning its own possibility.

Since Kant—but this was already the meaning of the work of Descartes and of Plato before him—we recognize as transcendental every investigation which, far from identifying with the spontaneous course of science, on the contrary, poses in the guise of a problem the essential possibility for this science to orientate itself toward its peculiar object and to attain this object. Even more essential than the search for an a priori condition for science is the work of bringing to light that which constitutes the internal possibility of the very being which is grasped in its questioning. And this is so because, for Marx, the possibility of knowing, theory, rests upon reality. This is why, from Kant to Marx, the transcendental question shifts; it is no longer an interrogation concerning the essential possibility of science, in this case of political economy, but one that concerns first of all the reality which comes to be the object of this science, the “economy,” now understood in its relation to praxis and to the fundamental modes of its actual realization. These modes henceforth form the theme of transcendental philosophy. When it is a question of the market economy—that is, precisely, of one of the essential modalities through which human praxis is realized and continues to be realized today—the question is thus the following: What makes this sort of economy possible? What is it that has allowed something like exchange to be produced in history and that, in an essential and radical manner, is capable of doing this?

The transcendental, and hence universal, significance of a question such as this may appear doubtful. Is not the market economy a transitory mode of social praxis? Is not the critique which Marx constantly levels at it intended to present it in this way? To the extent that it comes after the communal modes of primitive production, after the artisanal mode of medieval production and before the socialism that will follow it, does not the market economy obviously share in the facticity of history? Does it not as such escape the transcendental dimension of radical founding and of apodicticity? But it is not exchange as an historical phenomenon, its emergence in the distant past, its development and its generalization in capitalism, and its demonstrated or prophesied demise in the near future which constitute the ultimate object of Marx’s reflection, but the possibility of exchange and, consequently, the possibility of a market economy in general. This is why Capital is not restricted to the study of a given economic system but is presented from the outset as a transcendental investigation. Exchange is no doubt a transitory phenomenon, and the system that rests upon it is destined to be a part of history, but the possibility of exchange is a pure essence, even if there had never been and never would be any actual exchange on the face of the earth. And the thought which thinks it elicits a transcendental truth or, yet again, an eternal truth; it goes beyond the factitious science of a factitious reality and escapes history: it is philosophy.

Here the profound unity of Marx’s reflection becomes apparent to us, inasmuch as the economic problematic, finding its completion in Capital, links up with the problematic of history as it is presented in The German Ideology. For, just as historical materialism is not in itself a science—that is, precisely, history—but a reflection on the necessary conditions for all possible history, and as it is actually for this reason that it escapes history or, as we have said, that it is not an ideology, in the same way the economic analysis is not part of the history of economic doctrines and is not presented as one among these. And just as the concept of history is ambiguous, since by this is understood both history as science (Historie) and historical reality (Geschichte), so too is this the case for the concept of economy, which designates at one and the same time political economy, that is, economics, and the economic reality itself, the actuality of a specific type of social praxis. The analogy that is formed in Marx’s thought between history and the economy is then evident. The shift in the transcendental question concerns both of them and allows us to say in both cases that, in Marx, transcendental philosophy ceases to be a philosophy of transcendental consciousness in order to become a philosophy of reality. For the genesis which The German Ideology traces for us is that of the reality of history and not that of history as a science. Likewise, Capital, in its essential opening analyses, provides in its turn the transcendental genesis of the reality of exchange and of the social praxis which rests upon it and not simply that of the political economy. But when the genesis is no longer within the province of consciousness, is no longer the constitution by consciousness of its object as a scientific object but instead the genesis of reality starting from reality itself and from what it includes that is most essential, when knowledge itself finds its possibility in that of reality, then idealism is rejected once and for all.

The transcendental question of the a priori possibility of exchange can only come to light if exchange is itself perceived as a problem. However, it is by no means simply for us, for modern-day economists, that exchange is given as problematical but for as long as there have been men and for as long as they have found themselves in the situation of having to exchange their products. The question of the possibility of exchange is not a theoretical but a practical question. It is not resolved by the production of an adequate concept of exchange, even when this occurs within the context of a rigorous science of the market economy which itself is adequate, but by exchange as such, by men inasmuch as they have always, in any case for as long as commerce has existed, exchanged their products. The adequate concept of exchange—as a philosophical concept, however, not as a scientific concept, as a transcendental concept of the possibility of exchange—is, it is true, produced for the first time in Capital. But it is not produced as what makes exchange possible, as theoretical—and moreover contingent—consciousness of its practical possibility. It is precisely this practical possibility, but as a transcendental possibility, which Marx has in mind, and by no means the epistemological question of knowing how it was possible for him to form an adequate theoretical concept of this practical possibility. Capital is a philosophy of the economy, not a theory of political economy. And it is only as such, as a philosophy of the economy, that it constitutes as well the ground of a rational theory of political economy.

How is exchange possible? To begin with, why does it pose a problem? In exchange—whether it is a question of a primitive form of barter or of the circulation of commodities in a modern industrial society—the products that are to be exchanged and that as such become commodities are qualitatively different, both in their material nature and in their use-value. Actually, these two aspects are closely connected. The natural qualities of the commodities are necessarily taken into consideration when one considers the utility they are likely to offer for life. The natural properties of commodities “claim our attention only in so far as they affect the utility of those commodities, make them usevalues.”² Consequently, considered in themselves, in other words in their use-value, the products that are exchanged have nothing in common. On the one hand, we have salt, canvas, skins, and on the other, wheat, metal, or whatever. How can any equality be established among all these products? How can one determine the correct proportion in accordance with which they have to be and, consequently, can be exchanged? How does it happen that a certain quantity of commodity A can be deemed the equivalent of a certain quantity of commodity B, that x cA = y cB?

This question is at one and the same time that of the exchange-value of commodities. For it is precisely the exchange-value of a commodity that determines the proportional relation that it carries into exchange, namely the quantity of this commodity that must be supplied in order to obtain a given quantity of some other commodity. The problem of value and of determining it is the problem of classical economics and, moreover, its exclusive problem, since it knows no system other than that of exchange. We know the reply of political economy to its crucial question: the origin of value resides in labor; the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of labor required to produce it. Since determining the value of a commodity is identical to determining the conditions for its exchange, one will be able to exchange x cA for y cB once it appears that these different quantities of different commodities have required the same amount of labor.

Where political economy sees a solution, Marx, however, perceives no more than a problem. Labor, it is said, produces the substance of value and determines it quantitatively. Only, for Marx, labor in itself as such does not exist. Because the essence of praxis is a living, individual subjectivity, the exploration of the universe of labor necessarily leads to the recognition of a wide number of concrete, subjective, individual, specific, and qualitatively different labors. When, confronted with the variety of the products brought to the market, one moves back from these to the labor from which they result, what one finds is precisely not a unity capable of reducing this plurality of diverse objects to itself nor a standard capable of serving as a common unit of measurement. To the irreducible diversity of commodities considered in their material form, in other words, in their use-value, corresponds the irreducible diversity of the different sorts of labor that produced them. Capital speaks of “the equalisation of the most different kinds of labor.”³ To leave the objective world of commodities for that of labor is not to exclude the sphere of qualitative heterogeneity and of incommunicability, which is inconsistent with exchange, but to rediscover it in its original and irreducible form.

However, this difficulty must be given its radical meaning. Not only do the different “kinds” of labor—weaving, ploughing, metal extraction, etc.—differ from one another and, due to what in each case constitutes their specificity, refuse to submit to a common unit of measurement; but one and the “same” labor—let us understand by this labor of the same kind, activity of the same type—once it is performed by different individuals ceases, precisely, to be “the same.” If, for example, it is a matter of unloading coal from a truck and of carrying the sacks to a nearby warehouse, the effort of one worker, his activity as it is lived subjectively, differs substantially from that of another. What is felt by one to be an “unbearable burden” will be experienced by the other as the positive release of his physical strength and as the expression of his vitality. Or again, what is boring to one person will be indifferent or agreeable to another. This is why the “time” of their activity is also not the same. One person will take support in the living present of corporeal actualization and will tend to lose himself in it; the other, from the start, will project himself toward the future time when the work will have ended. In other words, existences cannot be exchanged, they are not comparable, and real labor, its subjective temporality, possessing in each case a particular mode of a peculiar realization, cannot be exchanged either.

That a philosophy of monadic subjectivity, by recognizing the irreducibility of each individual and as a result of each of the modalities of his praxis, excludes at the same time, along with any unit of objective measurement, the possibility of making apparent between different individuals and their different kinds of labor some sort of “equality” and, consequently, the very possibility of exchange—this is categorically affirmed in the text of the Critique of the Gotha Programme, written in 1875. This is a decisive text because it considers from the same standpoint bourgeois society, that is, the market economy; communist society, that is, socialist society in its first phase, not as it is developed on its own bases but as it has emerged from capitalist society;⁴ and finally, socialist society properly speaking, which is constructed on the basis of its own principles. This is a decisive text because it shows that the single standpoint from which Marx considers together the three essential forms of modern society rests upon a common ground, which no longer belongs to any of these forms and cannot be explained by them but which, on the contrary, explains them and accounts for the problem on the basis of which they have to decide just what they are. A ground such as this, namely monadic subjectivity as the fundamental structure of being, transforms into an insurmountable aporia the very possibility of any sort of equality between individuals, that is to say, between their different kinds of work as well, inasmuch as the latter are no longer defined in terms of an objective norm, a method or a process that can be observed in the world, but find their actuality, precisely, in the irreducible, unrepresentable, and undefinable subjectivity of the absolute monad. This aporia of equality is at the same time that of right, for there is no right other than an “equal right,” as Marx says,⁵ that is to say, that right exists when, for one and the same work, those who do it receive the same value, whether this is an exchange-value or a use-value. In stressing this indifference with respect to the nature of the value produced by the worker and which must be received by him as such, we wish clearly to indicate the vast scope of Marx’s problematic here, the fact that it concerns not only the economy of exchange but also the communist regime in transition toward socialism and, even more so, this regime in its completed form, consequently, every possible type of economy. If we were to suppose that the mediation of the exchange-value were suppressed, by placing ourselves through a willful fiction outside of the capitalist regime and of the communist regime, the question of attributing to workers the same use-value for the same labor would remain unchanged if the concept of “the same labor” lost its meaning, if, as the realization of a praxis that was fundamentally subjective and monadic, labor was precisely never “the same.”

