Cody Without Organs’ recent substack post on Marx, “Notes on Marx”, attempts at “igniting a deeply scientific, materialistic, metaphysical, and even theological production of the political philosophy of Marx to a standard that must be demanded of ‘theoretical marxists’ today.” The aim of my essay is the exploration of the litany of misreadings, mischaracterizations and theoretical errors pervading the piece, despite the alleged mission statement. In the process, some of the core concepts of Marx’s Capital will be explored in a significantly more productive and rigorous fashion than what is displayed in Cody’s essay. Hopefully, then, this work can act as both a critique of lazy scholarship and a productive exploration of the concepts and structure of the Critique of Political Economy.
I place large emphasis on the concept of commodity fetishism, even though this is not central to Cody’s essay. This is because it is synonymous with one of the actual tenets of the essay, Marx’s value theory, and reveals the gaping theoretical and intellectual vapidity laying at its heart. The misunderstanding of commodity fetishism and the subsequent explanation of the relationship between value and communism/the worker’s movement are but one and the same topic, because it is within the actual Marxian concept of the commodity fetish that the real structure of value and its relevance to communist political movements becomes evident. Along the way, we’ll discover that Cody’s essay is deeply embedded in exactly what Marx’s analysis actually denotes as fetishistic, and that it comes to political conclusions regarding the constitution of communism antithetical to those of Marx.
1 | Value
First, the Marxist concept of value must be explored, as a precondition for a refutation of the ideological and fetishistic notion of value that Cody presents in her essay.
Marx begins Capital with an explicit definition of the scope of its analysis and the object of its concepts. “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of commodities.” (Marx, Capital 1, Penguin Publishers, pg. 125, emphasis added). Already, in the first sentence, Marx signals that whatever defines the commodity, whatever makes it a commodity, is specific to the capitalist mode of production. What stamps it so? Marx’s unambiguous answer is value:
Use-values […] constitute the material content of wealth, whatever its social form may be. In the form of society to be considered here they are also the material bearers of … exchange-value” (pg. 126) and again on pg. 131: “A thing can be a use-value without being a value […] A thing can be useful, and a product of human labour, without being a commodity […] In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use-values, but use-values for others, social use-values.
Marx clearly indicates that the specificity of the production and circulation of commodities derives from the value-characteristic of the object. How? Let’s take a look at Marx’s answer.
In sub-chapter 4 of Chapter 1, the Fetishism of the Commodity And Its Secret, among other things (which we will get to), Marx explores the constitution of value itself as a surface phenomena of bourgeois society. He says:
the equality of the kinds of human labour takes on a physical form in the equal objectivity of the products of labour as values; the measure of the expenditure of human labour-power by its duration takes on the form of the magnitude of the value of the products of labour […] Since the producers do not come into social contact until they exchange the products of their labour, the specific social characteristics of their private labours appear only within this exchange […] the labour of the private individual manifests itself as an element of the total labour of society only through the relations which the act of exchange establishes between the products, and, through their mediation, between the producers […] the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work.” (pg. 164-66), and again on pg. 167: “the specific social character of private labours carried on independently of each other consists in their equality as human labour, and, in the product, assumes the form of existence of value.
Let’s explore what Marx is saying, starting with the concepts of private and social labour. The characteristic of value is the mechanism whereby the private producer is related to the total act of social production. This is because labour appears, in the value-objectivity of the commodity, as homogeneous human labour. This equalization of private labour through the product of labour allows products to be exchanged and for an all-round process of social metabolism to mediate the relationships between the various private commodity producers. This is expressed explicitly in money, exchange-value, as the mediation of particular products in a general social object that expresses their value-objectivity within a distinct entity. Producers can then exchange their product for money, which becomes the general mediator of this mediation/relationship between private and social labour. This fetish-objectivity of the product of labour as a value is a specific way commodity producers relate to each other in a capitalist economy within a social division of labour based on private property.
The measure of the value of the product is abstract socially necessary labour-time only under these specific conditions, i.e. under the conditions of capitalist production. The exchange of commodities for money, and the use of this money to further purchase a separate commodity, is an expression of the fact that private labours must be quantitatively equalized within the exchange-relation in order for a specific (capitalist) organization of the social process of production to occur. The organization of production via the qualitative character of abstract labour and the quantitative congruence of private labours is the basic definition of the function and existence of what Marx calls value. In contrast, if we presuppose a feudal character of production, the direction and socialization of production is mediated via personal and direct political tincture. Therefore, the product of the feudal process of production possesses no value (except within the interstices of the feudal social body), taxes are paid in kind and surplus-labour does not appear as directed towards the accumulation of capital (value + surplus-value). Production is immediately presupposed as for and within society, and therefore, outside capitalist relations of production, the general mediation of the relationship between private and social labour is not established on the basis of a value-objectivity of the commodity.
