Does the collapse of theoretical and real "Marxism-Leninism" - i.e., of Marxist orthodoxy in general - not also affect the basic principles of Marx's theory, so that even in a modernized guise Marx reading has literally become irrelevant? Indeed, this seemed to be the "dominant discourse"1: in seemingly "numbing unanimity" it was insisted that Marx "was dead, remained dead," and must remain dead. But such "invocations"2 were found almost exclusively in the political literature of the day, hardly in the scientific literature. Here, especially in recent times, Marxian theory has received support even from authors who, like Jacques Derrida, see themselves as "non-Marxists"1 . Karl Otto Hondrich, for example, insists that Marx's "analysis of the self-destructive processes of capitalism (...) has by no means been refuted by the self-destruction of state socialism".4 And Derrida states that the "lesson" of "Marx's great works" seems to him "more urgent today" than ever: "no future without Marx".5
In the national economic journals, one of the central themes of Marx's economic discourse, the problem of value and price, was and is discussed before and after the implosion of the Soviet Marxist system solely in a factual-logical manner, thus in an almost unchanged way that is quite inaccessible to political journalism; in this context, it should be left open for the moment whether this national economic form of reception and critique is adequate to the intentions of Marxian theory or not. This almost unbroken continuity of the scientific discourse on Marx will hardly be surprising insofar as already for decades, namely since the beginning of the Cold War, a general consensus was established that a strict distinction had to be made between "Marx as prophet" - that is, the inspirer of the "proletarian worldview" - and Marx as scientist and philosopher, and thus also between Marxian theory in general and the theoretical as well as real system of "Marxism-Leninism" in particular. The general rules of scientific discourse proved themselves in that even the collapse of Soviet Marxism was hardly able to shake this communis opinio of Western philosophy and social science. After all, it was precisely in academic national economics that people had long since subscribed to Werner Sombart's thesis, which in truth was extremely problematic, that "with Marxian science in one's breast, one could just as well be capitalist as socialist, or neither"6 From this perspective, Marx appears - e.g. in 1988 in the eyes of Jürg Niehans - as a "Ricardian". His "lasting contribution" is considered to be - "paradoxically" - his allegedly "thoroughly neoclassical model of the uniform growth of a two-sector economy",7 which consequently not even the Association of German Industrialists could deny its recognition.
A strict distinction between Marx and Marxism was also recommended, with plausible reasons, by some non-Marxist philosophers. In 1973, for example, Georg Picht argued that Marx, from a natural philosophical point of view, "remained a misunderstood thinker" and that Marxists generally "failed to understand the depth of his questions." The same position was taken with regard to Marx's Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 by the Thomistic philosopher Bernhard Lakebrink. According to him, Marx could neither be understood merely as an economist nor, no less one-sidedly, merely as a philosopher; rather, an adequate understanding of his early writings required understanding him as the founder of an economic-philosophical synthesis. And with regard to the relationship between wage labor and capital in the analysis of the young Marx, Lakebrink comes to the conclusion in 1969: "Karl Marx adheres (...) strictly (!) to the Hegelian logic of contradiction. (...) It is shown here once again (...) that (...) the interpretation of the contents of Marx's early writings is still completely in a mess (...). (They) can only be opened up to our present understanding on the basis of a well-founded knowledge of Hegelian logic or phenomenology."
On the assumption that the early writings have a justificatory function with respect to Capital, that consequently the "existing" or "dialectical contradiction" is to be attributed a constitutive and universal significance for almost all economic categories, the conclusion arises that also the interpretation of Capital "is still completely in a mess", that Marx's main work is still to be "opened up" to our understanding, because it can only be understood on the basis of the Hegelian logic of contradiction, i.e. the essential logic. This is an old thesis that has been known since Lenin, but which has been followed only in the very first rudiments and taken to heart by very few authors. If we look at the history of the development of Capital, we cannot help but notice a striking continuity of Marx's thinking from his dissertation to his last economic work, the critical marginal notes to Adolph Wagner's textbook. Max Horkheimer rightly stated that Marx's main work "is only halfway comprehensible to the masses in popularized dilutions".10 Without exception, all political economy textbooks of Marxist-Leninist provenance present themselves as examples of such manifold "dilutions".
Although, in contrast to the economic ones, some philosophical authors offered a much more differentiated picture of Marx's economics, their efforts to reconstruct its dialectical structure were narrowly limited. Thus, [discussion of] the blatant Engelsian misunderstanding of Marx's theory of "simple circulation" as a theory of "simple commodity production" remained a taboo, which only under the pressure of West European Marx research was broken through very late here and there and with many ifs and buts - the reasons for that fatal misunderstanding remained withdrawn from public discussion. However, a related, more weighty taboo remained untouched. As is well known, Marx had "popularized the analysis of the substance of value (...) as much as possible" in Capital. (23/11) But the fact that until the downfall of Soviet Marxism a systematic discussion had to be prevented also about what was to be understood as a "popularized" representation against the background of the Rohentwurf of Capital illuminates the whole misery of the "Marxist-Leninist" Marx discussion. If this question, which is precarious in itself, had been taken up, an avalanche would have started rolling, which would have torn the laboriously erected edifice of traditional Marxism into the abyss in the first place. It was not only about the so-called "value substance" as a detailed problem of value theory, but ultimately about Marx's much-vaunted "method" itself.
Remember: Engels, in his 1859 review of Marx's Critique, canonized by Marxism-Leninism, had formulated the thesis: "The elaboration of the method underlying Marx's Critique (...) we consider a result hardly inferior in importance to the basic materialist view." (13/474) And generations of Marxist theorists and politicians (up to Kurt Schumacher) had always referred back to the "method" when Marx criticism was able to prove certain inconsistencies and antiquities of Marx's theorems and prognoses.
Furthermore, one recalls the fiercely disputed thesis of Georg Lukâcs that one could "reject all of Marx's individual theses - without having to give up for a minute his Marxist orthodoxy", because this referred "exclusively to the method".12 Lukâcs undoubtedly succeeded in convincingly elaborating some of its peculiarities - such as the category of "totality" - and in putting his finger on some sore spots: see only his important thesis that Marx's "vulgar Marxism" had "flattened the concept of reality (...) taken over from classical philosophy".13
However, since the publication of the Paris Manuscripts and the Grundrisse, the Rohentwurf of Capital, there is also no doubt that the methodological understanding of even a Lukács remained far below Marx's and had to remain so in view of the abundance of material problems of economics.