This is the rigorous thesis formulated by Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Programme. With respect to society in its communist phase, Marx says that “the individual producer receives back . . . exactly what he gives to it.”⁶ What he gives to it is a certain labor and what he receives back from it—what alone becomes individual property in a system such as this—are the objects of personal consumption which correspond to this labor. These are not objects he himself has produced but objects which take exactly as much time to produce as the labor time he himself has contributed to society, which then correspond to the objects that he produced himself. This is why there is an equivalence between what he gives and what he receives. Of the individual means of consumption, Marx says: “But, as far as the distribution of the latter among individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity-equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount in another form.”⁷ The principle upon which the communist regime is based is thus the right, the principle of exchange, the very principle of the market economy. The sole difference that exists between communism and the market system is that the former undertakes actually to apply the principle which the latter countervenes in practice to the extent that it does not give the worker the true equivalent of his work. What differentiates communism from capitalism is thus not a question of principle, but quite the opposite: communism wishes only to realize the market principle. One must not simply say, therefore, that “Communist society ... is thus . . . still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges,” but that it fulfills this old society by fulfilling its principle. And Marx states: “Hence, equal right here is still—in principle—bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads.”⁸

Because it is the radical development of the principle of the market economy instead of being a fallacious application like capitalism, communism is revealing in this regard; it is the pure form produced by the principle and in which the principle appears as it is in itself. What is remarkable is that, against all logic, Marx calls this principle of right and of equality a bourgeois principle. If in bourgeois—that is in capitalist—society, it finds simply its distorted image and so is fully realized only in communism, it is rather as a principle of communism that it should be recognized by the problematic. Only, Marx will make such a radical critique of this principle that it seems preferable in presenting a revolutionary program to direct this critique against the birthmarks of the old order rather than against the very essence of the regime one is going to institute. It is significant, in any case, that this critique comes about just when we arrive at the study of the communist order and of its foundation. The “progress” of this regime lies precisely in the fact that the principle of equal right is no longer belied by the facts. “In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.”⁹

Where, then, are the “bourgeois” limitations of this principle of equal right, in accordance with which each person receives exactly what he has produced? Not in bourgeois society but in a monadic distinction understood metaphysically as the structure of reality. The text we are discussing continues, “But one man is superior to another physically or mentally and so supplies more labor in the same time or can labor for a longer time.” If under these conditions one and the same product, that is, one and the same objectively defined “labor,” one and the same objective process, requires, due to the inequality of subjective capacities, a much greater effort from one individual than from another, it is unjust to give to the first the same value, whether exchange-value or use-value, as to the second, since the latter has worked harder or longer than the former. In other words, the labor that should serve as the criterion for determining what is due to the worker cannot be subjective labor, the effort actually accomplished, the particular intensity which it must have had in a given individual due to his aptitude, the time required to do what someone else might have done more quickly or more slowly. “. . . labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement.”¹⁰ Only, real labor never plays this role and is incapable of playing it: just as there is no way of measuring subjectivity, subjectivity itself cannot serve as a standard of measurement. It is the objective definition of a program, of a production, and this by means of a method which itself is defined objectively—it is the objective process which constitutes the standard by which right measures each individual praxis, and it is only in light of this norm, which is objective and valid for everyone, of this universal unit of measurement, that there is and can claim to be an equal right for all. Measuring every form of individual praxis in the light of a common norm, it necessarily fails to recognize their fundamental difference. Thus, right is prey to an inflexible dialectic which literally destroys it. To apply one and the same standard, for example, the same salary, to objectively identical but subjectively unequal labors is inequality itself; as Marx abruptly states, “This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor.” And again, in a no less essential declaration: “Right by its very nature can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal). . . .”¹¹

Communism claims to abolish privileges and, in order to do this, to eliminate classes, henceforth treating all individuals in the same way, as workers. The elimination of classes is for it, precisely, the abolition of difference, the abolition of individual differences which are traceable to class differences. The abolition of individual differences is, in its turn, nothing other than the abolition of privileges, and the elimination of privileges is right as such. Only, the work of right is contradictory and, as we have just seen, its concept self-destructs. Individual differences are so far from being abolished by the work of right, they are so far from being eliminated when one claims to eliminate them or not to take account of them that, in this abstract destruction of themselves, they are, on the contrary, maintained and are carried to the level of the absolute. As soon as one places oneself in the communist universe of the right of labor and considers all men as workers, one recognizes their fundamental inequality, since their productive capacities, their strength, their agility, their intelligence, etc.—in short, all the determinations they present as workers—are fundamentally unequal. Of the equal right that opens the communist horizon, Marx says: “It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment and thus productive capacities as natural privileges.”¹² Actually, communism does not only recognize the inequality of individuals against the background of the difference in their productive capacities; it carries this in a sense to the extreme when it defines the individual in terms of these capacities, that is, as a worker: of a state of affairs it makes a right. In this way, either one gives every individual his due—but then one is simply ratifying the inequality of different talents, and right is precisely the right of inequality—or one claims to apply to all individuals and to all labors, despite their fundamental inequality, the same measurement and the same remuneration, and the inequality is no less obvious. Marx concludes his analysis of equal right as the principle of communism in this way: “It is therefore a right of inequality, in its content, like every right.”¹³

The fact that right, that of communism but also all right in general, is the right of inequality, and that this is so because ultimately reality, as monadic subjective reality, is irreducible to the universality of an objective measurement¹⁴ is made even more obvious in what follows in this text. For it is not only the actual praxis of an individual which escapes the definition of “labor”; it is his entire nonprofessional life which is placed out of bounds when he is reduced to the condition of a worker. Now, in this private life there are numerous circumstances that result in the needs of one person being greater than those of another so that, here again, to give an equal share of social wealth to these two workers is to wrong the one who has, for example, a family to support. “... unequal individuals . . . are measurable only by an equal standard in so far as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only, for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right instead of being equal would have to be unequal.”¹⁵

The problematic of socialism can be understood only on the basis of this radical critique of equal right, and this is why it must be said that socialism, as Marx understood it, is not built on the idea of justice but on the clear awareness of the absurdity of this idea, an absurdity which finds its most obvious expression in the collapse of the concept of right. It is therefore not in opposition to capitalism, where the use of this concept remains purely theoretical, but rather in opposition to communism, which wants to realize it, that socialism must be thought of. Thinking of it in this way is nothing other than dismissing the idea of a possible equivalence between subjectivities, and this is why we are led back to each subjectivity and to the interiority proper to it. Labor can no longer be a mediation between need and the goods capable of satisfying it, not only because it is impossible to establish a socially defined equivalence between them, but because, as a moment of subjectivity, labor in itself cannot be a mediation. The critique of right is then nothing more than the critique of objectivity in a new form, a new affirmation of the radical immanence of life. The relation of the individual to being cannot be an external relation with something outside, a relation in which no equality is possible because it immediately throws us into the realm of heterogeneity, but a relation of subjectivity with itself. To begin with, labor is returned to what it actually is, neither a mediation nor an equivalent but a determination of life willed by it. “... after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want. . . .”¹⁶ As a mode of life, work can be willed by it, can be its want, only in a society in which each person can perform the activity that is best suited to him. A society such as this is a society of abundance, or rather of overabundance. Moreover, in it alone can it happen that, devoting himself to the activity of his choice, each person nevertheless finds in the social wealth the possibility of satisfying all his other needs. The overabundance of social wealth is therefore what allows the activity that comes from me and expresses me to connect up with the satisfaction of all my other needs, what enables the immediate synthetic relation of praxis and enjoyment to be added onto their analytical relation, to the extent that praxis has itself become a need and the satisfaction of this need. This relation, which is no longer mediated by anything, this relation internal to subjectivity between its capacities and its needs, is subjectivity itself in its immanent temporality; it is the movement of life understood as its self-realization. It is precisely because, even though he himself was compelled to live through its initial and most terrible phase, he grasped capitalism as being a formidable development of the productive forces of society that Marx saw in it the condition for socialism, which is to be defined as that place where an impossible justice becomes useless since, as a result of overabundance, all the needs of the individual are satisfied even though he devotes himself to the activity that corresponds to his deepest wish. Marx characterizes in the following manner this socialist society, which he still calls “a higher phase of communist society,” where exchange and right will have disappeared, where with the abolition of all mediation subjectivity will be restored to itself: “After labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’ ”¹⁷

The presuppositions upon which the socialist Utopia is constructed are not themselves Utopian. Because they constitute the internal structure of reality and express it, they are the presuppositions of every possible society and, in particular, of bourgeois society. With respect to the latter and to what founds it, namely exchange, the difficulty has become even more urgent. It is no longer a matter of simply opposing the question of its possibility to the factitious description of the market society and the different forms in which it appears in history, starting with primitive bartering. Inasmuch as the exchange of commodities, in accordance with the theory of value formulated by the English school and taken up again by Marx, is only that of the labor of different individuals, and inasmuch as the latter are, however—and this is Marx’s personal and decisive contribution—subjectively, qualitatively different and as such irreducible to one another just as to any unit of measurement, the transcendental question of exchange is now formulated as follows: how is exchange possible starting from its own impossibility?

