Introduction Excerpt for Absolute Ethical Life

INTRODUCTION

Ethical Life and the Life of Capital

“SO, this volume is finished,” Karl Marx rushes off in a letter to his dear friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels, at two o’clock one morning in August 1867. Nestled in London’s leafy northern suburbs, only a short walk from where another refugee, Sigmund Freud, would later settle, Marx’s study enjoyed a view of Maitland Park. From this room, overflowing with books, papers and large printer sheets of proofs, Marx worked ever more frantically, desperate to complete the work. Writing to Engels in Manchester, the reason for such urgency was that he had just corrected the last sheet of a long-awaited manuscript. “Without your self-sacrifice for me,” Marx remarks, “I could not possibly have manged the immense labour demanded by the 3 volumes,” adding in English, “I embrace you full of thanks!” In the months preceding the letter, Marx had been working on an appendix, which he attached in fine print, titled “The Form of Value [Die Wertform].”¹ The forthcoming work, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, was to be Marx’s masterpiece. Despite his exulted frame of mind, the work was never finished. In his lifetime, only the first volume was published. Capital, volume 1, appeared in two German editions and a French translation, which Marx himself painstakingly corrected.

Earlier in June, again across letters, the two men discussed the merit of this appendix. Engels suggested to Marx that his discussion of the “form of value” should be simplified, quipping that it bears the “marks of your carbuncles.” Marx’s skin was red with boils, a condition which plagued him for over a decade and made it increasingly hard for his body to keep up with his work schedule. According to Engels, the explanation of value should be made more accessible

as your philistine really is not accustomed to this kind of abstract thinking and will certainly not torment himself for the sake of the form of value [Wertform]. At most, you could provide rather more extensive historical evidence for the conclusions you have here reached dialectically, you could, so to speak, apply the test of history.

While Engels acknowledges the dialectical structure of Marx’s conceptual categories, where each category is developed immanently leading to the next, he advised that greater historical illustration will simplify the discussion for the reader and make it easier to understand. Engels also recommended that Marx follow a paragraph structure modelled on G.W.F. Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, with section headings making clear each “dialectical transition” and, like a “school text-book,” offering an explanation to “a very large class of readers” mostly unfamiliar with Marx’s dialectical approach, since “one has to make it as easy for them as one possibly can.”²

In his reply, Marx played on the idea that dialectical thought arrives at a new truth immanently, by both affirming and denying at the same moment. He joked “[w]ith regard to the development of the form of value, I have both followed and not followed your advice, thus striking a dialectical attitude in this matter, too.” Marx adjusts the structure of his discussion and adds section headings to help the “‘non-dialectical’ [nichtdialektischen] reader.” However, Marx maintains that the form of value “is crucial for the whole book” since “economists have hitherto overlooked” the way that value is expressed in commodities and money. Marx also retorts, “I hope the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day.”³ Aware of such concerns, he wrote to The Chronicle, a Catholic newspaper in London that showed interest in “things German,” including Hegel, to promote the publication of Capital to an audience more receptive to dialectical thought. Marx described the work as the “first attempt at applying the dialectical method to political economy.”⁴

For the second edition in 1872, Marx altered the structure of the opening chapter, incorporating parts of the 1867 appendix and adding section headings. The treatment of value remains a much-contested aspect of his work—posing the question of Marx’s philosophical influences and his particular method. Marx’s dedication to dialectical thought and the abstractions of value has left many readers putting down Capital without progressing past the initial pages. “Beginnings are always difficult in all sciences,” Marx warns the reader.⁵ Indeed, the difficulty of Capital’s beginning prompted Louis Althusser to recommend the early sections should be rewritten “so that it becomes a ‘beginning’ which is no longer at all ‘difficult,’ but rather simple and easy.”⁶

However, with all its Hegelian subtleties and seemingly obscure digressions, from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Marx’s first chapter and derivation of the value-form provides an opening to comprehend capitalism. Rather than rewriting the beginning of Capital, its fundamental conceptual categories should be unfolded to follow the path of critical investigation made possible by this sequence. The value-form is Marx’s most significant contribution to critical social theory. It is the theoretical innovation which sets him apart from traditional political thought and political economy and accords his analysis of commodity production and exchange with the historical specificity needed to grasp, and critique, capital. In this book, I reject the traditional view of Marx’s theory of value as simply a revision of the “labour theory of value” developed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Many economists, heterodox or otherwise, easily dismiss Marx’s theory of value, assuming it rests upon the same fundamental premises of the classical view.⁷ What emerges from Marx’s Capital is an account of capitalism as a form of life which is constituted by social relations of domination that restrict in fundamental ways the ability of human beings to recognise each other as free and rational beings in a social world of our own creation. My task in this book is to draw out the normative stakes of Marx’s critique of political economy as an understanding of capitalism as a form of life. For Marx, modern society consists of abstract and alienated social forms. His critique of the constitution of such social forms raises moral problems which stretch back through the history of philosophy, politics and economics. From Marx, as I argue, it becomes possible to see ethics, not just in terms of individual ideas of right and wrong behaviour, but as the goal-directed practices that structure social life and its ends. Marx’s analysis of sociality must be reconstructed from his immanent critique of classical political economy. However his critical social theory must be distinguished from the object of this reckoning.