An unbiased and thorough reading of Marx's correspondence, which has been known since 1913, could have made it clear long before the publication of those drafts that already the first writing On the Critique of Political Economy of 1859 must be understood as the result of a simplification, Capital even as the product of a profoundly tragic and ultimately also misleading one. One may be divided about the justification of Marx's "popularization," but no one will be able to deny that it is primarily to this mode of presentation that the "obscurities of the theory of value" first criticized by Eduard Bernstein are to be attributed,14 the blindness and naiveté of Bernstein and other Marx-killers included, of course.
While working on the second draft of Capital, which was planned as a continuation of the Critique of 1859 and was to follow it as "Part I" of the complete work in the sense of the Rohentwurf, Marx informed Engels on December 9, 1861, of his decision to write the planned work in a "generally intelligible" manner. This communication proves two things - on the one hand, that the "popularized dilutions" noted by Horkheimer already affect the writing On the Critique of Political Economy, on the other hand, that they even extend to the much-vaunted "method": "My writing is progressing, but slowly. (...) Meanwhile, it becomes much more popular and the method much more hidden than in Part I." (30/207) It is not the place here to describe the circumstances that led Marx in mid-November 1858 to shelve the almost finished text and to work out a new, popularized version, which was then subjected to further popularization in Capital.
The fragments of the so-called Urtext only became accessible to a larger audience in 1953, but fortunately the correspondence does not only contain the letter about the "hiding of the method", but another, more important text, from which the "hidden method" could have been developed only half a year later. It is a thesis-like summary of Marx's reflections on commodity and money as well as on the construction of a "dialectical transition" to the category of capital. The letter of 2. April 1858 thus informs us about nothing less than the only authentic form of Marx's theory of value, which he was also to elaborate in the fall of that year, but never publish. The manuscript written in the fall, of which only parts have survived and which was published in 1953 under the title Urtext, does not contain the most important parts, namely the elaborations on value and commodity. These first sections - but with them what is methodologically essential: the dialectic of the beginning, the unfolding of the dialectical principle of "commodity in general" - have been lost.
One would think that the interpreters, in view of the fragmentary character of the Urtext, would have directed all their efforts to reconstruct the lost parts and thus at the same time the "method", namely in the context of the "development" of the "beginning" - all this on the basis of that above letter of April 2, 1858, known since 1913, i.e. the "short outline" of the dialectically conceived theory of value and money. But far from it, and so, according to my knowledge, not a single work exists, neither in the ex-GDR nor in Western Europe, in which such an attempt of reconstruction has been undertaken - i.e. the reconstruction also and especially of the "hidden method" on the basis of that "short outline" of April 2, 1858 as well as of the preserved parts of the Urtext of autumn of that year.
Relevant references, however, are not found in those two letters alone, for even the already "popularized" 1859 Critique contains a sentence of infinite importance for understanding the third volume of Capital, published in 1894, and its relationship to the first volume, which has been controversial ever since. This sentence, nevertheless ignored by the entire Marx literature until today, reads: the "doctrine of competition" solves the problem "how, on the basis of exchange value, a market price different from it develops, or more correctly (!), how the law of exchange value realizes itself (!) only in its own opposite". (13/48) There are numerous passages in the rough draft, but especially in the early writings, which indicate a similar concept of law, whose origin can easily be traced back to the Hegelian doctrine of the "second supersensible world". Still in the Theories of Surplus Value there is a sentence which, in contrast to the above, has occasionally become known even in Marxist, but nowhere in academic literature: "contradiction between the general law and more developed concrete relations." (26.3/83)15
Already in his excerpts from James Mill's Eléments d'économie politique, Marx polemicizes in 1844 against the use of the traditional concept of law in the "school of Ricardo," namely, against the "abstract law, without the change or the constant abolition [Aufhebung] of this law - whereby it first becomes," the "real movement, of which that law is only an abstract, accidental and one-sided moment, is made an accident by the newer national economy." (40/445) The concept of a merely "abstract law," criticized in the Hegelian sense also by Marx, refers, as Gadamer asked to show,16 to the Platonic-Galilean concept of law, which in Hegel's view asserts itself as a "second supersensible world" that is mirror-image related to the "sensible" and owes itself to the dichotomization of the world into "sensible" and "supersensible"; it is therefore also transverse to Marx's conceptualization of the economic world as "sensibly supersensible."
If core ideas of Hegelian philosophy itself still co-determine the original conception of the "development" of the relation of "simple" and "developed" circulation, "simple exchange value" and "developed", thus also of the first and third volume, and if Marx's "dialectical method of development" (31/313) is essentially indebted to the Hegelian progressive-regressive one, then it is not surprising if already in 1841 in Marx's dissertation On the Difference of Democritical and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature its main features were anticipated: that instead of starting from an "abstract principle" - for instance in the sense of the axiomatic-deductive method - it is important to "let this principle itself be abolished in higher forms" (40/65) and that "every determination finds its existence in its immediate otherness, its being abolished (. .)" (40/43), because "the ground is the ideality of the phenomenon, the suspended phenomenon." (40/73) The "genetic development" (40/245) of the "beginning" takes place as a "further determination of its principle imposed upon it." (40/247) The same core ideas are formulated here which are later to be found again in the "dialectical method of development" of the raw draft, i.e. the "hidden method" in Capital, namely insofar as the "commodity" is first realized and annulled in Capital as its "ground".
The "short outline" [English original] of April 2, 1858, repeats these thoughts in a form corresponding to the "peculiar logic of the peculiar object": "From the contradiction (!) of the general characters of value with its material (!) existence in a particular (!) commodity, etc., we find that the "peculiar logic" of the peculiar object is the same as the contradiction (!) of the general characters of value with its material (!) existence in a particular (!) commodity. - these general characters are the same which appear later (!) in money - results the category of money." (29/315)
According to this presentation of the core idea of a new, a dialectical theory of value, we are dealing with a "real" (26.3/492) opposition or contradiction, which is supposed to underlie the "real" development of the commodity as well as its theoretical one. But until today, not even a rudimentary attempt is made to identify these "general characters" of value, which are supposed to "contradict" their "material existence" in a "certain" commodity - thus also contradicting the possibility of the exchange of a commodity determined as premonetary; they can only be those which must be used and recognized by every economist, also and especially the academic one, at least implicitly in the sense of "abstract", "objective" and "absolute value". This Marxian general thesis makes it unmistakably clear that he intended the elaboration of a theory of value distinct from the academic theories of value and exchange in toto, precisely a dialectical one, and it makes it clear that even the popularized theory of value of Capital can be understood solely from this original and, according to the letter of December 9, 1861, only authentic version. Because this was omitted in the more than hundred years of discussion of the theory of value, it actually remained misunderstood until today.
