Abstract
Wolf investigates the consequences of the missing elaboration of the reproduction of labour power for the enlarged reproduction of capital. The issue of the forms of reproduction of labour power, which Marx skipped in his drafts for Volume II, raises issues of both gender and ecology for an adequate analysis of the comprehensive reproduction process of capital in Volume III. This leads him to identify a deeper absence of ‘living labour’ in Marx’s dialectical presentation of the forms of reproduction of capital, as it dominates modern societies. The missing elaboration of the cycle of metamorphoses undergone by variable capital and labour power is reconstructed on the level of Marx’s analysis of the metamorphoses of capital (Volume II), on that of the comprehensive process of capital (Volume III), as well as in the transition to the economic surface of the trinity formula (a largely unwritten final chapter). This absence is simultaneously regarded as a symptom of the specific concentration of Marx’s critique of political economy on issues of economics, and of the need to supplement his reconstruction of the comprehensive process of capital leading to his reconstruction of the economic surface of modern capitalist societies by other dimensions of material reproduction, as in the dimensions of gender, of ecology, and geography. This leads to the idea of supplementing the critique of political economy with other critiques following its paradigm but not dependent on it.
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Notes
- 1.
Particularly the ‘incompleteness’ with regard to the tendency of the profit rate, as argued by Böhm-Bawerk and Bortkiewicz (see especially the debates triggered by Sraffa’s treatment of the issue, Gehrke and Kurz 2006), which has basically been shown to be based upon an artificial construction (Hecker 1997, 121f; Steinvorth 1977).
- 2.
While others appear overly driven by a desire to ‘disprove Marx’, like Shortall 1994.
- 3.
Underlining this does not imply downgrading Marx’s theory to a mere narrative, nor following the desperate attempts to salvage the ‘orthodox Marxism’ of the Third International by postulating a historico-systematic reading of Capital (such as Holzkamp 1974 or Haug 1973): it merely suggests the historical limitations of the validity of the systematic critique of political economy, which evidently does not apply as such to pre-modern structures of domination and exploitation.
- 4.
This has occasioned a theoretically challenging albeit misleading debate over whether ‘labour power’ can really be construed to be a commodity like all others (see, for example, Gintis and Bowles 1981).
- 5.
With regard to which Marx demonstrated an impressive visionary force (see Saito, chapter “Profit, Elasticity and Nature” in this book).
- 6.
To which Marx has been, I think, unduly restricted in the reconstruction of the ecological dimension of his critique of political economy by the mainstream of Marxian ‘political ecology’ as has emerged thus far (see Castree 2015 for the Anglophone debate), represented by Paul Burkett, Jean-Paul Deléage and John Bellamy Foster.
- 7.
These ‘metamorphoses of capital’ have been so little discussed that Timo Hein, in a book of the same title (Heim 2013), feels able to use this word in a different sense, referring to historical changes in the overall functioning of modern, capitalist-bourgeois societies. In the East German debate, the ‘forgotten’ problematics of the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production were forcefully rearticulated by Helmut Steiner (Steiner 1985, 2016), although he did not recognise the specific importance and forms of the reproduction of labour power.
- 8.
However, see below for the diverse ‘options’ available to capital in acquiring the workforce it requires.
- 9.
I delivered a first sketch of these metamorphoses lacking from Volume II of Capital in a debate with Wolfgang Fritz and Frigga Haug (Crome et al. 2002).
- 10.
See the important debates initiated by Braverman and Buroway.
- 11.
This category is marked by a structural conflict between the workers’ claim to have their labour power back ‘undamaged’ and the capitalists’ claim to make use of their purchased commodity as much as possible. In order to rationalise this conflict a number of specialised practices and investigations have developed, beginning more or less with the development of ‘labour law’ (Edelman 1973).
- 12.
Which is ordinarily the family, with important implications in the dimension of the gendered unequal ‘division of labour’. This, however, is not necessarily so: strictly individual models—with all goods and services needed for the reproduction of labour power acquired on the market—can also be imagined, while, on the other hand, communal or even public intervention models are possible in this respect, and have historically been the object of important struggles.
- 13.
For brevity’s sake, I avoid discussing the inter-generational reproduction of the workforce, which Marx addresses under the restrictive label of the reproduction of ‘Ersatzmänner’. This evidently implies sex and gender, as well as ecological relations and geographical positioning (migration!) of the real human individuals constituting the said workforce. In methodological terms, I am convinced that the problematics this raises are the same as the ones raised by the reproduction cycle of the individual labour power.
- 14.
We could describe this as the full sum of capital reproduced in its metamorphoses, then, dividing into ‘constant’ and ‘variable’ capital, and, finally, in the process of its reproduction, returning to its owners to be divided again into income generated, and investment into C and V, and so on.
- 15.
We are not on the concrete level here, grounding our perspective, again, from Volume III of Capital, where we cannot talk about actually existing individuals, but are dealing with individual instances of a theoretically reconstructed ‘ideal average’.