To fully explore the relationship between value and capitalist production would require a lengthy digression into the processes and mechanisms of dialectical analysis. Instead, a brief note on Marx’s own position will have to suffice:
In the completed bourgeois system […] everything posited is also a presupposition, this is the fact with every organic system […] In the first section, where exchange-values, money, prices are looked at, commodities always appear as already present […] We know that they (commodities) express aspects of social production, but the latter itself is the presupposition. However they are not posited in this character […] [the surface of bourgeois society] points beyond itself towards the economic relations which are posited as relations of production. The internal structure of production therefore forms the second section […] the whole system of bourgeois production is presupposed before exchange-value appears as the simple point of departure on the surface. (Marx, Grundrisse, quoted in Elson/Banaji’s Value: the Representation of Labour in Capitalism, a collection published by Verso)
What Marx is saying here is that the commodity (and therefore value, as we have shown) as a simple surface phenomena of capitalist production presupposes the total structure, and therefore further categorical developments of Capital such as capitalist production, circulation, social reproduction and the transformation of values into prices of production. So, Marx’s conclusion has incontestably been shown to be that value (in its immediate form as the commodity) is the most general expression of bourgeois political economy, being the “surface” of commodity circulation, and the general way in which capitalist commodity producers (and Marx consistently states that generalized commodity production presupposes capitalism, see for ex. pg. 951 “it is only with the emergence of capitalist production that use-value is universally mediated by exchange-value”) relate to each other. I could pile quote on top of quote on this topic (for another example, see the famous Letter to Kugelmann of July 11, 1868), but the point is proven. The commodity is the germ-form of capitalist production, and as a value forms the departure from which capitalist relations of production can be dialectically explicated.
2 | Cody and the Commodity Fetish
I apologize for the lengthy foregoing analysis of Marx’s theory of value, but it was necessary to set up the following treatment of the unfortunate way Cody deals with value, ontology, history and the concept of the commodity fetish.
In her essay, Cody quotes Marx saying “all commodities are crystallisations of the same substance”, referring to the representation of labour in exchange-value. She then follows this with the remark:
The Spinozism of this particularly lies in the notion of a same substance by which all things are connected, this is called Monism. All is one or connected to/by the One.
It follows from this that, flying in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, Cody understands Marx’s value theory as ontologically constitutive of existence itself! In fact, branching off from the initial remark on Spinoza, Cody consistently attributes this ontological import to value and labour throughout the essay:
The Spinozism of Marx here is that Exchange Value is simply the way in which different Use Values are made equivalent to one another. These values are garnered in the commodity through the process of labour […] The value of the product of labour ultimately gives the labour its value in return; when someone plucks bananas all-day from a tree, their labour is as valuable as the bananas plucked.
Regardless of whether, at one point, Cody adds that labour is ambiguously given its value within exchange, these quotes clearly show that she understands value and labour as, in some way, intimately connected at the level of existence itself.
To briefly digress to a seemingly unrelated field, shortly after these questionable interpretations of Marxist value theory, Cody gives the following definition of what Marx calls commodity fetishism:
The fact that we ‘forget’ (one must be concerned here with Ideology and Power more so than psychology) that the value of a commodity, such as an apple, is composed not only of its ability to nourish, nor its flavour (its qualities) but also of the labour which goes into it, and the fact that under capitalism this same labour is granted less reward or value than of its own product, that the worker who produced the apple is paid less then the value of the apple itself, Marx calls Commodity Fetishism.
This definition is thoroughly incorrect, and unrelated to anything Marx ever said. If you disagree, feel free to message me a quote where he explicitly says something to the contrary. Or, you could not waste your time, because such a quote does not exist. Not within the corpus of texts surrounding Capital itself, nor in Marx’s early works, since at that point he did not possess nor use the language of “commodity fetishism”. To explore why, let’s deal with the actual text itself.