Here the implications of the theory of praxis, the final consequences of the critique directed at Hegel, become all the more obvious. For it is only when labor ceases to be interpreted as an objectification process that the problem of exchange is posed in apparently insoluble terms. If indeed labor is objectified in the product, if the being of the product is constituted by labor, then the question of exchange is resolved. What is before our eyes, what is there on the market with the product is, precisely, the work it contains, and the comparison of products is immediately possible or, rather, has already been effected, since merely perceiving them is identical to perceiving the labor inscribed in them. Because subjectivity is understood by Marx in its radical immanence, labor, then, is not displayed in its product—to be specific, it is not objectified. And it is for this reason that labor “in itself as such” does not exist, because since it never exists in the form of the product, it is never this unitary, objective reality which is the same for everyone. By rejecting the Hegelian concept of labor as objectification, this thesis denies its unity, its identity, its universality and renders all objective knowledge and all measurement of its being impossible and reduces it instead to the insurmountable plurality of different types of labor that are concrete and subjective; this is thereby, precisely, the thesis that raises the possibility of exchange to a transcendental question.

Capital approaches this question in its opening chapters. The problem that takes shape here is, as we see, by no means limited to capitalism. And this is not only because the market economy does not coincide with capitalism, which represents no more than its most advanced form, but, on a more essential level, because the possibility of exchange must be constructed on the basis of a reality which is heterogeneous to it and which as such escapes the sphere of the market economy itself. A reality such as this constitutes the ontological ground upon which Capital and, generally speaking, Marx’s entire economic problematic is built.

The transcendental question of the possibility of exchange is formulated with inspired concision in the Grundrisse. This formulation goes as follows: (1) the affirmation of the radically subjective character of praxis and hence of labor and labor time: “Labor time itself exists as such only subjectively, only in the form of activity”; (2) the consequence of the subjective status of labor: the impossibility of exchanging one particular labor, that is, an individual and subjective labor, for another: “This statement means, subjectively expressed, nothing more than that the worker’s particular labor time cannot be directly exchanged for every other particular labor time”; (3) the construction of the possibility of exchange starting from its very impossibility, that is, substituting for real labor, which cannot be exchanged, some other entity capable of representing it and of being exchanged in its place. Right after stating that a particular labor cannot be exchanged by the individual who performs it, Marx adds: “... its general exchangeability has first to be mediated ... it has first to take on an objective form, a form different from itself, in order to attain this general exchangeability.”¹⁸ To take on a form different from itself, to become other is, properly speaking, to be alienated. Inasmuch as it is the condition of the possibility of exchange of labor and, consequently, of the exchange of commodities, alienation appears as the fundamental concept of the economy, of the market economy—capitalist and communist—in any case. Fundamental: as that which founds the economy and makes it possible. But we must see under what condition: alienation constitutes the principle of the transcendental genesis of the economy only to the extent that its concept has been stripped of its Hegelian signification. To be alienated does indeed mean to be objectified, but it is not real labor as such that is objectified. This is precisely because, according to Marx, real labor is incapable of being objectified and, consequently, of admitting measurement, because it is necessary to substitute for it an equivalent different from it, an equivalent that is presumed to be or alleged to be objective, ideal, and quantifiable, that will play this role and make a quasi-exchange possible. Because alienation understood in this way is certainly not the alienation of labor in the sense in which labor itself would be alienated, would become substantively other, would change in its very reality—this is, precisely, impossible—but instead signifies that something is substituted for real labor, that, to be more precise, an ideality is superimposed on the reality of labor without in any way changing the latter, and in this sense, it is indeed alienation that is in question here. An alienation such as this, by which an ideality is substituted for a reality, allowing this reality (which nevertheless subsists intact just where it is) to escape—this is what Marx calls abstraction. Alienation, as identical to abstraction, is the originary founding act of the economy and, precisely, of its transcendental genesis.

Like all great thinkers Marx wrote only a single book, at least as far as the economy is concerned, whose structure, themes, and theses are to be discovered throughout its different stages. The opening theme of this work is precisely the fundamental theme; it is the transcendental genesis of the economy, the theory of the abstraction starting from which the economy becomes possible and, in the same stroke, constitutes an object within the sphere of human experience. This abstraction is presented in a double form. First of all, it is the abstraction by virtue of which a commodity is considered to be a product of labor and nothing more. This consideration, which indeed makes it into a commodity and marks the boundaries of the market economy, is an abstraction because, by viewing what is offered on the market as simply a product of labor, its material qualities, that is, its use-value as well, are lost from sight. “But the exchange of commodities,” says Capital, “is evidently an act characterized by a total abstraction from use-value, and every relation of exchange is even characterized by this abstraction.”¹⁹ What indeed remains once one has abstracted from the material qualities and the usefulness of commodities is solely the fact that they have been produced by labor. “If then we leave out of consideration the use-value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labor. ”²⁰

We must see then in what way the “product of labor” considered as such is an abstraction: it is, precisely, not a real thing, resulting from the action of real labor, but a pseudo-thing, stripped of all real determinations and reduced to the pure meaning of having been produced by labor. This radical modification by which every real property is abolished to the benefit of a pure meaning, Marx calls a change, a metamorphosis.²¹ This chemical or rather metaphysical transubstantiation which changes the real object, fashioned by real labor, into a mere meaning, makes of it a “residue.” It is not an impoverished reality which has lost some of its properties but, having lost them all and reality along with them—and hence all possibility of being distinguishable from another reality— it is no more than a shadow, a ghost. “Let us now consider the residue of each of these products; it consists of the same unsubstantial reality in each.”²² This unsubstantial reality, this irreality is, however, neither empty nor undetermined; it is precisely a meaning, that of being a “product of labor.” A meaning such as this is nothing other than value.²³

But this abstraction, by virtue of which commodities stripped of their real property are no longer anything but values, presupposes another abstraction which founds it. Indeed, inasmuch as “value” means “a product of labor,” the values which compensate for one another and are exchanged for one another on the market can do this only to the extent that the labor which they “crystallize” is one and the same labor. But, as we have seen, the kinds of labor that produce commodities are as varied as the commodities themselves and, no more than the latter, do not allow comparison. The original abstraction which constitutes the transcendental condition for the possibility of exchange is that by which the various labors of diverse individuals are reduced to one and the same labor. For it is only to the extent that the various real labors are carried back to one single and undifferentiated labor which serves as a standard for them all that the commodities produced by these real labors can themselves be reduced to “values” measured, as are these labors, by the yardstick of the uniform labor that has been substituted for them. “To measure the exchange-value of commodities by the labor-time they contain, the different kinds of labor have to be reduced to uniform, homogeneous, simple labor, in short to labor of uniform quality, whose only difference, therefore, is quantity.”²⁴

How is this reduction of all kinds of real labor to one and the same labor accomplished? “This reduction,” Marx says, “appears to be an abstraction.”²⁵As in the case of the process which leads from the products of labor to their value, abstraction designates here the exclusion of all characteristics belonging to reality and their replacement by ideal determinations. Only, the reality from which the abstraction is then made is no longer the objective reality of commodities; it is the subjective reality of praxis. This is why the characteristics that are excluded in this abstraction are quite specific; they are the characteristics of subjectivity itself. If it appears that the determinations lost by the abstraction which is made here resemble those of commodities (for example, qualitative difference, specificity, etc.), this is inasmuch as the commodities themselves possessed these properties because they were secretly related to a subjectivity: as use-values they are first of all connected to the powers and the needs of life. We are acquainted with the characteristics of subjective praxis, with quality—but considered an original quality designating nothing other than the quality of the determinations of subjectivity, the distinctions separating these determinations themselves on the basis of their subjective realization, with, as a corollary, the radical distinction separating all the determinations and all the given properties inasmuch as they belong to different subjectivities: that is, individuality which designates the essential particularity of that which belongs to one and the same monadic sphere. Such are the characteristics which are abolished in the process of abstraction, which leads from real labor, as determined qualitatively and accomplished by individuals who, in each case, are different, to labor which, as the result of this process of abstraction, is, precisely, abstract or, rather, general labor, whose characteristics are, on the contrary, uniformity, homogeneity, and indifference with respect to quality, to any particularity of a specific type of labor and, what is more, of the individuals who perform it.²⁶

Because the individuality of real praxis is its very essence, the negation of this ontological characteristic in general labor makes the latter the “opposite” of real labor. Marx says that “the particular individual labor contained in the commodity can only through alienation be represented as its opposite, impersonal, abstract, general—and only in this form social—labor. ...” And further on, speaking of the contradiction characterizing the commodity, Marx once again states that it results from the fact that “the particular labor of an isolated individual can become socially effective only if it is expressed as its direct opposite, i.e., abstract universal labor.”²⁷ The indifference of labor with respect to the particular individual who performs it goes so far that a reversal in perspective is produced and that labor, which in its real being is but a determination of individual subjective life, becomes, properly speaking, hypostatized due to this abstraction and therefore seems to deny the individuals themselves, who are reduced to the level of mere instruments of this labor. “Labor . . . does not seem, indeed, to be the labor of different persons, but on the contrary the different working individuals seem to be mere organs of this labor.”²⁸

