Absolute value

A, if not the, key concept in Karl Marx’s critique of political economy is “absolute value”. This category has been lost in the English secondary literature. Its specific meaning can be understood by re-reading Marx’s confrontation with Samuel Bailey and David Ricardo. Unfortunately, the available English translation of the Theories of Surplus Value is seriously deficient. The chapter reconstructs this theoretical path, whilst also considering his previous writings (Grundrisse, A Contribution, Urtext), and provides a first survey of the relevant secondary literature (in German, Italian, French and English). The adjective “absolute” refers to the two following, and entwined, circumstances. First, that the commodity, beyond being use value, is value as long as it materialises as exchange value in another commodity. Value within the commodity is separated (or “abstracted”) from the use value of that commodity itself and enters a relation where money becomes the “body of value”: “value embodied”. Second, the “unsocial sociability” between the isolated producers is separated (or “abstracted”) from them, and controls them. “Absolute” also stands for the development of value into an “automatic Subject” as an overgrasping and self-reproducing totality. Unfortunately, the foundation on which Marx’s reasoning is erected is fragile. The category of labour as the substance of absolute value is not properly grounded, and it maintains an internal necessary reference to “money as a commodity” which should be rejected. The answer to Marx’s question - “what is it” that grounds the reference of value to labour? - lies in the “consumption” by capital of the living bearers of labour-power: i.e., in the use of their labour power, and hence in the (antagonistic) extraction of their living labour, turning into the new value added. This outcome cannot be taken for granted in capitalism’s historically socially specific situation, and that is why capitalist production is nothing but labour. This is the ultimate foundation of Marx’s (monetary) value theory of labour. The monetary imprinting must be given by an ex-ante validation of the living labour expended, by finance to production (the buying and selling of labour power).