In the previously quoted sub-chapter 4 of Chapter 1 of Capital, Marx gives his actual definition of the fetishism surrounding commodities. To explore this ourselves, we will make a distinction between the fetish character of the commodity, and commodity fetishism proper. The former is explained by Marx thus:
The value character of the products of labour becomes firmly established only when they act as magnitudes of value. These magnitudes vary continually, independently of the will, foreknowledge and actions of the exchangers. Their own movement within society has for them the form of a movement made by things, and these things, far from being under their control, in fact control them. (pg. 168)
Marx is expressing here that, under the conditions of commodity production, value in actuality mediates the relationships between commodity producers. The “market” is in fact the general way in which they are socially interconnected, and this “control”, or more acutely ‘externality of the producer from his object’, comes to be obvious when value mediates itself in money. When the commodity stands for the particular, and money for the general, incarnation of value, value exists outside the direct producers as their fate. If they do not sell their product, if they cannot successfully metamorphose their product into the socially uniform objectivity of the general equivalent, then their labour will not be socialized. The motif of the subject/object inversion is a common one throughout Marx’s work (and the question of its scientific or ideological character, as covered by Althusser &co., is not necessary here), but the point here is that, within Capital, it takes on the form of the existence of value itself. Value is an expression of the fact that relations are not directly social, that they are controlled and mediated by an alien objectivity. Social labour as an object (value) is the fetish character of the commodity.
Another noteworthy aspect of this description of commodity fetishism (the only extensive and explicit one within Capital) is that it is introduced before the concept of capital and wage-labour by over a hundred pages and several chapters. This is because, within the capital-relation (value self-valorizing through the capitalist process of production), the capitalist is not the arbiter of fetishism, of the “forgetting”. It is conceptually impossible for commodity fetishism to be by definition and completely linked with wage-labour, as it is in Cody’s essay. Marx lucidly makes this clear in Chapter 4 when he describes capital (M-C-M’) as an “automatic subject”, and in the Results of the Direct Process of Production when he says:
The self-valorization of capital — the creation of surplus-value — is therefore the determining, dominating and overriding purpose of the capitalist; it is the absolute motive and content of his activity. And in fact is is no more than the rationalized motive and aim of the hoarder — a highly impoverished and abstract content which makes it plain that the capitalist is just as enslaved by the relationship of capitalism as is his opposite pole, the worker, albeit in quite a different manner. (pg. 990 of the Penguin edition of volume 1)
Marx’s theory of the structure of capitalism, contrary to Cody’s assertion, has nothing to do with with the idea that “the value of time and of wage labour is managed by a class of barbaric, apathetic, narcissistic hoarders”. This analysis of capitalist subjectivity is contrary to the structure of economic agency laid out in volume 3, but that would require an entirely new essay. This is partly demonstrated below, however, in Marx’s critique of both the capitalist and the worker’s experience of surplus-value under the concept of the “value of labour”. Instead, I’ll simply say that this vulgar understanding of class weasels its way into Cody’s analysis of commodity fetishism, and it’s just as incorrect there as it is when conceived a general theory of capitalist social relations.
Commodity fetishism, as it is typically understood (indeed as Cody understands it), involves a forgetting. This is partially true, but the exact qualifications of what this entails come to the forefront when Marx discusses the Political Economists. Marx’s most cogent commentary on this matter comes towards the end of the sub-chapter on fetishism:
Political economy has indeed analysed value and its magnitude, however incompletely, and has uncovered the content concealed within these forms. But it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product. These formulas, which bear the unmistakable stamp of belonging to a social formation in which the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite, appear to the political economists’ bourgeois consciousness to be as much a self-evident and nature-imposed necessity as productive labour itself. (pg. 173-75)
Marx critiques the Political Economists for transhistoricizing the expression of labour as value, when in fact it is the product of a specific, bourgeois, historical epoch. Value appears to the bourgeois consciousness to be a “nature-imposed necessity”, rather than the product of specific and definite capitalist social relations. Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism, when he isn’t discussing the fetishistic reality of value itself, consists in perceiving the homogeneity of labour in its product as independent and ontologically constitutive of existence itself.
I hope the purpose of my choice of digression has become clear now. Apart from Cody’s ridiculous explanation of commodity fetishism, which I hope bears no further rebuking at this point, it has become clear that Cody’s understanding of value is commodity fetishism itself. Exactly what she’s criticizing takes up an overwhelming majority of her commentary on Marx’s texts. The notion that the value of an apple is, independently of all social relations (which inheres in Cody’s notion of fetishism as a “forgetting” of a constitutive reality), the labour put into it, is precisely what Marx denotes as the bourgeois consciousness of the Political Economists. When Marx asks why labour takes the form of value, indicating it as an effect of a specific social structure, he is critiquing the very essence of Cody’s value theory. This becomes obvious once we continue to Marx and Cody’s diverging analyses of surplus-value and communism.
