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Productive Forces and Subjectivity; Socialism as Marx Saw It

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Michel Henry
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… The ultimate contradiction of capitalism—in the words of Marx—can be understood and should be described as follows: capitalism is the value-system, its development and its maintenance (money being the external value); value is produced exclusively by work done by men and women; the fate of capital is thus the fate of this work—the subjective praxis of the individual. Inasmuch as the real process of production includes within it the accomplishment of this praxis, it is precisely the same thing as a process of value-formation, a process of valorization. *

From here stems the first moment of Marx's problematics: his analysis of capital as it effectively exists; in other words, his analysis of the process of its formation, which in turn leads to the analysis of the real process of production and the revelation, in this process, of the element that produces value, namely, this subjective praxis. Economic analysis, therefore, is nothing more than the analysis of the effects of the real component parts of the process; the composition of capital into value refers, inasmuch as it is an organic composition, to its technical composition and this is where its whole explanation lies.

Type
Notes and Discussion
Information
Diogenes , Volume 22 , Issue 88 , December 1974 , pp. 77 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © 1974 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 Cf. Grundrisse, (Fondements de la critique de l'économie politique, trans. Dangeville, Paris, Anthropos, 1967) II, 104.

2 Ibid., 183, emphasis added.

3 Ibid., 184, emphasis added.

4 Capital, Editions sociales, II, 1, 114.

5 Grundrisse, II, 211. Emphasis added.

6 Ibid., emphasis added.

7 Ibid., 222.

8 Max, Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Costes, VI, 155; Editions sociales, 45-6, emphasis added.

9 Grundrisse, II, 215, emphasis added.

10 Ibid, 220.

11 Ibid., 212-213.

12 Ibid., 213.

13 Marx, Oeuvres, ser. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, I, 904, emphasis added.

14 Ibid., 905, emphasis added.

15 Grundrisse, II, 222, emphasis added.

16 Op. cit., Editions sociales, 45.

17 Marx, Oeuvres, Gallimard, op. cit., I, 285.

18 Ibid., 297.

19 Ibid., emphasis added.

20 Ibid., 285, emphasis added. It is precisely because the social character of work, in the sense of its real essence, is understood by him to be original that Marx has the concept, on the contrary, of private work and property as the historical effect and result of the dissolution of the primitive method of production: "An in-depth study of the forms of joint property in Asia and above all in India would show the various forms of dissolution." (Ibid., 284, note.); likewise in the Grundrisse (II, 438): "The production system based on private exchanges is above all the historical dissolution of this natural com munism."

21 The summary of the "community" is too lengthy for inclusion here.

22 Grundrisse, I, 109.

23 Ibid., 108.

24 Ibid., 109.

25 Ibid., 109-110.

26 Marx, Oeuvres, Gallimard, op. cit., I, 613; "as" our emphasis; "social" and "working time" emphasized by Marx.

27 Capital, op cit., II, 2, 13.

28 Marx, Oeuvres, Gallimard, op. cit., I, 985.