In a distinctive way, the dialectic between ethics and politics is part of Marx’s adoption, adaptation and absorption of a tradition with an expansive conception of ethical life—a tradition he shares with Aristotle and Hegel. Marx finds an ontology of social being in Aristotle. Since human beings are political by nature, for Aristotle, the basis for ethical virtue is provided by the practical activity of rational agents as they contribute to the flourishing, what he calls eudaimonia, of the polis. As for Hegel, reality itself is ethical. The expression of decisively modern and collective self-understanding is the composition of rational institutions, constituted by subjects who can objectively determine social life beyond the egotism of civil society to the mutual recognition and self-consciousness of ethical life entwined in the fabric of the political community. Marx takes from Hegel the conceptualisation of historical forms of being as socially determinate and relational. Like Hegel, Marx seeks the realisation of social freedom in mutual recognition. Cut from the same cloth, Marx shares with Hegel and Aristotle the need for a politics that grasps human action as rational and goal driven. For all three thinkers, the end of social life is the living good of human flourishing. The exact practices and institutions which might realise the good might vary between them; however, each thinker looks to the dynamics of political life as a compass for normative meaning. I argue that Marx’s value-form theory provides the crucial means for grasping the ethical dimension of his immanent critique. Marx’s analysis of the specific dynamics of social life identifies the contradictions within the forms he sets out to investigate based on their internal logic and relationship to the social whole. Marx goes on to show the normative limitations apparent in these forms, which point to new social practices, activities and forms of life. Marx’s theory of the value-form is the result of a close engagement with Aristotle and Hegel. The beginning of Marx’s Capital bears the mark of Aristotle’s Ethics and Hegel’s Logic. As I will show, Marx’s dialogic procedure redeems and reinvents the flourishing, eudaimonia, of Aristotle’s political community and the living good in what Hegel calls Sittlichkeit, ethical life. I argue this normative antecedence shines through Marx’s value-form theory and empowers his idea of emancipation.

My interpretation highlights the form-determinations operative in Marx’s critique of bourgeois economic categories. The most basic category for Marx’s theorisation of modern society is “the commodity.” The commodity-form is the abstraction from which Marx derives the dual characteristics of wage-labour—the bifurcation between social and private labour in the production of commodities made specifically for exchange. Such objects are values in terms of their practical use and necessary exchange. Commodities appear before us reflecting both qualities and quantities. But commodities only realise their potentiality as value when they are socially actualised by sale on the market. Thus, “value” is the complex metamorphosis of social forms, which Marx unfolds across the volumes of Capital, beginning with the use and exchange of commodities and proceeding to the “trinity form” of capital-profit, land-rent and labour-wages. Marx shows the process in which individual and social goods are subsumed by the logic of exchange and equated with our ability to buy and sell on the market. However, as a result of the need to continue the accumulation and valorisation of surplus value, the end of human flourishing inevitably loses out to the ends of capital’s reproduction. Things cannot be said to be created and exchanged based on how socially useful they are for human beings with complex and multifaceted needs living in communities. Instead, the market trades commodities based on their exchange principle, “value,” to derive surplus and make profit. Individuals are pitted against each other, and the social logic of wage-labour means that a defining feature of our relationships to other human beings is as buyers and sellers of commodities. This form of life is premised on an abstract sociality, since the form of value-producing labour specific to capitalism contains both private and social activity. Value is a social relation, but it is an expression of human labour, depending upon the particular social organisation of privately performed labouring tasks. Labour tasks are equalised by the market, which socially mediates the function of this activity. Abstract labour is the social activity that produces commodities to be sold as values. In turn, value is actualised through its metamorphosis into different social forms and its realisation as capital. Capital becomes “self-valorising value”—a force acting on the world as if independent of human action. What Marx unfolds through his dialectic of the value-form is the manner in which value is a social category comprising abstract forms of life. Value, as Marx maintains, is “purely social.”⁸

Marx, more than any other thinker, exposes the social mechanisms that underpin the whole process of capitalist production and exchange. For much of contemporary thought, “value” carries either a strictly economic definition (the monetary price of a commodity) or a seemingly moral usage (what I value). For Marx, the logic of commodity exchange means people come to associate what is of value with the exchangeable price of things. When put in a more determinate form, value is seen to be simply the cost of a commodity as expressed by money. But Marx suggests “value” in capitalist society is something distinct from price. Value, in his view, is a social relation mediated by commodities and their exchange. The commodity Marx identifies as playing the crucial role in this social relation is human labour-power. To see what Marx takes to be normatively unacceptable about capitalism requires confronting the character of value as both a relation and a real abstraction that carries in its common usage the antinomy of the commodity and its fetishism. Marx seeks to understand the full human consequences of value beyond either economic usage or individual decision-making.

Marx claims the essence of value is living labour which finds its necessary appearance in money. Capital is a relation of domination depending upon the extraction of living labour to derive value, which becomes a process that structures social life as a whole. In his writing, Marx returns to the evocative metaphor of capital as a vampire. The life of capital depends upon what it takes from human life:

Capital posits the permanence of value (to a certain degree) by incarnating itself in fleeting commodities and taking on their form, but at the same time changing them just as constantly; alternates between its eternal form in money and its passing form in commodities; permanence is posited as the only thing it can be, a passing passage—process—life. But capital obtains this ability only by constantly sucking in living labour as its soul, vampire-like.⁹

Requiring the unity of production and circulation for its metamorphosis, value shifts forms in an attempt to valorise and expand through a socially determinate process of accumulation. Beyond providing what he considers facts about capitalist production and exchange, Marx argues that the social relations underpinning value are structured by domination because they rest on the generalised exchange-ability of commodities created by value-producing labour. The reduction of human activity into what Marx calls “abstract labour” is the nexus between his mature value-form theory and the concept of alienation present in his early writings. What is important about Marx’s concept of labour and his account of the value-form is what it suggests about the paradoxical nature of exchange in capitalist society. On one hand, exchange is generalised in such a way that relations can only be comprehended socially. On the other, exchange can only operate by atomising, individualising and dominating the seller of labour-power. From conceiving this fact objectively in all its determinations, what underwrites Marx’s analysis of capitalism and its social forms of life is an embedded ethical claim. Marx’s value-form theory concludes with the necessary negation of value. This instruction, at once theoretical and practical, invites normative reflection. By thinking with Marx, we can better see what is wrong about capitalism as a barrier to human flourishing and what it is about our lives as social, rational and historical beings that makes a life well-lived possible. Construed in this way, it becomes viable to interpret the normative structure of his critique of political economy in terms of a sustained ethical vision of the good life.