- 16.
See Bernhard Blanke’s presentation in Heinelt, where he postulates a ‘mediation’ between ‘a systematic analysis of the anatomy of bourgeois society, [i.e.] of the reproduction process of capital [i.e. the object of Capital, FOW], a systematic analysis of the political system [then considered to be the task of the ‘derivation of the state’, FOW] and a systematic analysis of the reproduction of wage labour’ (Blanke 1980, p. 6). The point I am trying to make against Blanke and Heinelt (as well as against Lebowitz) is that the issue of the respective lacuna in Marx is not just a question of his unwritten book on wage labour, but can and should be taken up specifically in a modern reconstruction of Capital—not only as it is, but as it should be. The Italian tradition of operaismo, first formulated by Tronti (1966), has the advantage of avoiding philological and theoretical details, thereby referring to the class struggle of the working class as a dynamic undercurrent within Capital itself.
- 17.
Although written in a language still largely that of the specific debates on the ‘derivation of the state’ as they unfolded in West Berlin and—to a lesser degree—the Federal Republic of Germany, see the major contribution by Blanke et al. 1975a and 1975b, as well as the useful critical overview developed by Ingo Elbe (2008, pp. 319–443), which shows that these debates cannot simply be dismissed as irrelevant for appearing tied to an overly systematic reading of Marx’s theory.
- 18.
In principle, variable capital is capable of reproducing independently of any given reproduction of labour power, as long as it finds labour power ready for use on the market, as a commodity.
- 19.
It should be noted that the first definition of the value of labour power given by Marx—as entirely reproduced by the consumption of commodities, in the form of various goods and services—would result in a prohibitively high value, or in very rapid processes of incomplete reproduction of its value.
- 20.
My main criticism of her work addresses her neglect in properly distinguishing between modern and pre-modern forms of ‘patriarchal’ gender relations. These modern forms developed largely in the twentieth century (cf. footnote 23).
- 21.
- 22.
This complexity of the real situation of wage labour explains the surprising legal complexity of ‘labour law’, extending far beyond the seemingly simple structures of the ‘labour contract’ by which the capitalist, on the labour market, buys the individual labour powers he (or she) expects to need. Some of this complexity may be gleaned from George Daremas’s analysis in this book (chapter “The Social Constitution of Commodity Fetishism, Money Fetishism and Capital Fetishism”).
- 23.
Legal divorce, the abolition of all tutelage of the husband over ‘his wife’, and—only recently—the extension of marriage to same-sex couples, has been a visible step of this formal modernisation process. This process did not, however, bring about material equality of the married partners, or in the distribution of household labour (Schulze 2004).
- 24.
Not only at the domestic level but on all levels and contexts within modern society, as indicated, e.g., by the structurally distinct cosmetic expectations placed on male and of female individuals.
- 25.
Bourdieu and Passeron (1977), and the group around Althusser working on their critique, ironically coincide in neglecting these elementary, primary forms of reproduction, and concentrate on the institutionalised forms of their secondary reproduction (see, in spite of all insistence upon class struggle, the critical alternative to Bourdieu’s analysis of the school offered by Baudelot and Establet 1971).
- 26.
Marx himself uses this concept, such as in his ‘illustrations of the general law of capitalist accumulation’.
- 27.
On the model of Marx’s distinction between wage labour as an objectively mediated (sachlich vermittelt), i.e. modern, ‘structure of domination’ and personal domination or dependency (as in traditional slavery or in all kinds of feudal relations). The appeal of role theory in sociology seems to stem from the fact that it addresses the formal structure of all modern relations, as defined on the level of the ‘surface’ of modern societies by the principles of ‘Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham’ (see above). Its irremediable flaw (see Furth 1971), however, consists in its blindness to the dominational ‘depth’ characteristic of these very relations, in a way comparable to wage labour’s structural situation of being dominated and exploited by capital.
- 28.
It is important to stress here that Capital, although ‘closing the circle’ of its systematic argument by coming back, in the end, to the ‘appearing surface’, is not a closed conceptual system on the model of Hegel’s logic. On the one hand, its systematic ‘development of the concept’ is interrupted, time and again, by presentations of empirico-historical findings leaving the systematic structure of the argument; on the other hand, it remains open to additional conceptual reconstructions, which may find their place before its concluding ‘syllogism’, as in the areas of ‘interest-bearing capital’ (see Toporowski in this book—chapter “Marx’s Critical Notes on the Classical Theory of Interest”), or in the case of the modern corporation (see Toporowski and Bellofiore in this book—chapters “Marx’s Critical Notes on the Classical Theory of Interest” and “Taking Up the Challenge of Living Labour A ‘Backwards-Looking Reconstruction’ of Recent Italian Debates on Marx’s Theory of the Capitalist Mode of Production”). There is indeed room for speculation (indirectly reinforced by Saito’s findings) that the importance of this—in a way still ‘Hegelianising’—syllogistic form of Capital as a whole rapidly diminished in Marx’s eyes during his last years.