3 | Profit and Labour-power: Marx vs. Cody
In her essay, Cody develops the notion of communism as the reclamation of “the full value of time. the full value of the day.” She claims to derive this interpretation from Marx, but from what has preceded, it would strike us as quite strange if Marx suggested the socialization of labour through value within communism. Marx’s whole standpoint rests on the super-cession of capitalist forms of social organization, and if my analysis holds true, then certainly Marx couldn’t base communism on the continued existence of value, the most basic one of them all. The precise answer to this dilemma is that Marx never puts forward this interpretation of communism or labour. To prove this, lets first turn to the concepts of surplus-value and theft.
In Chapter 5 of volume 1, after developing the formula for capital, M-C-M’, or money-commodity-money (increased by m△), Marx delves into the surface impossibility of this process. Since the foundations of the circulation of commodities, the equality of labour within its quantitative expression as a value, never permits anything but equivalents to be exchanged, how is it possible for value to self-valorize? After rejecting a series of classical answers to this question, Marx comes to the conclusion that surplus-value is impossible within the sphere of circulation alone. We must turn to the “hidden abode” of production, where there exists a peculiar commodity that holds the secret to this process.
The change in value of the money which has to be transformed into capital cannot take place in the money itself […] Just as little can this change originate in the second act of circulation, the resale of the commodity […] The change must therefore take place in the commodity which is bought in the first act of circulation, M-C, but not in its value, for it is equivalents which are being exchanged, and the commodity is paid for at its full value. The change can therefore originate only in the actual use-value of the commodity, i.e. in its consumption. In order to extract value out of the consumption of a commodity, our friend the money-owner must be lucky enough to find within the sphere of circulation, on the market, a commodity whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being an objectification of labour, hence a creation of value. The possessor of money does find such a special commodity on the market: the capacity for labour, in other words labour-power […] The value of labour-power is determined, as in the case of every other commodity, by the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this specific article […] For his maintenance he requires a certain quantity of the means of subsistence […] the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner […] the value of labour-power, and the value which that labour-power valorizes in the labour-process, are two entirely different magnitudes […] the laws governing the exchange of commodities have not been violated in any way. Equivalent has been exchanged for equivalent. (pg. 270, 274, 301)
Therefore, what is Marx’s solution to the ‘Contradictions in the General Formula’? That equivalents are exchanged within the capitalist process of production, due to the fact that the magnitude of the value of labour-power, the actual commodity the labourer alienates, and the magnitude of value the use-value of that commodity, labour, is capable of creating, are two entirely separate quantities. The capitalist can make a profit in accordance with the law of value, which is non-other than the law of the exchange of equivalents, because the commodity he’s paying for is not labour, not labour-time. This contradicts greatly with Cody’s explanation of the process of profit and its relation to value:
Wages are the value given to time. The time of the labourer. A worker who makes £7 an hour is deemed to have their time worth indeed only £7 per hour […] What should we demand today? The full value of time. The full value of the day.