The domination of capital pervades modern life, and its logic seeps ever more into human relationships and interactions, inexorably subsuming and modifying the meaning of our feeling, treatment of others, as well as the measurement of our individual purposes, self-regard and value. Capitalism structures our ability to live happy lives as individuals and societies. Money-making is always in the foreground or background of our social relationships, no matter its worth. Marx’s claim to have elucidated the essence of the processes that mystify and obscure social relations—which are, in fact, structures of domination—relies upon his conceptualisation of value-producing labour. Under capitalism, according to Marx, human labour is made abstract and alienated, which limits and constrains the ability of human beings to control our life activity. The omnipresent fetishism of the commodity shapes our forms of activity and social being.

It is crucial to understand that Marx is not simply a critic of “economics” but is concerned with a critique of capitalism as form of life. As he put it in 1858, “[t]he work I am presently concerned with is a Critique of Economic Categories or, IF YOU LIKE, a critical exposé of the system of the bourgeois economy. It is at once an exposé and, by the same token, a critique of the system.”¹⁰ Marx’s work on a critique of political economy dated back even further. In 1851, he wrote to Engels that he was “so far advanced” in his work that he “will have finished with the whole economic shit in 5 weeks’ time.” Remarking that “this science [Wissenschaft] has made no progress since A. Smith and D. Ricardo,” Marx wanted to be done with his research on political economy and be able to “throw myself into another branch of science at the [British] Museum.”¹¹ Unfortunately, five weeks became sixteen years and Marx continued to refine and rework his critique of political economy. His dedication to this unfinished task, which engulfed his research, can make it appear as if Marx was fundamentally a social scientist exemplifying the transition (or break) from German Idealism, steeped in normative philosophy, to sociology, objective and value-free. As I will argue, such characterisation loses sight of the normative dimension of Marx’s idea of value and, at the same time, reduces its critical thrust.

In its earliest form, Marx had been working on a critique of political economy since 1844. But even before it became the fully fleshed research program of Capital, his turn to this inquiry was envisioned from the very beginning in normative terms. In a remarkable section of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx diverged from his exploration of the intricacies of political economy to draw a picture of the early Parisian working-class movement:

When communist workmen [Handwerker] gather together, their immediate aim is instruction, propaganda, etc. But at the same time they acquire a new need—the need for society—and what appears as a means has become an end. This practical development can be most strikingly observed in the gatherings of French socialist workers. Smoking, eating and drinking, etc., are no longer means of creating links between people. Company, association, conversation, which in its turn has society as its goal, is enough for them. The brotherhood of man [Brüderlichkeit d[er] Menschen] is not a hollow phrase, it is a reality, and the nobility of man [Adel der Menschheit] shines forth upon us from their work-worn figures.¹²

This quotation provides a useful point of departure for the argument I want to advance in this book. Marx does more than reflect on the cultural activity of a newly emerging working-class movement. More significantly, he also demonstrates his developing philosophical claim, an articulation emanating from his understanding of capitalism as a social form of life. This critique emerges in conjunction with a newfound analysis of the content of labour activity as alienated under capital production and reproduction.

Marx comes to the view that capitalist social relations limit the potential and capabilities of human beings as subjects, the type of flourishing and good realisable if we act together. In this passage, association does not simply arise from working together, but from the creative act of collective decision-making. Labour becomes an act of self-conscious intersubjective social connection, rather than alienation. Marx offers a way to think about the sociality of labour in both the process of productive activity itself and in the social relations which constitute its social form. The young Marx articulates a conception of freedom in teleological terms, as a potential to be realised in and by the actions of human beings aiming at a life which looks beyond the alienation of wage-labour. Capital carries forward this immanent critique by putting into view the very contradictions within the dynamics of capitalism that make possible emancipation. Marx’s thought is fundamentally motivated by the central question of ethics: how we should live? His analysis of capital is nothing but the working out of why capitalism cannot provide the good life.

Marx’s portrayal of the Parisian workers brings into focus crucial aspects of the ethical dimension of his thought that will be explored in this book. Marx’s ideas went through many changes, modifications and innovations as he continually sought to develop the concepts most adequate to grappling and grasping social life as a whole. But he never gave up the normative claim that underwrites his thought. As I argue, this through line shows that we should not understand his later work from the prism of the young Marx, but view his mature formulations of the form of value as a means to tarry with alienation critique. Marx conceives of our activities as conscious, rational, historical and goal-directed. He considers human needs as capabilities that can be met in accordance with collective association and rational production. Marx suggests that means and ends are not counterposed; human beings cannot simply be taken as a means for others, but means cannot be reduced to their ends. The phrase “what appears as a means has become an end” expresses the sublation of this binary into the telos of ethical life, a society of free association. The collective means becomes an end in itself. For Marx, this association is conceived concretely in the practices which bring about the negation of capitalism as a form of life, defined by value-producing labour, commodity exchange and capital accumulation. Marx’s analysis offers a way of conceiving ethical life as the concrete universality in which our social relations, our labour and institutions can become realised as relations of social freedom. Marx shows that capitalism as a form of life systematically precludes relations of recognition between human beings. Our social world is founded by relations of abstract action, from labour to our fundamental moral and political language. Social being and consciousness are made abstract by the social form of life under capitalism.