The indifference of labor with respect to the individual who performs it cannot be understood as a consideration of an ethical nature; it is what constitutes it as labor in itself, as typical labor, as what has to be done in order to produce a given object, so that what has to be done in this way has also to be accomplished within a specific amount of time. “The labor-time of the individual is thus, in fact, the labor-time required by society to produce a particular use-value. . . .”²⁹ Naturally, this typical labor necessary for producing a specific object is dependent on the capacities of the individual, but of the individual in general and not of this or that particular individual. It is an average labor adapted to an average individual, an ideal norm defined in relation to a concept which itself is ideal. Even more than the capacities of the individual in general, this sort of norm depends on the technical means existing in a given society, on the development of productivity, etc.³⁰ We are better able to see that this average labor is constructed as a norm when it is, precisely, impossible to consider abstractly the qualities peculiar to certain individuals such as knowledge, agility, intense effort, etc. Then it will be a question of establishing a strict equivalence between labor that everyone can do, or “simple labor,” and skilled labor, or “complicated labor,” so that, for example, one hour of the latter counts for two or three hours of the former. How is this equivalence obtained if not, again here, by means of a reduction which is only a new form of the process of abstraction thanks to which a quantitative proportion is substituted for a qualitative difference?³¹

Establishing a norm for labor on an absolutely general level, namely simple labor to which skilled or complicated labor is reduced, defining for the production of each object a particular norm for labor, namely the (simple or skilled) labor-time required for the production of a given object, this, then, is what enables one to definitively overcome the qualitative plurality of the labor performed by different individuals: since the labor of each individual is no more than the exemplar of a type of labor, it is then, in the same stroke, alleged to be identical to the labor of other individuals obeying the same norm. The equality of different labors, the possibility of exchange, is founded. Marx terms social the labor of each individual considered not in itself in its peculiar subjective reality, but as it is reduced by abstraction to the ideal norm to which it corresponds, inasmuch, moreover, as this norm was itself constructed on the basis of this labor. Social labor is precisely equal labor, that which, having lost all of its real and, as such, particular properties is henceforth the same for all.³²

Insofar as social labor is abstract labor, it finds its possibility in abstraction, which itself must be possible. For it is not enough to describe the substitution of social labor for real labor; one must also say how this substitution occurs. Real labor becomes social labor when it is measured, and the measure of real labor is the time it takes. It is solely because the labor that produces a commodity is measured by the time it takes that this product is itself capable of being measured and compared with another whose production will have required the same amount of time, or twice as much time, etc. How can the magnitude of the value of any particular article be measured? asks Capital, and the answer is: “by the quantity of the value-creating substance, the labor, contained in the article. The quantity of labor, however, is measured by its duration, and labor-time in its turn finds its standard in weeks, days, and hours.”³³

Why, then, is labor-time said to be abstract? Is not the time a man devotes to his labor in the day, in the year, in his life, something very concrete and very real and, in most cases, what is most real and most concrete in this life? Inasmuch, however, as “labor-time . . . finds its standard in weeks, days, and hours,” this time is an objective time. Far from being identified with the immanent temporality of objective praxis, it is but the external milieu of its representation. What is measured in this milieu, in the homogeneous milieu of time that is spatialized, divided, and quantified according to the divisions and the quantifications of the space in terms of which it is itself measured—the trajectory of the sun in the sky, that of a shadow on the sundial which measures this time—is thus represented time, the objective double, the irreal copy of praxis. This is why labor-time is abstract, because it is precisely not the real time of real labor, the subjective duration of effort as it is lived, but the empty dial upon which one claims to lay this effort out in order to measure it. An empty claim: between sunrise and sunset the worker is at the factory, the laborer is in the field, but what are they doing there, how are they doing it, and what is the intensity of their effort? In this way the standard of measurement lies outside the reality it wants to measure, a reality which, in fact, escapes it.

Once he finds himself confronted with the fundamental problems and concepts of the economy, Marx, starting in 1844, makes the crucial distinction between objective time and the subjective temporality of real praxis, a distinction which will command the entire subsequent problematic. In order to make the illegitimate character of property manifest, Proudhon had shown that the latter could not result from simple de facto possession, from its consolidation and its legitimation through the passage of time. “Never . . . will you succeed in making length of time, which of itself creates nothing, changes nothing, modifies nothing, able to change the user into a proprietor.”³⁴ This thesis was adhered to by Edgar Bauer in order to denounce the contradiction in which Proudhon had been trapped, for, if it is true that time creates nothing, how can it be made the source of economic value? “Herr Edgar’s conclusion is: since Proudhon said that mere time cannot change one legal principle into another, that by itself it cannot change or modify anything, he is inconsistent when he makes labor time the measure of the economic value of the product of labor.”³⁵ It is at this point that we find, issuing from Marx’s pen as he relates this discussion in The Holy Family, the decisive assertion that Bauer was able to formulate this objection against Proudhon only “by identifying empty length of time with time filled with labor,”³⁶ In the text following this passage, it is to the real temporality of actual labor that is unequivocally attributed both the formation of economic value—an assertion to which we shall return—and the real production of a real object, which, precisely, is impossible outside of real duration: “And even as far as intellectual production is concerned, must I not . . . consider the time necessary for the production of an intellectual work when I determine its scope, its character and its plan? Otherwise I risk at least that the object that is in my idea will never become an object in reality, and can therefore acquire only the value of an imaginary object, i.e., an imaginary value.”³⁷

However, just when Marx makes the distinction, a stroke of genius for this epoch, between immanent subjective temporality and objective time, he has a presentiment, which is no less a stroke of genius, that the economy is itself established on the ground of this distinction, which although essential is not perceived, and that the economy then slips from real time into abstract time, which consists in substituting objective time for subjective temporality. This is precisely the alienation which constitutes both the economy and the transcendental condition of its possibility. “The criticism of political economy . . . converts the importance of time for human labor into its importance for wages, for wage-labor.”³⁸ The radical critique that Marx undertakes here against Proudhon can thus be fully understood. Proudhon places labor at the center of his problematic, as the source of value in place of capital and landed property. The critique he directs in this way against political economy nevertheless remains prisoner to the latter, and this is so because labor is considered an economic concept, because for real labor is substituted its standard of measurement, its objective determination in objective time. Such is the “importance of time” not for “human labor”—let us understand by this real praxis—but “for wages, for wage-labor.” It is in objective time, in fact, in its equal divisions that the different types of real labor become equal, measured wage-labors. Then arises the world of political economy which finally had duped Proudhon, and in which “the mere quantity of labor functions as a measure of value regardless of quality”; it results from this that “men are effaced by their labor; that the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two locomotives. Therefore, we should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at most time’s carcase. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything; hour for hour, day for day.” In the name of justice, Proudhon wanted equality, equality of men and thus of different men’s labor, but with “his smoothing-plane of ‘equalization’,” with time as the standard of measurement, he does no more than express a state of affairs, that of right, precisely, that of the market economy: “this equalising of labor is not by any means the work of M. Proudhon’s eternal justice; it is purely and simply a fact of modern industry.”³⁹

Not just its fact: its possibility, if the measurement of labor by its objective duration is the concrete mode through which its quantitative determination, the determination of value, and, consequently, the condition of exchange are produced. The critique directed at Proudhon allows its transcendental meaning to appear behind its anthropological and ethical appearance. Marx returns to this in Capital when he favorably cites one of Adam Smith’s precursors who said with regard to the exchange of commodities that it “in effect is no more than exchanging one man’s labor in one thing for a time certain, for another man’s labor in another thing for the same time.”⁴⁰ And still in Capital, concerning labor-time: “The worker is here nothing more than personified labor-time. All individual distinctions are merged in those of ‘full-timers’ and ‘half-timers’.”⁴¹

We want to establish the possibility of abstract labor upon which the economy of exchange reposes. The objective temporal determination of labor grounds its quantitative determination and is identical with it. But, as has been frequently repeated, the real labor performed by different individuals is qualitatively different in each case, and the fact that the duration is identical does not, for all that, make them homogeneous. This is the reason why the reduction of diverse labors to a type of labor, to one and the same abstract labor, was posited. Far from being able to found this reduction, the objective temporal determination of labor presupposes it instead as its own condition. It is therefore a question of the constitution of abstract labor starting from qualitatively different labors, independently of their objective temporal measurement, and it is this abstraction of simple or complicated labor which can no longer be simply described but must itself be grasped in its possibility.

Such is the decisive progress realized by the analysis of Capital in its introductory stages, just when it appears to repeat purely and simply that of The Critique of Political Economy. It shows that the thematization of a single labor starting from qualitatively different labors is possible only to the extent that the latter reveal themselves to be substantively and ontologically identical, to the extent that they are but the diverse modalities of one and the same reality, namely the subjective force which itself constitutes the essence of all real praxis. Not only are the real labors of different individuals comparable among themselves as being for each person nothing other than the actualization of his very existence, involving his bodily powers, but in order to make this metaphysical truth apparent Marx places himself at the outset within the domain where this truth lies and is not afraid to make the leap into the monadic sphere. What, in fact, shows the identical essence of “qualitatively different kinds of labor” like tailoring and weaving is that they can be performed by the same individual. It is in the individual that they are the same thing, namely this individual himself. Capital abruptly poses the question of the possibility of exchange and of the market economy: “So far as they are values, the coat and the linen are things of a like substance, objective expressions of essentially identical labor. But tailoring and weaving are, qualitatively, different kinds of labor.” Under the appearance of these relativist and historicizing considerations which were to nourish Marxism and, after it, the human sciences, the absolute character of the transcendental condition shines forth: “There are, however, states of society in which one and the same man does tailoring and weaving alternately, in which case these two forms of labor are mere modifications of the labor of the same individual. . . .”⁴² The fact that a condition such as this is characteristic of no particular regime, for example, that of the family-centered economy, in which each person must do everything, but of every conceivable kind of economic regime, including that of the division of labor and of modern industry, is asserted by what directly follows in the text: “just as the coat which our tailor makes one day, and the trousers which he makes another day, imply only a variation in the labor of one and the same individual.” This then is what all sorts of real labor have in common: they involve one and the same organic force, of which they are but the diverse actualizations. “Productive activity, if we leave out of sight its special form, viz., the useful character of the labor, is nothing but the expenditure of human labor-power. Tailoring and weaving, though qualitatively of different productive activities, are each a productive expenditure of human brains, nerves, and muscles, and in this sense are human labor. They are but two different modes of expending human labor-power. Of course, this labor-power, which remains the same under all its modifications. . . .”⁴³