With Cody, we are taken back to pre-Marxist, a-scientific phraseology. In Marx, the value of labour-power is distinguished from the value of labour, the latter being a nonsensical phrase that amounts to a tautological “value of value”. Cody makes precisely what Marx sought, an explanation of surplus in accordance with the exchange of equivalent quantities of value, inexplicable through her shoddy conceptual work. However, you don’t have to take it from me, you can take it from Marx himself! Let’s turn to Chapter 19 of volume 1:
what is the value of a commodity? The objective form of the social labour expended in its production. And how do we measure the quantity of this value? By the quantity of the labour contained in it. how then is the value, e.g., of a 12-hour working day to be determined? By the 12 working hours contained in a working day of 12 hours, which is an absurd tautology […] Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but it has no value itself. In the expression ‘value of labour’, the concept of value is not only completely extinguished, but inverted, so that it becomes its contrary. It is an expression as imaginary as the value of the earth […] Classical political economy’s unconsciousness of this result of its own analysis and its uncritical acceptance of the categories ‘value of labour’, ‘natural price of labour’, etc. as the ultimate and adequate expression for the value-relation under consideration, led it into inextricable confusions and contradictions […] while it offered a secure base of operations to the vulgar economists who, in their shallowness, make it a principle to worship appearances only […] All the notions of justice held by both the worker and the capitalist, all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production, all capitalism’s illusions about freedom, all the apologetic tricks of vulgar economics, have as their basis the form of appearance discussed above, which makes the actual relation invisible […] Classical political economy stumbles approximately onto the true state of affairs, but without consciously formulating it. It is unable to do this as long as it stays within its bourgeois skin. (pg. 675-682)
If the reader cries out in protest, but Cody merely used the phraseology “value of time”! not “value of labour”! a few seconds of reflection will reveal that when Marx speaks of the labour constitution of value, he means labour-time, precisely what Cody is referring to when she says “time”. Therefore, from the mouth of Marx himself, Cody’s analysis is 1) tautologous 2) vulgar and 3) shallow. At best, her analysis yields a confused description of a real motion that “must first be discovered by science” (pg. 682). Explicitly, in Marx’s text, the most lenient we can be with Cody’s arbitrary model of wages is that it is completely foreign to actual scientific materialism. Labour-time is the constitution of value, but itself has no value. There is no “full-value” of a day, there is no “full-value” to be demanded. The quantity paid in wages, in full concordance with the laws of commodity exchange (which are nothing but the laws of value itself), i.e. with the exchange of equivalents, is the value of labour-power. This alone is the solution to the contradictions of the existence of profit present within the sphere of simple circulation. This difference, however, has deep political implications, to be explored next.
4 | Communism and Value: Marx vs. Cody cont.
To begin this section in a similar way to the previous: based on our analysis, would it not be strange if Marx’s concept of communism involved the demand for the full value of labour-time? Once again, the answer to the non-alignment of Cody's Marx and our Marx lays in the fact that Cody’s essay and its political conclusions have nothing to do with the actual Marx. To begin with Cody’s conclusions regarding profit, i.e. that communism consists in the reclamation of surplus-value, Marx has this to say:
‘profit on capital’ is in actual fact not ‘a deduction from, or robbery of, the worker’ […] even if only equivalents were exchanged in the exchange of commodities, the capitalist — as soon as he pays the worker the real value of his labour-power — would have every right, i.e. such right as corresponds to this mode of production, to surplus-value […] the production of commodities necessarily becomes “capitalist” production of commodities at a certain point, and that according to the law of value governing it, the “surplus-value” rightfully belongs to the capitalist and not the worker. (Marx, Notes on Adolph Wagner)
What Marx is saying here is complex. What this often quoted passage boils down to, however, is that as long as social production is the production of value (the “right corresponding to this mode of production […] according to the law of value governing it”), the extraction of surplus-value is both necessary and in accord with the structure of labour-values. It in no way arises from a violation of the law of value, contrary to what Cody believes. Only capitalist production is the generalized production of value, as only then does value in its self-movement take over the whole social process of production. Only then does everything enter into the production process as a commodity, because only then is the worker himself a commodity. As demonstrated above, our starting point, the ‘simple circulation of commodities’, is merely the surface of capitalist production. Once this surface is reflected into itself as the surface of capitalist production, we discover that what is constitutive of value producing labour is that it is wage-labour, labour for the capitalist. Cody’s political conclusions, therefore, are inexorably connected with the continuation and perpetuation of capitalist social structures.