In a summarizing review of the value-theoretical development of the section of Capital later called "First Chapter", which one has to understand as a résumé of the theory of value, we find formulations that still let the original intentions shine through, thus becoming understandable only against the background of those above quoted core ideas of the dissertation: "The decisively important thing, however, was to discover the inner necessary connection between value form, value substance and value magnitude (!!), i.e. ideally (!!) expressed, to prove (!) that the value-form arises from the value-concept." (II.5 /43) Here, it cannot be my task to interpret these theses and those of the "short outline" and to check whether Marx has actually taken up the "proof" for this in the value-theoretical debate only for him, but by no means for the national economist "decisively important" or not - here, it depends only on the fact that, according to the standard of both texts, his value-theoretical intention has remained manifestly misunderstood until today, that Marx has therefore remained a widely unknown thinker: It has not yet occurred to any of the interpreters of Marx's theory of value to examine what was "decisively important" for Marx in this theory. For what, for example, is it supposed to mean that something is "ideally expressed"?
And not only the academic economists: Also in orthodox Marxism (not only) of Soviet type, the core propositions of the theory of value have been ignored and collectively kept silent until today. The rough draft served in Soviet Marxism exclusively as a quarry, as a treasure trove of quotations for philosophers, but its "method of development," the only one capable of convincingly claiming the attribute "dialectical," remained inaccessible to the theoreticians of Marxism-Leninism, the text as a whole a closed book. The same ignorance characterizes Soviet Marxism, in general the Marxist pseudo-orthodoxy, also in relation to the texts quoted above - from the very beginning the so-called orthodoxy was characterized by a thoroughly "revisionist intention, which expressed itself in a more than just arbitrary selection of quotations. Some passages of the "short outline" can be found in the monograph of Rosental17 - who, as far as I know, is the only orthodox author who ever used this text -, but of all passages, the quoted passage about the commodity as a dialectical contradiction - and that means: the very value-theoretical core proposition - was sovereignly skipped by the supreme administrator of Soviet Marxist dialectics.
The reasons for this late-Stalinist obduracy are not difficult to discern. A systematic discussion of the origin and peculiarity of the "dialectical method of development" (31/313) of Marx's "Critique of the Economic Categories" (13/10) would have brought to light not only its hidden refinement - the Marx critic Klaus Hartmann praises the "extraordinary level"18 and the "highly artful" progression of the theory19 - but at the same time its highly fragmentary character. It is not merely a matter of Marx having been able to realize only a small part of his original project; rather, orthodoxy would have had to come to an admission with incalculable consequences, i.e., to the recognition of the fact that Capital came about less as a result of the "dialectical method of development" than, and conversely, owes itself to its reduction - that thus, in place of dialectics, a completely different procedure has taken its place, which Marx called his "method of condensation" (29/551). In Capital, then, there was hardly any "development",20 but rather "condensation", namely, the results of a "development" of the categories carried out elsewhere, i.e., in a fragmentary way in the rough draft.
Since within Soviet Marxism Capital was primarily assigned a legitimizing function, and the Critique of Political Economy, misused as a bible, was instrumentalized as a tool of political struggle, hardly anyone was interested in a serious reappraisal of its theoretical content, much less in taking stock of its shortcomings, gaps and "white spots". Elevated to the rank of a sacred text, canonized as it were, there could no longer be a more perfect creation of the human spirit than the popularized text - and this myth got along badly with the profane consideration of whether this text should not be better understood as a makeshift and embarrassing solution, as a surrogate of the originally planned work, whose conception was incomparably broader and deeper, i.e., as a product of resignation. That is, as a product of the resignation that set in when Marx, whose ability to work was impaired by various illnesses, had to recognize that he was hopelessly overburdened with the task of completing such a mammoth work in addition to his gainful employment, which, on top of that, could only have been understood by scientists, hardly by the workers.
Such trivial considerations could only be considered and expressed when theorists were seriously interested in the "radical further development"21 of Marx's critique of economics. --Thus Theodor W. Adorno with regard to the fundamental problem of "real abstraction" following Alfred Sohn-Rethel, so at present for instance Jacques Derrida with regard to the related problem of the "sensually supersensible thing" - problem fields in which Soviet Marxism showed little or mostly no interest and which were known to the great majority of Western interpreters at best by hearsay.
The primary issue here is the draft of a theory of economic "categories" as well as their "development" and "critique", which Marx merely sketched out and presented in the form of a conceptual stenogram. According to Capital, as is well known, these are "objective thought-forms" (23/90); but this basic concept of his theory has nowhere been made explicit by Marx. In the rough draft of Capital, further key terms can be found. There, there is talk of the "economic categories" as "forms of existence, determinations of existence" [Daseinsformen, Existenzbestimmungen] that "often express only individual sides of this particular society, of this subject (!)22". (42/40)
What about these two determinations, how is their relation to be thought? Above all, what does "objective thought-form" mean? In what sense does Marx use the terms "objective", "Dasein" or "existence" and "expression"? The main issue here is two cardinal problems of Marx's theory. The first question is whether we have to characterize these categories in general as what he had once called "subjective-objective" (II.4.1/122) forms, which are only as such "social forms" of labor. Several times in the Rohentwurf subjective-objective unities are brought into play, for example, in the determination of the "existence of social labor - its combination as subject as well as object." (42/383) And what about the concept of "thought-form"? In the rough draft there is talk of commodities being "ideally, not only in the mind of the individual, but in the imagination of society (...) already transformed into money." (42/118)
That the individual consciousness corresponds to a "general" one, precisely to a "conception of society", is repeatedly expressed in the early writings. Thus already in the dissertation, and specifically in the context of Marx's first discussion of the concept of money. Here, too, the "subjective conception" is contrasted with a "general or rather communal conception of men" (40/371); we are obviously dealing here with what has also been repeatedly thematized in the academic money literature under the titles "general consciousness" or also "money-value consciousness." In the Paris Manuscripts there is talk of "my general consciousness" as the "theoretical shape" of the "real commonwealth" which in alienated society is "hostile to us", then even of an "activity of my general consciousness" (40/538), which is also called "generic consciousness", in which the human being "active in his real life in society (. .) in thinking" is "repeated"; in this, this "general" is by no means hypostatized in relation to the individual, it is rather regarded as "general individual life", the individual himself is "totality, (...) ideal totality." (40/539) All these assertions, alien to traditional Marxism, finally culminate in the apparently quite hopelessly idealistic thesis: "Thought and being are thus distinguished, but at the same time in unity with each other" (40/539); "subjectivism and objectivism (...), activity and suffering (lose) (...) their opposition and thus their existence as such opposites." (40/542)
All these propositions do not directly refer to the national-economic categories, but there is also the mediation of the concepts "general consciousness" and "conception of society", respectively, which are immediately related in monetary theoretical contexts, from which one can conclude that the parallelism of the concept "subjective-objective" form of social labor and the concept of "unity of thinking and being" cannot be a coincidence either. In short, the conceptualization of the national-economic categories as "objective thought-forms" and "expressions" of social "forms of existence, determinations of existence" - they are "real abstractions" throughout - seems to imply their determination as subjective-objective units, as supra-individually valid manifestations of a supra-individual subject-object unit, a socio-economic "unity of thought and being".