The work-worn figures Marx describes find dignity in a politics that seeks collective expression in rational association. This action expresses a form of self-consciousness that aims for universality, the collective rational agency that emerges from, and strives to transcend, the contradictions of life under capitalism as divided by class. The “brotherhood of man” (Brüderlichkeit der Menschen)¹³ reconceives society, challenging the sociality of fragmentation and atomisation of “economic man.” On such logic, just as the individual lives a private life at home, their activities at work are equally private. The sole autonomous producer is not the basis of society, but only reflects the abstraction of social forms under capitalism. In rejecting this alienated existence, Marx sees in the nexus of workers the reality of a shared political existence which he calls “a community of human beings.” This reality is both the actualisation and realisation of socially transformative action, where association makes possible a social form of human activity in which human subjects are in collective control of the productive and political institutions of social life. To find meaning in such institutions requires social relations of recognition. Put this way, Marx’s idea of freedom is an understanding of ethical life. Borne out of Hegel’s appraisal of Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy as empty formalism based on “infinite autonomy,”¹⁴ the guiding thread of Marx’s thought traces the contradictions within social relations between human beings that define our activity and forms of life. This inquiry depends upon a conceptualisation of sociality that traces the social mediations between human beings as the basis for normative analysis and critique.

While few would dispute that Marx belongs to the canon of political and economic thought, usually this is seen in terms of the stagist politics attributed to “historical materialism” or the economics of an embodied “labour theory of value.” To push past these interpretative impasses, I argue that Marx is foremost a theorist of “the social.” Marx fuses political, economic and ethical thought to produce a dialectical account of modern life in the unfolding of social forms specific to capitalism. Marx does not have a single concept of “the social.” In fact, ideas of sociality (Gesellschaftlichkeit) appear throughout Marx’s work in various concepts. Marx speaks of “social relations,” “social modes of production,” “social division of labour,” “socially necessary labour-time,” “total social capital,” “social labour,” “social need,” “social reproduction,” and of course, “socialism.” Fundamentally, Marx maintains that there is no form of human activity that is not social, since we are social beings. Communism can only be a possibility as a result of social forms of human activity, which Marx takes to be constituted by an immanent sociality, that is, life activity that is abstract, alienated and unrealised, but it could be otherwise. That it could be otherwise is a view that Marx develops immanently from his analysis of capitalism and the form of value.

What Marx means by his idea of a postcapitalist form of society requires unpacking the concept of “the social” in his thought. Marx considers “society” and “social” as categories which pertain, resembling Hegel’s claim in the Science of Logic, to the “exact determination [Bestimmung] and discovery of objective relations.”¹⁵ By treating human beings as ontologically social, Marx assesses human action as embedded in a total social system of production and reproduction. Fundamentally, capitalism is not just an economic system, but a form of life. Marx’s account of value shows the way in which social productive activity becomes an abstraction that obscures the actual relations of sociality apparent in the fabric of our lives. The sociality of capitalism is hidden from those who produce it. Capitalism as a form of life is constituted by labour that must be in essence social, even if the individuals who perform this activity are isolated and alienated. This is why Marx also uses “society” to mean a sublation of those relations into a social formation where relations between human beings are readily apparent and rational.

This social view criticises, and goes beyond, Enlightenment conceptualisations of society as a contract between singular individuals. From the perspective of the individual, society is a collection of atomised persons, entering via contract into a governed state with sovereignty. This ontology generates a view of freedom as the protection of individuals against the threat of “the social,” which is collapsed into the question of the state and government. The atomist view advances both a critique of government as such (negative liberty) and an affirmation of its necessary power to secure authority and order (ranging from Leviathan to the nightwatchman state). In this view, the separation of individuals is the necessary condition of private interest, which motivates human action. Society arises from the need to regulate and legitimise the interests of private interaction by exchange. Gain is supposed to be the compelling feature of human interaction and rationality. Hegel described this understanding and its reflection in bourgeois “civil society” (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) as “the spiritual animal kingdom,” a world of “deceit” in which “this individuality which is real in itself is again singular and determinate. The absolute reality which it knows itself to be is, as it will become aware, therefore the abstract universal which is without fulfillment and without content and is only the empty thought of this category.”¹⁶ With the idea of “civil society,” many Enlightenment thinkers contributed to the creation of a model individual fundamentally bourgeois in nature. In Marx’s view, the methodological individualism of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke defined a social theory which was then translated by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, despite protestations, into political economy. Marx picks up the paradox of civil society that troubles Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. If Hegel sees it that civil society serves a necessary but contradictory system of needs, Marx demonstrates that these limits—poverty, exploitation and alienation—are inherent within capitalist social forms. By doing so, the immanent insight of Hegel’s own interpretation of the social contract tradition and political economy are vindicated. Marx shows the insights of both political and economic traditions are undercut by the naturalisation of historically specific social forms. Marx insists the thread that runs throughout is the depiction of human nature as an ongoing tension between benevolence and self-interest in the individual.¹⁷ In this way, the social contract thinkers created an ontological starting point of the atomised individual and a model for thinking about society that still acts as a barrier to normative conceptions of the good life.