“Simple average labor,” which serves as the measure of all labor, which is represented in the exchange-value of the product and out of which skilled labor is constructed, is nothing other than “the expenditure of simple labor-power . . . which, on an average, apart from any special development, exists in the organism of every ordinary individual.”⁴⁴ Let us therefore recognize the essential distinction which serves as the ground for the problematic of Capital just when it seems to blur, the distinction between, on the one hand, primordial labor, namely the activity of organic subjectivity as it is capable of unfolding spontaneously and of being realized without preparation or training of any sort, and, on the other hand, simple labor, which is only the abstraction of primordial labor. In what does this abstraction consist? In the case of primordial labor, which Marx terms labor-power, we are in the presence of the possibility of identical labor, which serves as the ground for all economic determinations: simple labor, for its part, is the representation of primordial labor; the abstraction that constitutes it resides in this representation. This is why simple labor is abstract, because, bound to representation, held within its field of vision and rendered objective by it, it is, in the same stroke, separated from the original domain of real praxis. This is why this labor serves as a standard of measurement for the complex forms of labor and for the determination of value, because primordial labor is the essence common to all kinds of concrete labor and is their reality.

Because abstract labor is only the representation of real labor, the relation that is established between these two forms of labor can be determined rigorously: to be precise, there are not two forms of labor but a single labor, real labor, considered the actualization of labor-power, of organic subjectivity and, on the other hand, this same labor as it is opposed to itself in representation and as it henceforth takes on the form of irreality. Real labor produces the real object, the commodity in its materiality and as a use-value. Abstract labor, which is the pure representation of this real labor, is in its turn represented in the commodity as its exchange-value, which is thus nothing other than the objectification in the product of the prior objectification of real labor in abstract labor. Capital states, touching on the essence of the matter: “If there are not, properly speaking, two sorts of labor in the commodity, nevertheless the same labor is opposed to itself therein depending on whether it is related to the use-value of the commodity, as to its object, or to the value of this commodity as to its pure objective expression.”⁴⁵

The genesis of abstract labor, starting from real labor and in opposition to it, is presented by Marx as his great discovery and at the same time as the foundation for political economy. “At first sight a commodity presented itself to us as a complex of two things—use-value and exchange-value. Later on, we saw also that labor, too, possesses the same two-fold nature; for, so far as it finds expression in value, it does not possess the same characteristics that belong to it as a creator of use-values. I was the first to point out and to examine critically this two-fold nature of the labor contained in commodities. As this point is the pivot on which a clear comprehension of political economy turns, we must go into more detail.”⁴⁶ A good many years later, in the Preface he wrote for what was to be called Book Two of Capital, Engels, asking himself about the importance of Marx’s work on economics—“But what is there new in Marx’s utterances on surplus-value?”—replies to his own question in these terms: he “was the first to ascertain what labor it was that produced value.”⁴⁷ The thesis which asserts that labor produces value is the thesis of classical economics, but as long as one has not ascertained “what labor” produces value, an assertion such as this not only remains thoroughly vague, it is false. For by labor is quite naturally meant real labor, the labor of an individual as he performs it in accordance with his capabilities and his own rhythm. Now value is neither produced nor determined by labor such as this, which depends upon the particularities of each person; otherwise, one would have to say that “the lazier a man, or the clumsier a man, the more valuable his commodity, because the greater the time of labor required for finishing the commodity.”⁴⁸ In this way, the problematic of abstract labor and all its determinations, notably that of socially necessary labor, is seen to be a necessary development, and it is demonstrated that abstract labor alone, and not real labor, is capable of producing and determining the value of commodities.⁴⁹ Political economy is reproached by Marx precisely for its inability to recognize labor as social labor.⁵⁰ This shortcoming becomes evident when, renouncing its attempt to establish the standard of value in precious metals, political economy turns instead toward labor. It is amidst general confusion that labor is cast in the role of a central concept, and Benjamin Franklin, one of the first—after Petty—to have reduced value to labor and, as such, the founder of classical political economy, confuses real labor with social labor.

The distinction between real labor and abstract labor, founding the latter on the basis of the former—a manner of founding which is none other than the transcendental genesis of the economy—on the contrary signifies for the economy the radical clarification of its fundamental concepts.

The radical clarification of the fundamental concepts of the
economy and the delimitation of its status

What is clarified, first of all, is the concept of value in its relation to the definitive formulation of the being of labor. It is real labor that creates use-value; it is abstract labor that creates exchange-value.⁵¹ Inasmuch as it is both use-value and exchange-value, the commodity refers to these two essentially different and heterogeneous forms of labor, relating in its materiality to real labor and in its economic value to social labor.⁵² Because real labor differs ontologically from social labor, just as use-value differs substantially from exchange-value, the relation of real labor to its product has nothing to do with the relation of abstract labor to value. Here, in the rigor of phenomenological evidence, is revealed the source of the illusion according to which Marx is held to have retained in his economic analysis the conceptual underpinnings by means of which Hegel himself had sketched out, as early as 1803, the philosophical interpretation of the thesis of the English school. This concerns notably the interpretation of the concept of labor as objectification. The conservation of this concept in Marx’s subsequent work concerns abstract labor alone, more precisely, its relation to what is found to be created by it, namely exchange-value. Exchange-value—and it alone—must be said to be the objectification of labor, which, precisely because it refers back to this value, is no more than—and can be no more than—abstract, general, ideal, irreal labor, as is strikingly demonstrated by this text in the Grundrisse: “The objectification of the general, social character of labor ... is precisely what makes the product of labor time into exchange value; this is what gives the commodity the attributes of money.” And a few lines further on, Marx says that “money is labor time in the form of a general object, or the objectification of general labor time, labor time as a general commodity.”⁵³

One may still have some doubt as to the legitimacy of using the concept of objectification to characterize the relation between labor and value. Understood in this way, objectification, at any rate, has already lost its Hegelian signification. For Hegel, labor is objectified in the sense in which mind is objectified, in the sense of a real power which itself accomplishes the act of objectification, which carries itself into the domain of objectivity and, above all, establishes objectivity as such. But social labor is not real and has no power. Moreover, it is not labor which is objectified but its “general, social character.” Now, the “general, social character of labor,” consequently abstract labor, is only a representation in the sense of a cogitatum, not in the sense of a power of representation. The “objectification” of social labor in exchange-value is thus only the representation of a representation. This is why, instead of speaking of the objectification of social labor, it is better to say, as Marx himself does most often, that social labor “is represented” in the value of the commodity.

It is true that Marx uses a similar expression in relation to real labor, of which it is said that it is presented in the product.⁵⁴ The reason is precisely that the relation of real labor to its product can no longer be subsumed under the Hegelian schema. Fundamentally different from the relation between social labor and value, the relation which unfolds on the level of irreality and which is only the representation by a representation—value—of an initial representation—abstract labor as the representation of real labor—the relation of the latter, of real praxis, to what it actually produces is by no means an objectification because, since it is of its essence subjective and incapable of being anything other than subjective, praxis, precisely, cannot objectify itself but can only transform the product it confronts in the internal tension of organic subjectivity. It is the result of labor that is objective, not the living labor itself which is and remains subjective, as this decisive text affirms: “. . . labor time as subject corresponds as little to the general labor time which determines exchange values as the particular commodities and products correspond to it as object.”⁵⁵ This is stated no less explicitly in another, equally essential passage which establishes in turn that the product—the commodity—is the result of real labor, of the temporal process of praxis and not this process itself: (1) “it [the commodity] is not labor time as labor time, but materialized labor time; labor time not in the form of motion, but at rest; not in the form of the process, but of the result”— that, distinct from the temporal process of real praxis, it nevertheless results from this process and not from abstract labor, which, as a mere representation, as an ideal determination, is, precisely, incapable of producing anything at all; (2) “. . . it [the commodity] is not the objectification of labor time in general, which exists only as a conception (it is only a conception of labor separated from its quality, subject merely to quantitative variations), but rather the specific result of a specific, of a naturally specified, kind of labor which differs quantitatively from other kinds. . . .”⁵⁶

The radical clarification of the relation of labor to the commodity renders this decisive form of economic alienation intelligible; Marx called this alienation the making into a thing, or the reification, of social relations, namely their transformation into relations between things. The ambiguity of Marx’s problematic is tied here to the fact that he denounces this reification at one and the same time (thereby contradicting himself) as a scandal and as an illusion: if it is an illusion, then the scandal is merely an apparent one. The illusion is that in their circulation commodities seem to be exchanged by virtue of their own inherent qualities. It is gold itself or iron which demands opposite itself a given quantity of tea or of cloth. “Exchange-value thus appears to be a social determination of use-values, a determination which is proper to them as things and in consequence of which they are able in definite proportions to take one another’s place in the exchange process. . . .”⁵⁷ In fact, as we know, if commodities are exchanged in a definite proportion, this is not by virtue of their natural properties, as use-values, but because they represent equal labor-times. The relation of commodities, which seems to be a relation between things, is in reality a relation between the different kinds of labor that produced them and, consequently, between the individuals who performed this labor. It is in this way that the material relation connecting use-values presents only an appearance of another type of relation, the economic relation of exchange-values, which is only a social relation, that of the different kinds of labor which these values represent. The social relation is thus concealed within a relation between things. “Although it is thus correct to say”—as did Galiani—“that exchange-value is a relation between persons, it is however necessary to add that it is a relation hidden by a material veil.”⁵⁸ To the extent that it substitutes the world of things for the world of persons, this disguise appears as a scandal. The 1844 text—“The devaluation of the human world grows in direct proportion to the increase in value of the world of things”⁵⁹—seems to find an echo in this protest of The Critique of Political Economy: “Only the conventions of our everyday life make it appear commonplace and ordinary that social relations of production should assume the shape of things, so that the relations into which people enter in the course of their work appear as the relations of things to one another and of things to people.”⁶⁰

Whatever the importance of this disguise and of the illusions to which it gives rise—for example, those of the monetary system⁶¹—it should not be forgotten, however, that this is no more than an illusion, than an erroneous way of representing things to oneself which changes nothing with regard to their real essence. Now if an illusion such as this, which is purely theoretical, in fact defines the error from a scientific point of view, it cannot constitute a real alienation. Increasing the value of the world of things and devaluing the world of men is thus only an appearance, tied to our perception. And if it is stated that the task of science is precisely to correct this perception and to reestablish scientific truth in opposition to it and to the ideology of the classical economy which it produces, by eliminating the illusion this truth also eliminates alienation, and the world of exchange is justified.