Before we demonstrate Marx’s extreme divergence from Cody’s political/economic conclusions, one preliminary is necessary. For Marx, money is “a law of the expression of the product as a commodity” (Marx, Capital volume 2, Chapter XVIII, sub-chapter II). Therefore, value production (concomitant with commodity production, as previously demonstrated), necessitates money. With this out of the way, we can explore Marx’s critique of Proudhon at the beginning of the Grundrisse, and its implications for Cody’s value theory:
It should further be examined, or rather it would be a part of the general question, whether the different civilized forms of money — metallic, paper, credit money, labour money (the last-named as the socialist form) — can accomplish what is demanded of them without suspending the very relation of production which is expressed in the category money, and whether it is not a self-contradictory demand to wish to get around essential determinants of a relation by means of formal modification? (Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin Classics, pg. 123)
We must ask, therefore, along with Marx, whether Cody can get around the essential determinants of bourgeois value production by a utopian abolition of the class structures of contemporary capitalism? Whether the project of reclaiming the “full value of time” does not preserve the alienating structures of market mediation it is communism’s very goal to abolish? Marx consistently opposes Cody here:
On the basis of exchange values, labour is posited as general only through exchange. But on this foundation [communism] it would be posited as such before exchange; i.e. the exchange of products would in no way be the medium by which the participation of the individual in the general production is mediated […] In the second case, the presupposition is itself mediated; i.e. a communal production, communality, is presupposed as the basis of production. The labour of the individual is posited from the outset as social labour […] He therefore has no particular product to exchange. His product is not an exchange value. The product does not first have to be transposed into a particular form in order to attain a general character for the individual […] the social character of production is presupposed, and participation in the world of products, in consumption, is not mediated by the exchange of mutually independent products of labour. It is mediated, rather, by the social conditions of production within which the individual is active. Those who want to make the labour of the individual directly into money […] into realized exchange value, want therefore to determine that labour directly as general labour, i.e. to negate precisely the conditions under which it must be made into money and exchange values, and under which it depends on private exchange. This demand can be satisfied only under conditions where it can no longer be raised. Labour on the basis of exchange values presupposes, precisely, that neither the labour of the individual nor his product are directly general, that neither the labour of the individual nor his product are directly general; that the product attains this form only be passing through an objective mediation, by means of a form of money distinct from itself. (Marx, Grundrisse, pg. 172)
This extensive, though necessary, quotation, demonstrates that Marx comes to the conclusion: abolish value! don’t reclaim it! Cody’s demand that socialist conditions of production be primarily based upon value, a relation of production that presupposes private labour (note that exchange-value in Grundrisse and value in Capital have roughly the same meaning, Marx’s terminology and concepts in Grundrisse is not fully developed, but regardless exchange-value in Capital is just the self-mediation of value: a critique of this essay on the basis of the divergence of exchange-value from value in the above quotations will not be fruitful), is self-contradictory. The coherence of both myself and Marx against Cody’s sloganeering for the reclamation of the value of time (itself an incoherent concept) has hopefully been sufficiently demonstrated.
5 | Conclusions
Beyond the portions covered here, there are many other strange points and questionable choices in Cody’s essay. The lengthy quotations from Engels’ Principles of Communism, the digressions into Bergson, Buddhist philosophy and Spinozist monism, and the non-existence of Hegel’s actual, well-established impact on the meta-structure of Capital (something acknowledged by Marx himself in a letter to Engels) as well as the philological sophistries, are among them. However, I’d like to focus on the aspirations to the theoretical rigour of Žižek and Deleuze:
Materialist science which has been dealt with especially well by contemporary thinkers such as Deleuze (Spinoza: Practical Philosophy) and Žižek (Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism) […] I hope this makes a solid beginning (as opposed to a Grundrisse, “shaky ground”) to that journey towards unleashing the Virtual Marx haunting the plane of Deleuze's finished and unfinished works
My final point will be merely this, that if you aspire to the conceptual cogency and creative engagement with the text displayed by these two thinkers, you ought to actually understand what they have to say on the concepts covered in this essay. For both Žižek (Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso Books, pg. 8 & 13-16, specifically his exploration of the works of Sohn-Rethel, who is largely in agreement with my position in his book Intellectual and Manual Labour) and Deleuze (Anti-Oedipus, pg. 225-30, also note Deleuze’s consistent engagement with Suzanne de Brunhoff and Samir Amin, who again support the value critical interpretation of Marxism) are completely separate from Cody’s conceptual corpus. this is largely due to the factor of consistent and rigorous engagement with the texts of Capital, Grundrisse, Theories of Surplus-Value etc. The numerous theoretical and factual errors explored in this essay can only, in the end, be chalked up to one thing, bad scholarship.
Many of the conclusions of this essay can be reached by a simple browsing of the literature on Marx’s value theory (Heinrich, Kliman, Elson, Banaji, Postone, Kurz, Althusser, Amin, Clarke, Rubin, Bellofiore, Starsota, Saito etc.), or by simply reading the very first chapter of Capital. There is no great difficulty in reading and understanding these texts, and it’s therefore difficult not to attribute the faults of Cody’s essay to a frantic set of connections between Marx and various other thinkers (he’s a Spinozist! a Hegelian! a Bergsonian! a Deleuzian!) through lengthy and implausible linguistic analysis, rather than a simple straightforward understanding of the text itself. What Cody sees in Capital is also what she doesn’t see. The impatient attempts to draw wide-reaching monistic/philosophical conclusions using a text that is nothing but what it says, a Critique of Political Economy, and using these conclusions to justify half-baked political slogans, are ultimately also what obfuscates the text of Marx for Cody. This is a shame, since in my opinion, there’s nothing more disingenuous than not just letting the text be simple.
points were made!!