The notion of civil society expresses a fundamental split between the world of politics and that of commerce. Society itself is conceived as divided between two contradictory notions: the world of the private individual who is the producer, owner, buyer and seller of commodities, and the realm of government, which is the nexus of social structures and interactions that make it possible for individual sellers of commodities to meet each other at the market. This bifurcation presupposes an extant social system that has been created by human agents. By drawing attention to this contradiction, Marx highlights the limitations of ahistorical and particular standpoints. He has this in mind in the tenth of the Theses on Feuerbach, “[t]he standpoint of the old materialism is civil society [bürgerliche Gesellschaft]; the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity [die menschliche Gesellschaft, oder die vergesellschaftete Menschheit].”¹⁸ Marx’s inquiry is a distinct way of conceptualising society. The Theses on Feuerbach strike an immanent vision of the possibilities of critique, grasping the present with the demands of a future conceived as a new form of freedom. In the process of the new society emerging from the remnants of the old within the antagonisms of contemporary life, Marx finds revealed an image of transformative possibilities: “The emancipation of the oppressed class thus implies necessarily the creation of a new society [neuen Gesellschaft].”¹⁹

The most fundamental aspects of Marx’s immanent critique of the atomistic position are cast in his value-form theory. Crucially, Marx does not adopt the ahistorical and physiological “labour theory of value” found in the traditional view spanning Locke to Ricardo, but instead sets forth an immanent critique of this conceptualisation.²⁰ Marx’s value-form theory is better understood as a “value theory of labour,” a historical and critical concept of human activity, abstract labour and social form.²¹ As I will argue, the value-form provides the key to open up the normative resources in Marx’s thought.

In this book, I trace the importance of Marx’s political and economic thought by excavating the specific usages of the category of “the social.” This task is primarily developed by locating the ancestry of his thought in Aristotle’s social ontology and Hegel’s speculative Realphilosophie. I group the three philosophers—Aristotle, Hegel and Marx—together as constituting a shared tradition of thinking about society that locates ethics within social relationships which are, in turn, mediated by political concerns and action. All three assess social life in terms of the normative relations of human activity and rational institutions in which human beings might be free. For Aristotle, society is prior to the individual. Ethics must be understood in terms of political life and organisation. Human beings are conceived of ontologically as distinctively rational and political animals, where politics is the exercise of our ethical natures. For Hegel, the human subject seeks social recognition. Conflict and domination are life-and-death struggles for subjectivity that must be sublated through mutual relations of recognition. Individuals are seen not in isolated singularity but in relation with others, both in terms of their conflicts and dependence. Marx detects domination in the social relations of production and reproduction.²² When the form and content of these relations are defined by capital, they take on characteristics seemingly independent of human control and agency. Thereby, the products of human creative activity become fetishistic, appearing as objects beyond our control. If Aristotle sees freedom in the teleological function of the polis and Hegel perceives it in the rational state, Marx discovers the telos of human beings in a society of freely associated producers.

For Marx, following Hegel, the Enlightenment was unable to provide a coherent account of social reality. Political economy sought to ground an understanding of society in the individual producer—the free commodity owner and seller. Marx’s reckoning with political economy establishes a mode of thinking about society and sociality that regards the form of social interaction in question as an expression of relations inherent to capital itself. For Marx, human relations are mediated by things. But these things, although embodied in various objects and means of production, derive their meaning from estranged social relations. Thus, capital itself is a relation and “simply takes the form of a thing.”²³ This specific social form is paradigmatic of the way human relations are mediated in capitalist society.²⁴ Marx’s thought aims to advance human possibilities, which would require the negation of capital for there to be any hope for such potentiality to be realised. In conceiving of emancipated human activity as “freely associating production,” Marx’s thought follows Aristotle’s definition of the good life as human flourishing. Simultaneously, he also affirms an association of collective institutions, a view in basic accordance with what Hegel finds in ethical life, Sittlichkeit. Thinking with Aristotle and Hegel illuminates the ethical dimension of Marx’s thinking that has been insufficiently recognised.²⁵ In reinstating these links, the ethical dimension of his thought comes to the forefront, and it becomes clear that Marx belongs to a tradition of critical inquiry that conceives of ethics as a historically and socially embedded rational practice. Central to such a conception of rationality means articulating the manner in which social life is constituted by practices and institutions. Aristotle’s notion of the practices of the virtues is manifest in Hegel’s conception of rational agency and in Marx’s articulation of political action. Practices aim at the good; they require cultivating the virtues of human action for the end of flourishing, and as such require that human beings make decisions and act on reasons that help bring about that end as the good of collective enterprise.²⁶ Marx’s writings express a view of rational agency as the collective subjectivity in the practice of working-class action. My claim that Marx enables us to think about ethical life brings to bear his normative assessment of modern social forms and the corresponding human rationality and activity that is alienated in such forms of life.

Marx’s analysis of capitalism demonstrates the normative barriers to an ethical life. From this position, it becomes possible to generate a conception of mutual recognition where agents give and find meaning in the normative fabric of social life and action informed not narrowly by individual self-gain and interest, but by a rational conception of what a good life for everybody requires. By examining the historical and social form of capital, Marx illustrates that its sociality is in an essential way abstract. Individuality and collectivity are seen in antinomic opposition, rather than in an essential unity.

The intellectual landscape traversed in this book shows that rational inquiry is always set within social, historical and intellectual traditions. In a similar manner to what Alasdair MacIntyre calls “tradition-constituted enquiry,” I argue that Marx’s social thought and its relevancy today can only be understood “when placed in the context of traditions.”²⁷ The conception of rational enquiry, is “embodied” in tradition. As MacIntyre points out, “the standards of rational justification themselves emerge from and are part of a history in which they are vindicated by the way on which they transcend the limitations and provide remedies for the defects of their predecessors within the history of that same tradition.”²⁸ This insight is suggestive of the reading of Aristotle, Hegel and Marx in this work. It helps push past the tired tropes of Marx scholarship, especially the Althusserian legacy which argues that Marx decisively “breaks” with Hegel and in doing so drops his alienation critique and its normative character. Another influential perspective, critical of Marx, but which helps elucidate the problem of tradition is offered by Hannah Arendt. For Arendt, Marx “adopts” the Hegelian tradition but at the same time, maintains “a concurrent rejection of its authority.”²⁹ While I challenge Arendt’s understanding of tradition and her view of its rupture in Hegel and Marx, the advantage of her insight is that the relation between Hegel and Marx is an open question.