The situation, in fact, is the following. The exchange of commodities is, it is true, only that of the different kinds of labor which produced them. Everyone knows this to be the case despite the appearance that commodities themselves circulate.⁶² Science establishes the truth of this suspicion. An identity exists between the relation of commodities and that of different kinds of labor, and affirming this relation is merely a tautology.⁶³ But a tautology is neither an illusion nor a disguise; even less is it capable of constituting something like the process of real alienation. The fact is, therefore, that illusion, disguise, alienation do not dwell within the relation between social labor and exchange-value, a tautological relation, but are situated in advance of it, in a domain out of which this relation proceeds, in a process which makes this relation possible. Alienation is not internal to the system of exchange, it belongs to its genealogy and is identical with it. It is to the extent that different kinds of real labor and, consequently, the relation between persons, have previously been alienated in social labor, considered homogeneous and defined quantitatively, that they are capable of being alienated in the equivalent of this labor, in the value of commodities, and of taking on the aspect of a relation between things. “... it is a characteristic feature of labor which posits exchange-value that it causes the social relations of individuals to appear in the perverted form of a social relation between things.”⁶⁴ Reification is not originally the objectification of social labor in commodities: social labor is already objective, it is an ideal meaning, “so many hours of socially necessary labor,” and the value of the commodity is nothing other than this meaning. Reification secretly refers to the prior process in which real labor was transformed into social labor. It does not constitute the becoming of reality but the abstraction in which reality has been lost. It is only inasmuch as reality has originally been lost that it can take on the form of a thing. It is only because, in the mystification upon which the system of exchange is built, subjective praxis has become abstract social labor that the real practical relations between persons can become the relations of this labor to itself, the relations of commodities between themselves. Capital relates in a concise manner how the substitution of the relation between products for that between producers finds its condition in the abstraction of social labor. “The equality of all sorts of human labor is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labor-power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labor; and finally, the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labor affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products.”⁶⁵

In determining social labor and value as abstractions, the transcendental genesis of the economy rigorously defines the “economic” in its pure state. What is established is, first of all, that far from opposing one another, as subject and object or as reality and its representation, economic labor and value are ontologically identical and are situated on the same plane of existence, namely that, precisely, of abstraction, of irreality, and of ideality. It is the status of abstract labor which determines that of value, but it is with respect to the latter that the status of the “economic” is, first and foremost and most often, brought to light in Marx’s work. The ideality of value is itself made evident by the opposition which is continually asserted between value and the material reality of the product. “. . . the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value-relation between the products of labor which stamp them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties.”⁶⁶ It is because it is opposed to the material content of the commodity that the value is termed a form. The form of value must then be clearly distinguished from the form of the product, which is only a determination of its reality and, as such, something material like it. The formal character of value as it is opposed to the material content of commodities or, again, to their “natural form” is, on the contrary, something ideal, as one sees in the case of prices or of money, which is precisely one of the forms in which the value form attains the pure expression of itself: “The price or money-form of commodities is, like their form of value generally, . . . a purely ideal or mental form.”⁶⁷ “The value of the commodity,” Marx again states, “is different from the commodity itself.”⁶⁸ This opposition between the form of value and the content of the commodity is so thoroughgoing that it actually constitutes value as such: “. . . through just this separation from its substance, it collapses into itself and tends away from the sphere of simple exchange value. . . .”⁶⁹ Becoming value only by being separated from the substance of the commodity, value no longer carries anything material within itself; all natural determinations are foreign to it. “[Torn] free from the commodity,” it appears as “a metaphysical, insubstantial quality,” in Sismondi’s words as they are quoted by Marx,⁷⁰ who himself declares in Capital: “The value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition.”⁷¹

Now, the immateriality of value is not a simple property it would possess for one knows not what reason, a factitious determination that one must merely note. This is an operative characteristic, the principle of its action, its raison d’etre. Because it is radically opposed to the substance of the commodity, the form of value is indifferent with regard to the latter and can, while remaining identical to itself, subsume under itself any content whatsoever. Concerning money, which represents the pure form of value, the Grundrisse comment on “. . . the indifference of value towards the particular form of use value which it assumes, and at the same time its metamorphosis into all these forms, which appear, however, merely as disguises.”⁷² But the metamorphosis of value into the numerous use-values in which it is successively embodied is nothing more than the circulation of commodities, than exchange: exchange has its condition in the indifference of value with respect to the substance of the product. The ontological heterogeneity separating the use-value and the exchange-value does not belong to a sphere of philosophical considerations that are obsolete, external to the properly economic or scientific analysis, in short, of no interest; rather, it defines the internal possibility of the market economy and is only a new way of formulating its transcendental genesis, as is expressed once again by this innocent statement: “Trade has robbed things, pieces of wealth, of their primitive character of usefulness. . . .”⁷³

Inasmuch as value is opposed to the material properties of commodities, it possesses its own peculiar mode of existence, “purely economic” existence.⁷⁴ We know what this purely economic existence is: it is the ideal representation of a specific quantity of abstract labor; it is the ideal representation of an ideal reality. This is why, in the doubly ideal existence of value, there is not a single particle of matter, because “the value of commodities has a purely social reality; and . . . they acquire this reality only in so far as they are expressions or embodiments of one identical social substance, viz., human labor.”⁷⁵ In this way the being of the “social thing,” that is, the product transformed into value in the commodity, is fully elucidated: “the products of labor become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses.”⁷⁶

How are the thing which is perceptible by the senses, and insubstantial, “metaphysical,” or, yet again, “social” value related to one another in order to constitute the commodity? How does an ideal or categorial relation refer in general to its material “basis”? By adding itself on to it by means of a synthetic relation which leaves it unaffected in its reality. This ideal relation, namely the representation of a specific quantity of abstract labor, alone makes the thing that it subsumes under itself become a social thing, alone makes it enter into the realm of the economy and participate in it. To the question: “How is use-value transformed into commodity?” is replied: “. . . the use value of the commodity is a given presupposition—the material basis in which a specific economic relation presents itself. It is only this specific relation which stamps the use value as a commodity.”⁷⁷ Because the economic relation is purely ideal, the manner in which it determines reality is defined rigorously: a determination such as this is contingent, accidental; it could just as easily not occur, just as the universe of material things could exist without the things in it ever having to be counted. This is what Marx means when he repeats that the market economy is only an historical and transitory system, that it is certainly possible but that it could very well never have occurred, just as it is possible that within one family the various members sell their labor or its results to one another, although this is not the rule for all family life in general.⁷⁸

The dissociation of economic properties and reality presents an absolutely general signification and invites us to establish an essential difference between the material process and the economic process of production. The real or material process of production is the transformation of nature into use-values. It is an activity of life stemming from need and directed toward making everything homogeneous with this need. This real process of production has existed since the dawn of history; it is the transcendental condition of its possibility and its reality, and this is why it is immanent to history and reappears in each of its stages. “. . . the labor process ... is common to all forms of production.”⁷⁹ This is why this real process is present in capitalism: “Capital becomes the process of production through the incorporation of labor into capital; initially however, it becomes the material process of production; the process of production in general, so that the process of the production of capital is not distinct from the material process of production as such.”⁸⁰ Insofar as the process of production which is realized in capitalism is a material process, we can find in it the elements of every real process, namely, matter which is worked on, the instrument, and, finally, labor itself. “Originally, when we examined the development of value into capital, the labor process was simply included within capital, and, as regards its physical conditions, its material presence, capital appeared as the totality of the conditions of this process, and correspondingly sorted itself out into certain qualitatively different parts, material of labor, means of labor and living labor. On one side, capital was divided into these three elements in accordance with its material composition. . . .”⁸¹ Marx categorically asserts this once again: “capital presupposes: 1) the production process in general, such as is common to all social conditions, that is, without historic character, human, if you like.”⁸²

If, however, the real process of production is present within capitalism, the latter is by no means reduced to the former; instead it differs from it in an essential way, to the extent that it superimposes on this initial process something quite different from it, an economic process. The real process produces real objects, use-values. The economic process produces exchange-values, it produces value as such and for itself. This is why the productivity of the second process has nothing to do with that of the first; it concerns neither the production of use-values nor the increase of this production. Its sole role lies in the production and increase of value; it is a process of realization.⁸³ This is also why the material differences present within the real process of production—the material of labor, the means of labor, and living labor—are effaced in the process of realization in favor of new differences which are properly economic and tied to the essence and to the teleology of this process. After speaking of the three elements of the real process, Marx adds: “But this material side—or, its character as use value and as real process—did not at all coincide with its formal side.”⁸⁴ This non-coincidence is at the same time a recomposition, and it consists in the fact that the material determinations of the real process are, in capital, no more than fractions of the latter, quantitative determinations of value situated within the process of realization and subordinated to it. It is in this way that the means of labor becomes something quite different from a physical system organized for the manufacture of a certain number of objects: a certain portion of capital, a certain quantity of value, possessing its own peculiar characteristics, characteristics that belong to value and obey its laws, the great law of realization that defines capital “. . . as fixed capital.”⁸⁵

But what is true for the means of labor which has become fixed capital is also true of all the other material elements of the real process: raw materials, auxiliary materials, and, even more so, living labor have lost their primitive character and are now nothing more than economic elements, moments in the destiny of capital.⁸⁶ Then the economic reality appears in its formal purity, a reality composed solely of values and as such foreign to the materiality of the process and to its elements.⁸⁷ This presumes, precisely, that all the material elements of the process of production have been converted into economic elements, that for them has been substituted their value, and that the result of the process, which has become economic, is no longer the product but a new value, the sum of all the values involved in this process and superior to them.