Only in this way does it becomes intelligible that in Marx the national-economic categories qua "objective thought-forms" in their particularity as money exist "not only in the imagination", but at the same time as something else, namely "as a real (!!) economic category" (42/159), as a "crazy" (23/90), i.e. crazy or "inverted" form. Thus, in the case of money, and moreover probably in the case of any national-economic category, we are dealing with a unity as real as it is ideal on the one hand, a unity of the individual and the general on the other. It is this double structure that distinguishes a "category" from ideas or concepts, furthermore separates the "presentation" of a real "total system of categories" from a model theory, consequently also a "critique of the total system of economic categories" (26.3/250) qua real system from a critique of textbooks qua theoretical systems. Marx's "critique of political economy" is thus primarily a critique of the real system of categories, a critique of the category as a "twisted form, wherein the real (!) inversion expresses itself." (26.3/445) Only on the condition that the categories are not only "thought-forms" but at the same time "real ones" can there be a "form" that "deceives" individuals (42/732), and can capitals exist "in the form of values, values adhering to themselves" that "confront" (42/410) individuals and dominate them. Marx's talk of the "personification of things and objectification of persons" (23/128) presupposes the categories as "real" and as "thought-forms," as subject/object entities. It is this inversion that led Karl Löwith to characterize the "analysis of the fetish character of the commodity" as a "prime example of Hegelian dialectics."23
Adorno once emphasized that the critical "theory of society (has) sprung from philosophy, while at the same time it strives to re-function [umzufunktionieren] its questions."24 For him, this also manifested itself in the fact that from this point of view society presents itself as a subject/object: "Society as subject and society as object are the same and yet not the same "25 -it is an "objective contradiction. "26 Thus, not only questions, but also philosophical categories are "re-functioned" in terms of social theory or socio-economics. It seems that the much lamented "indeterminacy" of the national-economic object, as well as the repeatedly criticized "incomprehensibility" and "meaninglessness" of its basic concepts, especially of the macroeconomic ones, is based on the fact that the economic object eludes the grasp of the actually specialized economic concepts and can only be grasped and determined by means of such "re-functioned" concepts and questions of philosophical provenance.
Now, some economists have recently tended to claim a "failure of national economics" with regard to money and to concede that this national economic object still presents itself as an "indeterminate", "incomprehensible", in short, enigmatic phenomenon. Hajo Riese, for example, argues "that national economics to this day does not know what money is." Indeed, where "money supply" and "money volume" are mentioned, monetary theory still refuses to provide information on what actually constitutes the quantity of money supply and the dimensionality of money volume. That it cannot be the "quantities" of paper and gold stored in the Bundesbank is obvious, but if it cannot be physical quantities and volumes, the quality of these quantities remains completely undetermined, simply incomprehensible. Riese promises a "solution of the riddle" of money, but this problem of the "objectivity" of these quantities, discussed by Simmel and the older money literature, seems to be just as non-existent for Riese and the Riese school as it was for the great debates on monetary theory of the twenties, which still caused Schumpeter to resign. And is this really about the "last riddle of national economics "27 ? Is it not rather a question of the "riddle" of economic quantities in general? Dirk Ipsen, for example, stated: "We speak of the circulation of capital [Kapitalkreislauf] without being able to give an indication of what is "running in circles"[im Kreise läuft]. These questions are determined (...) according to aspects of expediency (...) in a definitional way. "28
What is it that exists as a "stock quantity" and flows as a "flow quantity"? And how does it "exist" and "flow"? Or does one seriously want to be satisfied with that definition of the early Schumpeter, which he later dropped again, but formulated completely in the sense of Riese's subjectivist orientation: the "flow of goods" can be "defined as a flow of valuations or satisfaction of needs".29 Money flows are opposed to such obscure flows of goods, which should have prompted Riese and his school to reflect once again on this Marxian sentence: "The riddle of the money fetish is (... ) only the riddle of the commodity fetish that has become visible and blinds the eyes" (23/108), so that the resolution of the money riddle can by no means be the resolution of a supposedly "last riddle" of economics, but necessarily points to other riddles: money is the correlate of the commodity and both are manifestations of the category >capital<. The separate thematization of a "money riddle" tacitly presupposes the negation of Marx's thesis that there is an "inner" or "living connection" of money with the "total system of economic categories" (26. 3/250) and that there is such a "total system" at all, so that the emphatic theoretical concept must be generally abandoned; Under this presupposition, of course, economics can only be understood as an art theory, as an eclectic, motley mixture of elements of most different, even contradictory theories, for instance those of Walras, Keynes and Marx, or those of Sraffa, Keynes and Marx - an eclectic, currently fashionable understanding of >theory<, which thinks it can do without a systematic category analysis. That there cannot be such an analysis is a highly questionable thesis, which contradicts the concept of theory of all those philosophers who have been quoted here and for which Riese and his students have not provided convincing evidence.