By arguing that Hegel and Marx are best comprehended as parts of a shared rational tradition, I mitigate the danger of allowing one tradition to foreclose the other: both the self-referential closure of absolute idealism and the presumed infallibility of the materialist conception of history are avoided. Instead, I focus on their shared attempts to realise the forms of rationality required for human beings to become at home in our social world. This helps us to read tradition not as fixed and settled, but as I argue, a dynamic relation of possibility. Framed in this way, in a world as inhospitable as we find in our contemporary life, critical social theory can lend currency to the Adornoian insight that the bad life cannot be lived rightly, not to recant the possibilities of emancipation, but to show the normative import of holding fast to an idea of the good life.³⁰

Clearly, Marx differs from Hegel and from Aristotle in his vision of what exactly this good life constitutes. But the project of this book, and the concept “absolute ethical life,” which gives the book its title, is to show that occupying the point of departure between Hegel and Marx requires first unifying Aristotle, Hegel and Marx. Sittlichkeit is what Hegel calls “ethical life,” the form of life that preserves, but goes beyond, the morality of the individual and realises social freedom in the ethical relations of self-conscious and rational institutions. “Absolute ethical life” is the concept that brings together Hegel’s critique of atomised and relative notions of morality (Kant’s practical reason) and the historical value of community into a normative theory of recognition. The three key terms in this concept each have significant meaning in Hegel’s thought. By “life,” Hegel is referring to the specifically rational agency of the human being, who as a living being, strives for self-consciousness. An “ethical life” is the shape of life in which human beings can institute their self-consciousness in relations of recognition between social subjects, which enables our freedom to be shared and sustained.

The “absolute” is Hegel’s master concept. While there is a long line of critics (including infamously, Karl Popper) who see this concept as explicitly authoritarian, the absolute is nothing but the philosophical name Hegel provides to articulate freedom. Despite the high altitude of Hegel’s writing, his concept of the absolute attempts to render visible the unity of thinking and reality in social life. In many of Hegel’s most important texts, the concept of the absolute appears at the end. However, the process of thinking through the relationship between thought and reality also means that a unity is always present, despite its appearances. According to Hegel, the absolute shows itself as the process inherent and necessary to grasp reality in thought and at the same time, as the unified ends, the concrete totality of concept and reality. The journey of forms of historical consciousness as traversed in the Phenomenology of Spirit culminate in “absolute knowing,” the self-knowledge of spirit. In the Science of Logic, the “absolute idea” is the concept that comprehends itself. To know in terms of the absolute is to conceive the possibilities of freedom. For thought to gain self-consciousness, Hegel insists that the speculative position of the absolute must be obtained:

Free and genuine thought is concrete in itself, and as such it is an idea, and in its full universality the idea, or the absolute. The science of the latter is essentially a system, since the true insofar as it is concrete exists only through unfolding itself in itself, collecting and holding itself together in a unity, i.e. as a totality. Only by discerning and determining its distinctions can it be the necessity of them and the freedom of the whole.³¹

To think the absolute entails unifying theoretical and practical reason and by doing so educing “the unity of the idea of life and the idea of knowing.” Hegel directly evokes Aristotle’s idea of noêsis noêseôs, thought thinking itself, to entwine the unity of reason with life. To reason in such a sense is the form of absolute living good.³² From this view, I draw out the normative aspects of Marx’s attempt to systematically unfold the determinations of value specific to capitalism as a form of life. I argue the debt to Hegel stretches beyond logic, since the entire point of mapping such forms is to think the possibility of freedom. For Marx, concrete freedom exists in the living good of the whole, which enables human flourishing.

My idea of “absolute ethical life” seeks to develop the concept by building on Gillian Rose’s highly generative interpretation of Hegel. Rose examines the split between theoretical and practical reason in post-Kantian philosophy as a contemporary crisis which demands Hegel’s notion of the absolute as the identity of thought and being. Rose’s arresting interpretation brings Hegel close to Marx to offer the radical potential of an idea of ethics as a mutually reciprocal form of life. She maintains:

For Hegel, the whole aim of absolute ethical life was to eschew the domination of the concept of pure practical reason. Absolute ethical life is a critique of bourgeois property relations. It may be elusive, but it is never dominant or pre-judged. Minerva cannot impose herself. Her owl can only spread its wings at dusk and herald the return of Athena, freedom without domination.³³

Expanding on this idea of ethical life, I argue that any Hegelian notion of freedom requires Marx to make good on a conception of the historical conditions of bourgeois life as both property and productive relations. Marx’s conception of capitalism spells out that modern rationality is itself beholden to fetishism in the metamorphosis of value as commodity, money and capital, and as such, our form of life is one of misrecognition. This social critique is required for the call of Athena’s speculative moment to be realised as a transformative journey worth taking. Absolute Ethical Life is the account of why sociality must go beyond capitalism as a form of life.