The difference between the real process and the economic process, and the indifference of the latter with respect to the former, can easily be seen in the following examples. Let us assume that as a result of an increase in productivity, which constitutes a real determination of concrete labor, this labor produces in the same lapse of time a quantity of use-values double that previously produced. The social wealth, if by this we understand the actual material wealth, that which consists precisely in use-values, has doubled. But the economic wealth, namely the value produced by this same labor, has not changed, for it is measured by the labor-time, which, precisely, has remained the same. Inversely, “if some factor were to cause the productivity of all types of labor to fall in equal degree, thus requiring the same proportion of additional labor for the production of all commodities, then the value of all commodities would rise, the actual expression of their exchange-value remaining unchanged, and the real wealth of society would decrease, since the production of the same quantity of use-values would require a larger amount of labor-time.”⁸⁸

Marx stressed a number of times the paradoxical character of the relation between real wealth and economic wealth, namely its contingency, the fact that real wealth can diminish while economic wealth increases or, on the contrary, that real wealth can increase while economic wealth decreases. Such was the case at the time of the “misery of agricultural overproduction, recorded in French history,” which showed that “the mere increase of products does not increase their value.”⁸⁹ Now despite this contingency, this is not a mere accident but a rigorous eidetic law which governs the correlative development of economic wealth and real wealth and which determines their relation as an inverse relation. Marx formulates this law on two different occasions: “In general, the greater the productiveness of labor, the less is the labor-time required for the production of an article, the less is the amount of labor crystallised in that article, and the less is its value; and vice versa, the less the productiveness of labor, the greater is the labor-time required for the production of an article, and the greater is its value.”⁹⁰ And again in Wages, Price and Profit: “The values of commodities are directly as the times of labor employed in their production, and are inversely as the productive powers of the labor employed.”⁹¹ At the moment when Marx’s analysis reveals to us for the first time this blatant contradiction between real wealth, which is displayed through the number and the quality of the products, and on the other hand, their value, let us immediately make the decisive remark that this is not an economic contradiction, inherent in the economic world and belonging to it, finding therein its origin as well as, doubtless, its solution: it is, instead, a contradiction between the economy and something else, between the economy and reality, between the economy and life.

Superimposed on the eidetic law governing the contradictory relation between real wealth and economic wealth is an historical law which itself is also rooted in life and which expresses the spontaneous development of real praxis: precisely because real praxis continues to develop, its efficiency, what is called the productivity of labor, constantly increases. The determination of the eidetic relation between real wealth and economic wealth by the historical law of the development of praxis is then clear. It is not enough simply to say apodictically: “an increased quantity of material wealth may correspond to a simultaneous fall in the magnitude of its value”;⁹² one must add: historically this has been the case. This is why, describing the astounding progress of capitalist production due to the increase in productivity in the various branches of production, Book Three of Capital shows that “the same amount of value represents a progressively increasing mass of use-values and enjoyments.”⁹³

The implications of this historical-essential situation are numerous; their systematic development is nothing other than the analysis of the economy in its entirety. For the moment, we shall limit ourselves to tentative remarks which, nonetheless, all display the fundamental gap that separates the level of the economy from that of reality. The increase in the productivity of real labor continually results in the decrease in the value of its product. But this productivity is not the same everywhere. The person who continues to use traditional means sees the value of his product measured not by his own labor, by real labor, but by the labor that could have or should have been performed with the help of the most modern methods. The difference between real labor and economic labor assumes its full meaning when it is seen that only economic labor enters into account in economic production. We know the situation of the English weaver when the hand loom was replaced by the steam-powered loom. Working with the old loom, it thereafter took twice as much time to produce the same value, seventeen to eighteen hours a day instead of nine to ten hours!⁹⁴ Here again, it is not a matter of a circumstantial difficulty but of the application of a law, namely the law of the antinomic relation between the economy and reality as it is both actualized and overdetermined in the historical movement of praxis. A law such as this does not simply result in the ruin of the “poor weaver”; it determines the entire economy. For example, it determines the fate of fixed capital, whose cycle of rotation is no longer predictable since it is no longer related to the wear on machinery but to the future invention and the installation of improved means which will thereby reduce the value of the products in equal proportion and will lead to abandoning the old machines. The essential law of capital, the tendency toward lower profits, will itself be over-determined by the contradictory relation between the real process and the economic process.

Just when the immense role it will play in the internal determination of capitalism becomes apparent, this contradictory relation between economy and life must be carried back to its source and perceived therein. Its source is to be found in the very principle of their initial difference, the distinction between economic labor and real labor, against the backdrop of the abstraction of the former starting from the latter. At the same time as it founds exchange, this distinction explains the decisive division in the process of production, a division by virtue of which the real process will henceforth always be found to be accompanied by an economic process which will enter into conflict with it, so that two processes will then unfold conjointly but separately, each obeying its own principle and the results determined by it, so that the growth of economic wealth and of real wealth are thereafter distinct and even opposed to one another. A fundamental text in Capital unequivocally designates the initial distinction between real labor and economic labor as the principle of the distinction between the two processes. It is due to the abstract character of economic labor in relation to real labor that the actual properties of real labor, which, like it, are real—in particular, its productivity—no longer appear in abstract labor or in the process of realization that it determines. This is why this economic process, oblivious to the essential determinations of the real process, thereafter continues in monstrous indifference with regard to the real process and to reality: the break between the economy and life, the possibility of their conflictual development, which capitalism demonstrates, is thus founded “. . . an increased quantity of material wealth may correspond to a simultaneous fall in the magnitude of its value. This antagonistic movement has its origin in the two-fold character of labor. . . . Useful labor becomes, therefore, a more or less abundant source of products, in proportion to the rise or fall of its productiveness. On the other hand, no change in this productiveness affects the labor represented by value. Since productive power is an attribute of the concrete useful forms of labor, of course it can no longer have any bearing on that labor, so soon as we make abstraction from those concrete useful forms. However then productive power may vary, the same labor, exercised during equal periods of time, always yields equal amounts of value.”⁹⁵

The dissociation opposing the real process to the economic process against the backdrop of their different and contradictory principles—real labor, abstract labor; real products, the value of the products—is at one and the same time the dissociation inherent in the commodity which splits it into its opposing elements, since the commodity is both a real product and an exchange-value and since in it the difference between these two terms is only the result of a duality of the principles of the two processes found in the market economy, real praxis on the one hand and its abstract, ideal representation as social labor on the other.⁹⁶ This duality can remain hidden under the appearance of the commodity to the extent that the latter contains both aspects within it—and we shall see that the “fetishism” of which Marx speaks is the result of being misled by this appearance and of confusing thoroughly the economic properties with the real properties that accompany them—the elements that merge together in the commodity are dissociated in the process of circulation, when exchange is nothing but this sort of process. Originally the exchange-value of commodities is, as we have seen, only a mediation which allows the exchange of products, and this continues to obey the teleology of life. Only, it then happens that the traders, in order to fix the proportion according to which two products will be exchanged, represent to themselves the amount of labor contained in each of these products and, in the same stroke, determine the exchange-value.⁹⁷ The exchange-value is indeed here a representation of labor, but it continues to be tied to the material substance of the product in the sense that the sole aim is to allow its use. Due to this explicit teleological subordination to use-value, exchange-value, despite its ideal character, has no existence independent of the former. In the circulation of commodities, on the contrary, when the figure M-C-M is substituted for the figure C-M-C, when it is no longer a matter of ceding one commodity in order to obtain another but of selling, of ceding a commodity in exchange for money, the exchange-value of the commodity becomes the goal of the process; or again, as Marx says, its formal existence becomes its content. “The exchange of material is the content of C-M-C, whereas the real content of the second circuit, M-C-M, is the commodity in the form in which it emerges from the first circuit.”⁹⁸

Every sale, C-M, it is true, is at the same time a purchase, M-C, for someone else. But nothing obliges the person who has sold something to buy; this is why “if the split between the sale and the purchase becomes too pronounced, the intimate connection between them, their oneness, asserts itself by producing— a crisis.”⁹⁹ In any event, once he has sold and before buying the seller holds money in his hands in place of the commodity. Then, the exchange-value is no longer bound to the material substance of the commodity but exists for itself: “The golden chrysalis state forms an independent phase in the life of the commodity, in which it can remain for a shorter or a longer period.”¹⁰⁰ Between the sale and the purchase, therefore, the formal existence of value—the ideal representation of abstract labor—exists for itself and this existence for-itself of the formal existence of exchange-value is money. “In money the medium of exchange becomes a thing, or, the exchange value of the thing achieves an independent existence apart from the thing.”¹⁰¹ The existence for-itself of the exchange-value in opposition to its existence as still synthetically bound to the substance of the commodity remains visible when money takes the form of gold. Unlike an ordinary commodity, gold is not a substance, a use-value that would possess a particular exchange-value; it is itself the exchange-value and the metal substance is only the support for this value.¹⁰²