In fact, the majority of the internal, loyal critics of national economics formulate the dilemma of their discipline considerably more radically. In their view, today's economics "lies sick" and therefore requires a "pathology (!) of economic science."30 The internal critique is also far more radical in terms of scientific theory. Since there are "hardly any approaches to an independent social-scientific metatheory," the "social sciences are not a real science,"31 and economics is a "largely unsolved scientific task."32 Now Riese puts forward the plausible thesis that with regard to money "deep-seated forms of thinking prevent the solution of the riddle", whereby for him the "interpretation of money as a scarcely kept nothing (...) is supposed to offer the solution of the riddle of national economy" - the thesis, that is, "that money is created out of nothing".33 Apart from the fact that one can cite, for instance, with Valentin Wagner14 or Otto Veit35 a number of intra-economic reasons that there is by no means a "creation out of nothing", Riese is then to be agreed with in principle that in social economics obviously other rules must apply than in natural science, which, with regard to the problem of creation, still prefers with good reasons the antithesis that nothing becomes nothing - whereby it is to be remembered that the becoming of something out of nothing is regarded even by Hegelian dialectics as pure magic and superstition.
That there are "deep-seated forms of thinking" in economics and in the social sciences in general, which prevent the "resolution" of categorical "puzzles", is, however, a plausible thesis - the question is merely how such "forms of thinking" can be identified. Bruno Liebrucks has repeatedly held fundamental forms of thought responsible for the fact that the "riddle" of money, but also that of the commodity and capital, of the economic object in general, have remained unsolved - these are above all the categories of the so-called philosophy of reflection in general and those of Kantian philosophy in particular.
Indeed, a thinker as close to Kantian philosophy as Friedrich Kaulbach emphatically emphasized a "bias of Kant in the standpoint of theoretical-mathematical conception of object and form" and stressed that, from this perspective, objects of the "world of action (...), whose objects are sense-filled appearances", elude analysis; the thematization of the "objectivity of the pragmatic object" requires a specific "subject logic", more precisely a concept of substance, whose "meaning (...) is Aristotelian" (!), i.e. that substance must be understood "not as a complex of relations, but as a "genuine" substantial unity". Only such an analysis is able to thematize the object as a "bearer of meaning"; admittedly, this happens, in Kaulbach's case, only with respect to its juridical functions or, however, in its "role" as a "unity of use values" - here, the "transition" to the "perspective of the thing in itself" in the sense of an "anchoring of the appearance in a >real< ground, which is thought in this as appearing" is needed - for only insofar as "the appearance (...) >appears<. ..) makes >something< appear", we can speak of the "real meaning "36 of an object, which defines the "pragmatic object" as such. Kaulbach's considerations deserve special attention because they make clear that the analysis of the use value of the commodity alone must make use of concepts other than functional ones and is already referred to the categories essence and appearance on this level. The Marxian use of substantial concepts already on the level of the use-value is thus far more appropriate to the economic object than its functional determination in the subjectivist theories of the so-called "good".
Liebruck's analysis goes far beyond Kaulbach's, insofar as it does not merely thematize use-values, but also has in mind use-value as a commodity, but above all money and capital as objects of a peculiar kind. This step requires a far more radical Kantian critique. His critique is generally directed at Kant's "reduced concept of knowledge": "The human world does not belong to the world of appearances, since in it there is neither causality nor the principles constituting the Kantian world of appearances. "37 If Kant "had no idea" of "what money is",38 and on the basis of his dualistic philosophy could not have had one at all, it is because money is "not objective in the Kantian sense" (!!). It is not a "natural object", rather "a product of society, not of nature as existence under laws", i.e. "under laws of understanding":39 so that in the national economic theory of categories the Kantian laws of understanding - above all that of the separation of concept and existence - cannot claim any validity. Kant cannot comprehend money, because for him the appearance "must not be subjective-objective "40 , which in turn constitutes the peculiarity of money, which "stands neutral to the (...) opposition sensuous-non-sensuous". It is this sensuous-supersensuous double character that Kant is not able to grasp and that for Liebrucks was grasped above all by the Marxian analysis of the object as commodity: "This object is an embodiment [Inbegriff] (...) of values in the meaning of this term in Karl Marx. Strictly speaking, it is not a matter of ideal values, but of these as at the same time real objects. "41 What is at stake here is the "overcoming of the difference between the real and the ideal world," the commodity as an object that is "both real and ideal," a "real-ideal object."
If, according to Adorno, Kaulbach and Liebrucks, the objectivity of economic categories cannot be that of a Kantian-defined one - how is such a objectivity, which is indeterminate and indeterminable in the natural-scientific-Kantian conceptual system, nevertheless to be determined? How should one be able to talk meaningfully about objects which are located beyond the opposition of "sensual/nonsensual", "real/ideal", "subjective/objective"? Obviously only in a system of categories on the basis of "re-functioned" [umfunktionierter] philosophical concepts and questions, namely in the environment of Hegelian philosophy; but this proves at the same time the impossibility of assigning the socio-economic theory of categories to a social science which understands itself as autonomous and empirical. It goes without saying that the borders of economics and philosophy must necessarily become blurred if its basic concepts can only be grasped and determined as "re-functioned" philosophical ones. Without doubt this is true for Marx's theory. But insofar as these basic concepts underlie "classical" economics as they do those of Say and the physiocratic school, it implicitly applies to them as well. All these basic concepts turn out to be either those borrowed directly from philosophy and "re-functioned," or yet concepts that can be meaningfully thematized only on the basis of such "re-functioned" categories. The chapter on the fetish character of the commodity and its mystery in Capital shows that this is unmistakably the case.
The economic objects are described there by means of a series of opposing entities, which must appear to a neo-Kantian methodologist like the economist Alfred Amonn, for example, as "amalgamations" of "logically quite disparate things": these objects are characterized by the fact that they are structured "sensually supersensually," that they possess "social natural properties," that they present themselves as "subjective-objective" forms, and that their mode of being must be understood in the sense of a "objective appearance." Under these aspects, for example, the "price" qua "exchange power" presents itself as a "social natural property," as a highly paradoxical thing, as a "crazy form" or as a "supersensible" that somehow participates in the "sensible" and "adheres" to it, whereby no economic price theory in the strict sense is able to explain this strange synthesis, but rather always presupposes and must presuppose it. If one examines Marx's conceptuality, even the first glance shows that it is based on a large number of "re-functioned" pairs of concepts and questions of philosophical provenance, with two problem complexes dominating: on the one hand, the problem of universals, i.e. the problem of the synthesis of the general and the particular or individual, and, on the other hand, the subject-object problem. Furthermore, the relationship between being and appearance, essence and appearance, being and validity, being and becoming, substance and relation, presupposition and result, act and entity, concept and existence.