*   *   *

To comprehend the possibilities of emancipation, critical social theory must grasp the present. The challenge social theory faces today is to provide a conception of modern life that allows the present to be known as both conflictual and transmutable. The conflicts of modern politics, emanating from the public life of citizens and institutions, are by no means unrelated to the conflicts of private life, emanating from the decisions of moral agents, sellers and buyers. However, emancipatory thought too often dissociates these spheres into isolated realms, a procedure that Theodor W. Adorno names the “severance of morality from politics,” which results in an “extreme contrast between public affairs and private existence.”³⁴ Ideally, critical social theory should provide a bridge between these two realms; instead it has tended to reproduce this tension between political emancipation and individual morality. Precisely what intellectual resources might enable this tension to be transcended thus remains an open question. Curiously, however, the tendency has been to look everywhere but at Karl Marx.

This work is a reconsideration of Marx’s social theory and its relation to other traditions of critical inquiry. But why “reconsider” when Marx’s place in the pantheon of modern thought is hardly under threat? Marxism was so prevalent as a form of intellectual critique during the twentieth century that in 1981 MacIntyre could call it “the most influential adversary theory of modern culture.”³⁵ Yet, it was during this period, beginning in the late 1970s, that Marxism started to lose its coherence and authority in theory and practice. This deterioration corresponded with the popularity of various currents, such as “post-structuralism,” which moved markedly away from the traditions of critical inquiry established in close reference to Marx’s social theory. In effect, these trends sidelined Marx in a way that has been slow to recover.³⁶ Marx might be seen as foundational and historically significant, but his value as a thinker of the present remains disputed at best and repudiated at worst. Even those intellectual traditions derived from Marx (notably Frankfurt School critical theory and some strands of post-structuralism) are hesitant to posit the immediate relevance of his social theory.³⁷ Such disregard notwithstanding, during the last two decades an undercurrent has emerged which rejects this common sense, insisting instead on Marx’s contemporaneity.

Following the Global Financial Crisis—the biggest crisis of capital since the Great Depression—serious interest in Marx has flourished, no doubt due to the pressing need to understand the structure and nature of contemporary capitalism. Remarkably, “the critique of capitalism has come back into vogue,” as Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi observe in their book Capitalism.³⁸ Despite a proliferation of interest in capitalism, a focus on normativity has often come at the cost of the immanent critique of political economy. As Martijn Konings notes, “a growing emphasis on communitarian or civic-liberal principles of interaction is accompanied by a steadily declining ability to offer penetrating readings of the capitalist economic structures whose oppressive operation and colonizing dynamics are taken to require the need for critical interventions in the first place.”³⁹ My argument in this book is that a normative critique of social forms of life needs Marx’s critique of the value-form. Capital is precisely the text to offer such a vision.⁴⁰

Of further concern, is the little conceptual clarity on the relationship between the concept and the reality of capitalism in much of contemporary political theory. In his book on the history of the word “capitalism,” Michael Sonenscher declares that although the term “is still quite hard to define, it remains quite easy to see.”⁴¹ He argues that “capitalism” needs to be reinterpreted to consider the background of many earlier concepts into this nineteenth-century word, especially the specific context to the notions of commercial society, the division of labour and civil society expressed by Hegel, Smith, Ricardo and Marx. However, Sonenscher never ventures a definition of capital and simply assumes that capital is the “thing” that people own to produce profit.⁴² In this view, “capitalism” and “capital” are conceptually distinct. Yet, he does not see that capital is the necessary condition of capitalism as a social system once it becomes generalisable as a social form. Capital does predate capitalism, but as Søren Mau explains, what “distinguishes capitalism from other modes of production is not the mere existence of capital but its social significance; only in this particular mode of production is the accumulation of abstract wealth the basis of social reproduction.”⁴³ Sonenscher claims that the concept “capitalism” needs historical excavation, but in doing so, he leaves untouched the definition of “capital” in mainstream economics and overlooks its historically definite existence.

Marx’s own analysis of capital points to foundational conceptual issues in Sonenscher’s view. Capitalism cannot be grasped without theorising the historical and social form of wealth. The “social wealth” that Smith termed “the wealth of nations,” Marx makes clear, is “a specifically capitalist form of the process of social production” defined by “the self-valorization of capital.”⁴⁴ For Marx, capital is a social relation between human beings, which appears as a relationship between things. His critical social theory attempts to show the “connection” between

the simplest categories of the capitalist [kapitalistischen] mode of production, in connection with commodities and money, the mystifying character that transforms the social relations for which the material elements of wealth serve as bearers in the course of production into properties of these things themselves (commodities), still more explicitly transforming the relation of production itself into a thing (money). All forms of society are subject to this distortion, in so far as they involve commodity production and monetary circulation. In the capitalist mode of production, however, where capital is the dominant category and forms the specific relation of production, this bewitched and distorted world develops much further.⁴⁵

Capitalism is the social form in which capital is dominant, and its movement defines social relationships well beyond economic ownership as a total form of life.⁴⁶ It must be explained through examination of the conceptual makeup of capital as a social form of value. Thus, social forms “are not defined in independence from the object being valued; they emerged from and constitute that object.”⁴⁷

This task is pressing since life following the pandemic is more unequal and unstable, with the spiralling cost of housing and stagnant wages. While this book does not explore the contours of the contemporary financial world, it is intended to provide insight into the conceptual genesis of capital and illuminate the connection between political, ethical and economic life. With this theoretical construction, it becomes easier to see that the current crisis is much more than an economic one—it is a crisis of the “conjuncture.”⁴⁸ The reverberations of surging living costs have exacerbated an existing crisis of political legitimacy for mainstream political institutions. In a situation of global unease, the public sphere has seen a collapse of the political centre. Social movements against inequality, racism and environmental destruction have disrupted typical ideological narratives. The formal freedom of individuals under the law is constantly contrasted with the experience of systemic oppression. The once accepted neoliberal economic and political paradigm is now widely viewed as a failure and is subject to mounting challenge—although as yet, it has by no means been overcome. In the midst of austerity and depression and in the face of an intensifying global growth of the far-right, critical social theory is necessary. In today’s world, ordinary people are increasingly seeking theoretical explanations with which to make sense of the contemporary conjuncture. The mounting irrationality of our world demands rational theorisation.