- 29.
At least on the level of exemplification, as in the chapter on the struggle for the normal working day, whereas, in general terms it should be clear that Volume I also argues under the pre-supposition of the ‘ideal average’ of the reproduction of capital, as fully articulated in Volume III.
- 30.
Which entails, on the one hand, that the very formal ‘Umschlag’ of capital—in its velocity and rhythm—also must be ‘deciphered’ in terms of class struggle, while the openness of Marx’s construction will allow the incorporation of further developments of the money form, as well as of the form of the capitalist firm (see Toporowski in this book (chapter “Marx’s Critical Notes on the Classical Theory of Interest”)).
- 31.
Not necessarily in Marx’s manuscripts or in Engels’s edited version of them, as we have them now in Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2) (for a differentiated evaluation of their status of theoretical elaboration see Bischoff et al. in this book—chapter “‘Secular Stagnation’ and the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy ”). And yet, I think it is possible to show that they should have been developed in place of the argument which I indicate here, and can be developed now as a contribution to elaborating a fully-fledged and contemporary critique of political economy taking up Marx’s pioneering but incomplete theoretical corpus.
- 32.
Referring to passages in Marx’s manuscripts, in which Marx underlines that, from the perspective of capital, the appropriation of victuals is no labour (cf. Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses, p. 30), or that ‘the consumption of the worker […] remains an aspect of the production and reproduction of capital’ (Marx 1976, p. 718).
- 33.
What Marx has been able to do within Volume I, which is constructed on the level of the ‘production of capital’ (which should not be misunderstood as anything else than an abstract moment of its complex reproduction process), although—in hindsight—not very convincingly, i.e. to delineate a perspective leading beyond the capitalist mode of production, cannot be repeated properly on the level of Volume III. Here, the class struggle emerging from ‘living labour’ is, properly speaking, ‘irrepresentable’ and, therefore, a disruptive potential to be kept under control through all kinds of ‘extra-economic’ mechanisms.
- 34.
This makes it easier to understand his arguments as contributions to ongoing debates in economics, particularly with regard to the ‘dissenting voices’ of modern economics like Schumpeter, Keynes and Kalecki, and so difficult to relate it to theorists of the non-economic dimensions of modern societies like Max Weber (see Bader et al. 1975, who attempted precisely this with considerable effort and subtlety, but less than convincing results).
- 35.
Such a programme of ‘Wissenschaftskritik’, a critical reconstruction of the relevant sciences in the field of history and society, was undertaken in various places in the twentieth century, to my knowledge most intensively in West Berlin and West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s (see the collection of essays from this wave in Klüver and Wolf 1972), as well as in France in the same period (see the present attempts at a critical renewal in France, as they look back on these developments, Haag and Lemieux 2012). Following the defeat of left-wing alternatives in Western Europe in the mid-1970s, it could not—for obvious institutional reasons—be pursued in due form and had to remain a largely unexecuted epistemological programme.
- 36.
Althusser’s intuitions in his manuscript on the ‘Reproduction of the Relations of Production’ (in Althusser 2014, pp. 1–214) seem to provide a reliable starting point, as well as first instruments for these inquiries, especially if we are aware of the unresolved internal tensions in his exposition of his theory of ideology, partially due to his preference for making use of the early modern and transitional (and therefore still strongly personalised) models of absolutist monarchy and the Catholic Church to exemplify modern, objectively mediated structures of ideology as well as ideological state apparatuses, which should at least be counter-balanced by also taking his extensive analysis of trade unions (not taken up in the shortened ‘pre-publication’ of Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses) and of the Communist Party (in later publications, see Althusser 1977 and 1978) into account.
- 37.
At has been the bane of many academic papers in the social sciences since the early 1970s, beginning with a recapitulation of Capital in order to find a starting point for ‘deriving’ the constitutive notions for a scientific analysis of their specific field of inquiry—be it psychology, sociology, ethnology or political science.
- 38.
The analysis of the cycle of reproduction of labour power with respect to variable capital, as sketched out above, with its unavoidable links to gender, generational and geographical processes, serves as a prime example of these deep and multiple interlinkages.
- 39.
This would further contribute to making Lenin’s overoptimistic notion of ever achieving ‘the concrete analysis of the concrete situation’ as a strictly scientific result quite impossible, due not just to the time factor involved in the difference between scientific investigation and political deliberation, but also the need to conceptually integrate findings from different scientific disciplines analysing contemporary society.
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Wolf, F.O. (2018). Another Productive and Challenging ‘Incompleteness’ of Capital, Volume III. In: Dellheim, J., Wolf, F. (eds) The Unfinished System of Karl Marx. Luxemburg International Studies in Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70347-3_4
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