It is a central Marxian thesis that it is only on the basis of this conceptuality, which dominates the fetish chapter, that it is possible to determine the "abstract" and "spooky representationality" of economic objects and to make them comprehensible. The fact that the academic national economy until today discusses these remarks either very superficially, but mostly ignores them completely,42 is merely an indication and consequence of its "deep-seated forms of thinking", which determine its reflection to permanently confuse first and second nature, i.e. to continuously suppress the problem of the representationality of its object: a priority topic for the "pathology of economic science" demanded by economists.
Such a pathology can actually be convincingly developed only on the basis of an elaborated theory of categories, which can emerge only as the product of a collective effort - individual researchers are hopelessly overburdened with it. These categorial-philosophical problems have found their most concise and at the same time most vivid expression in Derrida's most recent treatise. It is primarily concerned with the "capital contradiction (...) of the incredible conjunction of the sensible and the supersensible",43 with the contradiction of "mutually contradictory predicates" - that is, with the problem of the "incorporeal body", of "invisible visibility", of the "immaterial becoming of matter". 44 He is especially interested in the phenomenon of the "doppelganger", "revenant" or "mute extras "45 - whereby he uses almost the same images as Eugen v. Böhm-Bawerk: The well-known Marx critic formulated his paradoxes, however, in the sense of the just opposite thesis that such things, because they cannot be thought, cannot possibly exist. He was concerned with the description of "capital" by certain capital theorists who presented it as a "spooky figure" and claimed the "existence of an invisible double "46 , which the nominalist Böhm-Bawerk could not possibly accept as a "solid, natural doctrine" of capital, but - from the point of view of precisely natural consciousness and "intelligible thinking", the "naturalness of shallow rationalism" (24/96) - had to fight against as a "mythology of capital". This is indeed the question: are we dealing with untenable theoretical creations or with a highly real mythology, the mythology of a real system, "capitalism"? It is certainly no accident if Böhm-Bawerk overlooked the fact that the descriptions criticized can already be related to the commodity and money, which thus also present themselves as "mythological" figures: Marx's description of the commodity in its "mystical" character, its "magic and spookiness," can thus be confirmed or also criticized in Böhm-Bawerk's own words, depending on whether or not I am able to agree with his nominalist critique of those academic theories of capital.
Derrida, at any rate, who only wants to "hint" at the problematic of this "mystical" - "it will not be more than a hint" - demands the elaboration of "another logic" for the logical overcoming of the "ghostly logic of the fetish", just as "other concepts" are needed, since the "simple opposition" of "reality and unreality, sensual and supersensual "47 does not allow to comprehend the capitalistically constituted world and the "logic of its antagonisms "48. When he speaks of the "testamentary dimension", the "legacy" and "heritage" of Marx's theory,4'' it seems appropriate to refer to the "testamentary" dimension" of some fragments and treatises of the founders of Critical Theory.
Such a dimension is especially evident in the notes of a conversation between Theodor W. Adorno and Alfred Sohn-Rethel on April 16, 1965, the study of which must be strongly recommended here. Here Adorno outlines a comprehensive research program dedicated to the "constitution of categories, "50 in which above all the "systematic encyclopedic (!!) analysis of the abstraction of exchange"''1 is necessary, i.e., the elaboration of a theory of real abstraction.
This leads me to some brief remarks on the genesis of my older investigations of Marx's critique of economics, republished in this book. I have given my consent to reprint them after long hesitation solely from the point of view that they may claim some interest with respect to the history of Marx's discussion. The first and most important work - On the Dialectics of the Value Form - owes its origin to some basic ideas which Adorno repeatedly presented both in his two as yet unpublished lectures on the theory of society and on Some Questions of Dialectics, in the treatise Sociology and Empirical Research, as well as in the Sociological Advanced Seminar - they are the same ones which, in Adorno's view, constitute the core of his social theory, but which are permanently concealed in the so-called "new critical theory" of the Habermas school.
The late Horkheimer's notes prove that he, too, saw no alternative to Marxian theory in terms of social theory: that, as he noted in 1966 and 1969, "we do not possess a better economic theory" and that it still offers the "key to understanding the present. "52 For the founders of the Frankfurt School, classified by the Habermas School as the "older critical theory," there was no doubt at all, even in the 1960s, that "Marx (...) recognized the essence of society better than anyone else. "53 The transcript from the summer of 1962, published in the appendix, should give some insight into the intellectual and political atmosphere that provided the impetus for a new reading of Marx in the early and mid-1960s and that also helped shape the intellectual background of the protest movement.
When I recently, after thirty-five years, reviewed my notes, I could neither deny my surprise nor a certain embarrassment about the fact that the thought that Adorno expressed in this seminar runs through my work like a red thread and may have determined me more or less unconsciously to judge and examine the national economic literature from precisely this point of view: the national economic and social theoretical "approach" that "makes it possible for more of reality to be expressed starts from the problem of constitution. It is about whether the constituents of totality can be grasped. (...) The analysis of the price question (concerns) an epiphenomenon vis-à-vis the constitutional questions. "54
The constitutional-theoretical "approach" was therefore the "deeper one."55 However, it was not this thought that consciously oriented my Marx reading at that time, but initially a more or less accidental find. In the Walter Kolb student dormitory in Frankfurt, the library of the Social Democratic politician Hermann Brill was accessible to us, and in it I discovered one of the rare copies of the first edition of Kapital from 1867; even at first glance, categorical differences in the conceptualization and also the questioning of the theory of value, which were at best only hinted at in the second edition, became apparent. In the hundred-year discussion of Marx's theory of value, this older text had been completely passed over; only the popularized and far less interesting appendix "The Value Form" had been republished in the GDR; there was a Japanese reprint, but its existence was hardly known and it was also ignored in the GDR. In a private study group at the political science seminar - Walter Euchner, G. Dill, Gisela Kress, Helmut Reichelt, Gert Schäfer and Dieter Senghaas participated - we dealt with this text, which, however, left all too many questions open. Of course, we were especially interested in the problem of the "dialectical contradiction," which was still identifiable in the first edition in the analysis of the equivalent forms, while it had almost disappeared in the second edition. My student friend Helmut Reichelt and I sought out Horkheimer together, who was to provide us with enlightenment on the problem of the commodity as a "unity of opposites." Unbeknownst to us, a discussion of the problems of value theory had taken place at the emigrated Institute for Social Research, which had not been particularly fruitful, as well as the fact that Henryk Grossmann, whom Adorno called his "teacher," had stated in a manuscript published later: "What the opposition of use value and value in the commodity consists in (...) has not even been treated as a problem so far. "56
Grossmann's own treatment of this basic dialectical problem, however, was not particularly convincing either, and Horkheimer as well as Adorno knew it only too well; both, especially Horkheimer, encouraged us to continue working on this problem and referred us to Friedrich Pollock, who was even more taciturn with regard to the question of the "dialectical contradiction", but also emphasized the necessity of working on these problems and then also tried not to discourage us.
