On value and abstract labour: a reply to Werner Bonefeld.
Capital & Class › Vol. 35 Nbr. 2, June 2011
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On value and abstract labour: a reply to Werner Bonefeld.
Werner Bonefeld has recently published an article in this journal (Bonefeld, 2010), in which he critically examines our contribution to the Marxian debates on the nature of abstract labour and value (Kicillof and Starosta, 2007a; Kicillof and Starosta, 2007b; Starosta, 2008). While we welcome the critical reactions that our articles have stimulated, we feel that Bonefeld's criticisms are not simply based on disagreements over these controversial issues, but also on a misunderstanding of our position on those more abstract determinations of the capitalist mode of production. Since we believe that this misunderstanding has led Bonefeld to fail to reconstruct our argument accurately, we would like to use this short note to clarify our stance on abstract labour and value. Also, we shall offer some brief critical remarks on Bonefeld's own intervention in the debate. In this way, we shall argue that despite his claim to make explicit what is already implicit in Marx's treatment of abstract labour and value in Capital (Bonefeld, 2010: 261), he actually departs from the latter considerably. More importantly and regardless of 'what Marx really said', we show that Bonefeld's contribution fails to offer a solid analysis of the fundamental categories of the critique of political economy.
At the broadest possible level, Bonefeld rightly captures the essence of our argument: namely, we claim that while value is the simplest economic form specific to the capitalist mode of production, abstract labour (i.e. the former's social substance) is a material expenditure of human corporeality that bears no historical specificity (Bonefeld, 2010: 259, 270). However, beyond this very general point, which Bonefeld finds 'intriguing' (Bonefeld, 2010: 259), he misunderstands and/or misreads our position on several scores. Here, we shall mention only a few of them. In the first place, he states that we 'see abstract labour as a transhistor...See the full content of this document
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