The existence for-itself of the exchange-value as it is realized in money, outside of the commodity, creates a new contradiction within the market economy. Or rather, this contradiction shifts: it is no longer based within the commodity itself, between its use-value and its exchange-value, but since the exchange-value has acquired an autonomous form, the contradiction is now found between the commodity itself and this form which has been separated from it, between the commodity and money, between the commodity and its price. The price, which was only the index of the product’s exchange-value and which allowed it, precisely, to be exchanged, which thus remained within the sphere of commodities as a function enabling the exchange-value to be realized, takes on a new form in money, a form external and foreign to this sphere, a form by which all commodities will henceforth be compared. It is no longer a matter of knowing how one commodity will be exchanged for another; it is a matter of knowing if the commodity can be exchanged for money. The price, money, is the end; the commodity is only a means to obtain it, a means that has lost its value and that is, ultimately, without any significance if it cannot realize its aim. This is also why, as soon as money is offered for the commodity, as soon as the commodity can be sold, it has to be sold right away, for in this way it realizes the exchange-value for which it represents only a means or a predicate.¹⁰³

The realization of exchange-value in a form external to the commodity creates a paradoxical situation. For the exchange-value is nothing but the exchangeability of commodities. When the exchange-value becomes autonomous, it is therefore its own exchangeability which is separated from the commodity. “By existing outside the commodity as money, the exchangeability of the commodity has become something different from and alien to the commodity. . . .”¹⁰⁴ But when the exchangeability has become alien to the commodity, then the exchange of the commodity is contingent and depends upon external, chance circumstances.¹⁰⁵ To take the case of two commodities, leaving aside their qualitative differences, their exchange-value was the common element by which they were said to be equal, by which they became equivalent and could be exchanged. However, when this exchange-value becomes autonomous as money, it is no longer the internal element common to both commodities but represents, above and beyond them, a third thing which each of them confronts separately.¹⁰⁶ When the exchange-value is no longer the value of the commodity but, as money, a third thing separate from it, the identity between the commodity and its value, between the commodity and money, vanishes, and the two parts of exchange, purchase and sale, no longer balance one another. “Since these have now achieved a spatially and temporally separate and mutually indifferent form of existence, their immediate identity ceases. They may correspond or not; they may balance or not. . . .”¹⁰⁷

Such is the paradox of the market economy: when exchange is its own value and its own aim, it is, precisely, no longer possible. There is really nothing mysterious about this, for it is the faithful expression of the becoming-for-itself of the exchange-value above and beyond the commodity. “The rise of exchange [commerce] as an independent function torn away from the exchangers corresponds to the rise of exchange value as an independent entity, as money, torn away from products.”¹⁰⁸ This means that there is no relation between use-values that are qualitatively defined and adapted to the needs of life and an autonomous ideal existence that claims to possess value and whose value is intrinsic. Or, rather, the only relation that remains is the perverted relation characterizing the market economy, the inverse relation of use-value and exchange-value. When the exchange-value of the commodity exists outside it, this inverse relation becomes that between the commodity and money and it is expressed as follows: it is no longer money which represents the commodity; it is the commodity which represents money. This inversion exists whenever the commodity has a price, whenever its formal existence as the exchange-value is separated from the commodity.¹⁰⁹ The antagonistic distinction between the commodity and money is, in fact, only the result of the prior distinction between use-value and exchange-value. Consequently, the more the exchange-value frees itself, the more it becomes the aim of production, and, correlatively, the more the immediate exchange of products is eliminated in favor of the circulation of commodities,¹¹⁰ the more the problems created by money increase along with the contradictions between money and commodities.¹¹¹ However, because money is only “exchange-value which has assumed an independent existence,”¹¹² because it is the exchange-value that creates money, it is useless to want to resolve monetary problems or contradictions on their own level or even to claim to eliminate money or to replace it with coupons representing labor, as long as the process of abstraction of exchange-value on the basis of use-value continues.¹¹³ However, abstracting the exchange-value from the use-value is itself only the result of abstracting social labor from real praxis and the original alienation of praxis in social labor. With regard to the “universal alienation of commodities” in the pure form of their exchange-value, Capital says: “[Gold] became real money, by the general alienation of commodities, by actually changing places with their natural forms as useful objects, and thus becoming in reality the embodiment of their values. When they assume this money-shape, commodities strip off every trace of their natural use-value, and of the particular kind of labor to which they owe their creation, in order to transform themselves into the uniform socially recognized incarnation of homogeneous human labor.”¹¹⁴ Alone, the transcendental gaze which examines the genesis of the economy as the common genesis of social labor and of exchange-value holds within its field of vision the totality of economic and social characteristics along with the reason for their “contradiction.”

The transcendental genesis of the economy allows us to understand in retrospect the famous text on money in the third Economic and Philosophical Manuscript of 1844. The reign of money is described more than analyzed here it would seem, and the concept of alienation that governs this romantic description inspired by Shakespeare bears within it all of the anthropological, even the ideological, defects of the young Marx. It must first of all be noted, however, that the term “alienation” has exactly the meaning it will possess in Chapter III of Capital and designates purely and simply the exchange of commodities, understood nonetheless as a universal and unlimited possibility, as the fact that anything at all can be exchanged for anything else. Money, which in the third manuscript is already said to be “the existing and active concept of value,” is precisely the condition of this universal and monstrous possibility; this is why it “confounds and exchanges everything, it is the universal confusion and exchange of all things, an inverted world.”¹¹⁵ Echoing this text, the Grundrisse will in turn state: “The exchangeability of all products, activities and relations with a third, objective entity which can be re-exchanged for everything without distinction—that is, the development of exchange values (and of money relations) is identical with universal venality, corruption. Universal prostitution. . . .”¹¹⁶ What characterizes the third manuscript, however, is that the things whose universal exchange is allowed by money, money in which all things are confused, are neither principally nor first of all the products of labor, commodities, but instead the modalities of individual life itself the determinations of subjectivity. And it is for this reason alone, because it claims to act as the exchange of existences themselves, in what they have that is most intimate and most personal, that the world of money appears as an “inverted world.” The confusion and the exchange that are realized in money are, in the text we are commenting on, “the confusion and the exchange of all natural and human qualities.”¹¹⁷ The first condition allowing money to realize the exchange of subjective determinations is that these be no longer defined or determined by subjectivity, of which they are the determinations, but, precisely, by money. “That which exists for me through the medium of money, that which I pay for, i.e. which money can buy, that am I, the possessor of the money. The stronger the power of my money, the stronger am I. The properties of money are my, the possessor’s, properties and essential powers. Therefore what I am and what I can do is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy the most beautiful woman. Which means to say that I am not ugly. . . .”¹¹⁸ It then appears that, finally, money is no longer the exchange of commodities, of things, but indeed the exchange of the determinations of subjectivity and of life itself. “It transforms loyalty into treason, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, nonsense into reason and reason into nonsense.” It is then that the text’s Shakespearean romanticism is given free reign: “Can it [money] not bind and loose all bonds? Is it therefore not the universal means of separation? It is the true agent of separation and the true cementing agent, it is the chemical power of society”; “. . . it is the power which brings together impossibilities and forces contradictions to embrace.” “Shakespeare brings out two properties of money in particular: 1) It is the visible divinity, the transformation of all human and natural qualities into their opposites, the universal confusion and inversion of all things; it brings together impossibilities. 2) It is the universal whore, the universal pimp of men and peoples.”

Marx opposes to this the original real situation in which each determination of subjectivity is what it is, and is such by reason of what this subjectivity is itself, a situation in which what each person is depends on him: “If we assume man to be man, and his relation to the world to be a human one, then love can be exchanged only for love, trust for trust and so on. If you wish to enjoy art you must be an artistically educated person; if you wish to exercise influence on other men you must be the sort of person who has a truly stimulating and encouraging effect on others. Each one of your relations to man—and to nature—must be a particular expression . . . of your real individual life.”¹¹⁹

The exchange of subjective determinations which makes the exchange the “universal . . . inversion of things” and money, in Shakespeare’s words, “the common whore of mankind” is, however, not something different from the simple exchange of commodities but its condition, if it is true that the exchange of commodities is only the exchange of different kinds of real labor, that is, precisely, the exchange of the subjective determinations of living praxis. Shakespearean romanticism is the transcendental truth of the market economy. The alienation of commodities appears to designate their transformation into one another, the fact that x cA is changed into y cB. “Alienation” here is only a throwback to the Hegelian terminology, a philosophical, pretentious, and uselessly complicated way of describing this very simple process. Nevertheless, inasmuch as the exchange of commodities is but that of the subjective determinations of praxis, it presupposes the alienation of these determinations, the transcendental process which, by substituting for the latter the objective quantitative determinations of alienated labor, founds this exchange and the market economy in general. Marx shows that alienation, understood in general as the alienation of life in the economy, is concentrated in the decisive event within which labor itself becomes a commodity. But the event in which labor becomes a commodity is no different from that in which commodities themselves are created. Labor becomes a commodity when abstract labor is formed, a process which founds the economy and which determines it as an abstract reality, which enables us to understand what this abstract reality is in its utter ontological insufficiency—precisely, an abstraction—and, in addition, what it is that constitutes its reality, the reality of economic reality.