From a Hegel lecture by Horkheimer's collaborator Karl Heinz Haag, the category of "doubling" had impressed itself on me, which, when I saw it at work in the first edition of Kapital and especially in the Grundrisse, seemed to offer the general key to Marx's dialectic. Together with some reflections on the then quite unknown value-form analysis, I made this the focus of a Marx paper to be delivered in Adorno's Hauptseminar in the winter semester of 1964/65. Presentations, even protocols were basically discussed in advance with Adorno's collaborators; I turned to Haag, who fortunately was able to talk me out of the idea that the commodity-money equation and the doubling structure structuring it "refute" the theorem of identity. Instead, he suggested the formulation: the equation is the "dialectical cancellation of the theorem of identity" - Adorno let this pass, expressed himself neither positively nor critically. The problem remains unsolved to this day.
The paper, which I then developed into a diploma thesis completed in 1968, spurred Hans-Jürgen Krahl, who later became a student leader, to deal with Marx's texts on the theory of value, which were still unknown to him at the time; and even by way of his papers, which were published after his untimely death, the category of "doubling" - Krahl preferred the more distinguished term "duplicity"57 - quickly enjoyed great popularity. Parts of the thesis were published in 1969 in the Beiträgen zur marxistischen Erkenntnistheorie (Contributions to Marxist Epistemology) edited by Alfred Schmidt, which in the years of the student movement achieved the unusually high editions usual at the time and were immediately translated into several languages; translations of Zur Dialektik der Wertform exist in a total of eleven languages.
In terms of content, Zur Dialektik can still claim a certain interest, especially in terms of reception history; with a certain limitation, this also applies to the materials for the reconstruction of Marx's theory of value, which were oriented on a basic idea of Helmut Reichelt. His dissertation Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriß bei Karl Marx, published in 1970, had also taken its starting point from the category of "doubling", but beyond that from a more comprehensive basic problem: Max Horkheimer's reflections on the problem of "dialectical representation", brought back to mind for the first time by Alfred Schmidt, which Reichelt now began to reconstruct on the basis of the hitherto completely unknown "development method" of the Rohentwurf; in doing so, he succeeded in providing the significant proof that Marx's theory of "simple circulation" had been interpreted by Engels as the so-called "theory of simple commodity production". This misunderstanding has caused untold confusion in the hundred years of reception and criticism of Marx's theory of value.
On the basis of this discovery, I undertook in the Materialen a critique of the Marxist reception of that Engelsian misinterpretation, which was to be followed by further misunderstandings and simplifications, especially in his 1859 review of Marx's Critique. Today one may pass them over shaking one's head, but Soviet Marxism elevated them to the rank of canonized doctrines, especially the so-called "dialectic of the logical and the historical". Part I of the Materialen, in particular, contains something like a "pathology of Marxist national economics," whose internal disputes are based primarily on the popularized and fragmentary character of Marx's theory of money and value, which Soviet Marxism had withdrawn from any public discussion. A core idea of the following parts is my interpretation of Marx's theory of value as a "critique of premonetary theories of value." Here I have to add self-critically that in this interpretation too little weight has been given to the difference between value and exchange value. It is true that especially the "value form IV" of the first edition of Capital, which no longer appears in the second edition, presents a pre-monetary value form, which on the one hand is supposed to emerge necessarily from the "simple" one, and which on the other hand nevertheless has an aporetic, self-cancelling structure; in such a way that a plurality of this form, a multiplicity of "forms IV" cannot be conceived; This in turn means that an exchange of premonetary commodities cannot be thought either; the "exchange process" of such premonetary commodities fails, it remains conceptually underdetermined, as this is demonstrated in the second chapter of Capital.
These considerations should be adhered to in principle, but one should be careful not to reject "premonetary value" per se. It remains the case that a premonetary exchange value cannot be pluralized, thus also the popular models of a natural economy, i.e. premonetary exchange economy, suffer from logical contradictions; but this cannot mean that also the premonetary "absolute" value cannot be thought. Marx's "surplus value" is of course also a premonetary one, and that value in general whose "general characters" "contradict" its "existence" in a "certain" commodity is likewise a premonetary one. However, the "development" of the contradiction is not able to produce a commodity determined by exchange value, but only a commodity determined by price; the "general characters" of the premonetary value in general do not "appear" and realize themselves in a premonetary exchange value structure, but immediately in the monetary commodity-money structure. The premonetary value in general is not able to realize itself in a premonetary exchange value, but in its own premonetary character it is insofar highly real. This value is the "ens realissimum"58 in Adorno's sense, the motor of "dialectical development," a principle that is ultimately realized only movement of capital in the world market.
As one can see, the Materialien as well as On the Dialectics of the Value Form also suffer from the fact that I was just as unaware of the scope of the conceptualization of the "short outline" of April 2, 1858 as I was of that of the résumé of the value theory in the first edition. In general, the problems of a "reconstruction" are much more difficult for me today than they were twenty-five years ago; that individual authors are hopelessly overtaxed in this, I had indicated with the title Materialen: only some building blocks should be offered. This idea was a bit naive, since it is primarily about the "reconstruction" of the "method". The sentence from the correspondence that Marx had "hidden" his method, I had just as much overlooked as any Marx interpreter so far; only about five years ago I became aware of it.
With all these reservations, the materials may nevertheless contain some useful thoughts. The essay On the Dialectics of the Value Form essentially contains programmatic considerations which were to determine to a large extent the problems of the following works and have partly maintained their topicality insofar as they still designate unsolved problems. Others, understandably, can only be characterized as the very first attempts to thematize the problem of abstract value-representation, i.e. of real abstraction and dialectical contradiction - its resolution is bound to the elaboration of the "other logic" in the sense of Derrida, which in turn presupposes the possibility of "re-functioning" the Hegelian logic of essence and concept. For this again nobody will want to claim even "in jest" that "absolutely concise answers" are available, since this raises the "ancient" "basic questions of philosophy" going back to Plato39 If one compares the first essay of 1969 with the text Zur logischen Misere der Nationalökonomie written in 1997, it will strike the reader that the same authors are discussed again and again, often even the same quotations. What are the reasons that I always end up discussing Simmel's philosophy of money and about half a dozen national economic authors who, apart from Schumpeter, are hardly known by name to a younger economist?
The subject of my work is basically always only one: the problem of fetishism. It presents itself threefold: as that of the objectified nature of the economic object, then as the problem of its contradictory structure, i.e. as the problem of unity and difference, and finally as that of its analysis on the basis of non-empirical theories. There are hardly more than half a dozen economic authors in German economics who have dealt with these highly controversial issues - apart from the fact that this has not once been done under the explicit problem of the "fetishism" of commodity, money and capital. Thus it is to be understood that, from a methodological point of view, these few authors, in comparison with the "classical" ones in the broader sense, deserve an attention which is by no means commensurate with their public effectiveness. If economics has hardly taken note of the subtitle of Capital - critique of political economy in the sense of a "critique of economic categories" - in the more than hundred years of discussion about this work, this is obviously due to the fact that the vast majority of economists have avoided and still avoid the main theme of this critique, the fetish character of economic categories, like the proverbial devil avoids holy water. This is understandable, since there are good reasons for the assumption that economic theory must fail to come to terms with the fetishistic structure of the economic object. With the question of the object always arises at the same time the Marxian question, "Gegenständlichkeit von was?" (II.6/4) - and it is obvious that academic economics must owe the answer.
Now every economic category is a "objective form" (II.6/13) and as such always a "subjective-objective" one, the so-called "absolute price" not excepted. The formalistic price theories - both the Walrasian and the Neo-Ricardian - come into being by preparing a "relative price" out of the so-called "absolute price", which is made accessible to all kinds of mathematical manipulations under the precondition of the leveling of product and factor prices; the system of equations of so-called "relative prices" obtained in this way needs no more than a "relative price". "This is done by means of the quantity equation, in which aggregated "absolute prices" are present as a constitutive element, i.e. "objective" and "subjective-objective" forms (II.4. .1/122), which as such "crazy forms" (25/483) remain undered, i.e., presupposed. In this apparently merely formal procedure, the economic model theorist commits a category error. He overlooks the categorial difference between the absolute and the relative price: the absolute presents itself as a subjectively objective category, the relative, however, as a product of abstraction, is a model concept, something merely subjective; its transformation back into the absolute price is only possible under the condition that the genesis of its objectivity can be shown, the "Vergegenständlichung": it would have to be possible to show how the "objectified form" springs from the "concept" - constitution-theoretical attempts such as those made by Marx and Simmel in their value-form analyses. But neither one nor the other has been heard by the economic model theorist. He does not seem to need them because his procedure is based on a gigantic fraud, a fraud of the objectivity of his model concepts: by always claiming already real, i.e. absolute prices, which he would have to derive, that of the quantity equation. This is supposed to provide him the "bridges to reality" - but to which one? It is the one which will always remain inaccessible to his model-theoretical procedure: that of the "abstract" and yet "real" concreteness. The step from model to reality, i.e. from subjective concept to subjective-objective category, would have to plunge him into the abyss of a conceptuality which, as "metaphysical" or even "dialectical", still sends shivers down his spine. Therefore, he has to accept that, like a deus ex machina, the most ghostly thing appears, the "objective equivalence" in the form of the axiom of circulation, to which he is already referred on the model-theoretical level of relative prices. What "objective" is supposed to mean here, he is never able to articulate conceptually; the "objective" remains a ghost in subjectivist economics, in neo-Ricardian economics an eternal riddle, for the solution of which a little pinch of Marx is demanded; somehow the neo-Ricardian thinks to know that it is about the social, which he calculates - and for this social, even in the neo-Ricardian view, Marx remains responsible - even Alfred Amonn wanted to have this recognized.
The nominalist critique, which Marx characterized as "skepticism in political economy" (26.3/106), began early on with the problem of the ghostly social-economic objectivity. But he did not want to take this flattened form of skepticism too seriously; Marx, as a connoisseur of genuine, i.e. ancient skepticism, did well to place a "distrust in this distrust "60 . Bailey criticized the so-called "absolute value", but he wanted to hold on to the relative value, thus to the price. Marx, however, took Bailey at his word, analyzed his definitions and showed him that "his >relationship to money< is merely imaginary" (26.3/153 fn.), thus even the price is "imaginary" for him, thus in every economic category "there is certainly no sense "61 and nobody can say "what all this wants to say "62 - thus only the "path of despair" remains open, the "despair of the (. ...) natural conceptions (...) and opinions", that it therefore depends on a "performing skepticism",163 i.e. on dialectics.
To all those anti-value-theoretical economists, the Marxian criticism applies - that their forms are "merely imaginary and groundless" (26.2/188). With the keyword "groundlessness", meaning the groundlessness of phenomena, we are back to the topic of "skepticism in political economy", namely the basic problem of the "incomprehensibility", "indeterminacy" or "meaninglessness" of national economic quantities and objects as well as the "logical misery" and "methodological tragedy" of national economics.
The required "pathology" of this subject can consist in nothing else than the elaboration of an aporetics of fetishistic thinking in national economics; in the first essay such an attempt is made on the example of Alfred Amonn, the most prominent methodologist of German national economics; his errors and confusions are not to be attributed to weaknesses of thinking of this astute analyst, but to the unsuitability of the neo-Kantian methodology as well as to the perfidy of the national economic object.
It remains for me to thank Michael Hintz for the emphatic assistance he has given me as a friend and bookseller, Joachim Bruhn, who has tried his hand at me as a materialist obstetrician, and finally and most cordially Stefan Krauss, who has taken upon himself the great trouble of checking the scientific apparatus for correctness and bringing it up to date.