It is here, as a theorist of society, and capitalist society in particular, that Marx is particularly indispensable. Marx helps us comprehend the alienation experienced in everyday life and the persistence of inequality in a world dominated by capital. In this book, I take it that Marx’s critique of liberal political and economic theory offers insight into the nature of neoliberal capitalism today.⁴⁹ This mode of abstraction avoids the danger of representing “neoliberalism as a return to a more basic form of capitalism modelled on the experience of nineteenth-century liberalism.”⁵⁰ Instead, by clarifying Marx’s critique of political economy, I aim to show fundamental points of connection between capitalism and liberalism and the resonance between economics and political theory in terms of the fundamental categories of capitalism as a social form of life.

My interpretation of Marx offers a basis to reconsider disciplinary boundaries which assume a great deal of distance between economics and politics. I maintain that the development of economic theory is nothing other than the history of political thought. Marx’s critique of political economy is the name he gives to his systematic critical reconstruction of the economic categories that comprise the modern world.⁵¹ I argue that Marx politicises economics by conceptualising a critical social theory that grasps economic phenomena as social relations that are anything but natural and outside the control of human beings. “Economics” is itself a modern category, and while it is possible to use modern categories to understand the past, there is no “economics” as such before capitalism.⁵² The “illusion of the economic,” as Patrick Murray calls it, is the view that there is “production in general” which “involves no particular social forms and no particular way of life.”⁵³ By denaturalising “the economic,” it becomes possible to draw the connection between modern capitalism and our political and ethical lives.

For this reason, an account of contemporary capitalism must come to terms with Marx’s critique of political economy since he demonstrates that any antinomy between politics and economics is untenable. Marx’s challenge to contemporary economic thought is that its foundational ideas and categories fail to conceive their conceptual underpinning. Essentially, in his view, economic relations are social. The distinctiveness of Marx’s claim that capital is a social relation makes possible an assessment of wealth creation as the accumulation of capital derived on the infinite valorisation of value. Marx’s critical social theory establishes a critique of economic thinking on its most fundamental level and in doing so, allows us to rethink the presence of economic logic in our day-to-day lives and our political and social institutions. From Marx, we become better able to assess the domination of our political lives by economic forces once his concept of capital is understood as a political theory of economic logic.

This book maps out a conceptualisation of Marx’s idea of capital as a social form of value. By investigating the ethical formation of Marx’s concept of capital, I hope to achieve two things. First, I seek to clarify the way in which economic theory has always expressed a moral position, despite foundations in the modern dualistic split between fact and value. Second, by examining the germination of Marx’s critique of political economy, I want to show the enduring importance of his thinking about sociality. From this critical project, I argue that Marx’s concept of capital provides normative resources to understand crucial ethical questions. Marx’s theory of value helps assess the structuring conditions of action in the modern world which make ethics possible.⁵⁴ However, Marx’s voluminous work—as neither his critics nor his defenders would dispute—contains extended reflection on class, ideology and economic theory. The role of ethics within his theoretical architecture is, however, less easily gleaned. Vulgarised politically and philosophically in traditional Marxist understandings, Marx’s thought has often been read as a positivistic science concerned with economic distribution rather than an immanent critique of modern social forms.⁵⁵

When Marxism is reduced to a programmatic demand for the common ownership of the means of production (as opposed to being understood as the moreover critique of the very form of capitalist production and exchange), the normative and ethical aspect of Marx’s social theory is lost. Such a view assumes that communism retains the same structure of value production while changing the way the results of production are distributed. This vulgarisation renders the key conceptual function of Marx’s thought as workers’ control of the existing form of production.⁵⁶ By comparison, a normative view holds that Marx’s critique of value illuminates the necessity of overcoming the form of capitalism itself through rational action. Further, through his explication of sociality, Marx identifies the way in which the entire fabric of social life under capital is dominated by the form of value. For Marx, the social conditions for fully actualised, concrete freedom are immanent in the overcoming of capital. Action can only be conceived as rational insofar as it pursues that end and can only be realised as rational insofar as it achieves it. Rather than something that hinges upon individual choice, therefore, Marx’s construal of the good life is the realisation of a particular kind of social world—a social world in which rationality prevails and human beings can recognise each other in reciprocal relations of freedom. I call this theory “absolute ethical life.” Under the value-form, actualised rationality is impossible, although it is promised. To be truly free, subjects must overcome the forms of domination which mask and mystify the social world (including “bourgeois morality” itself) and ask a wider set of questions about the total composition of social life.

I argue that an idea of ethical life motivates Marx’s thought, and this idea allows his theorisation of modern social relations to be adequately critical. Marx’s account of alienation and abstract labour does not just amount to an analysis of how capitalism is reproduced; it accords for an immanent critique of modern social relations. Within this examination resides his critical account of the human capacity, rationality and self-consciousness which are present under capitalism, but are not fully realised and constituted as actual. Until the very end, Marx’s vision of emancipation is underpinned by a concept of human flourishing. While this concept is discerned via critical social inquiry within capitalism, wherein human virtues do exist, albeit in stunted or one-sided forms, the concept may only be actualised by a free humanity, flourishing in the fertile ground and clear light of a society built around interdependent social relations of freedom. However, locating this conception of ethics requires a reconstruction and elaboration of both the form and content of Marx’s thought.

With his immanent critique, Marx calls attention to a paradox that goes to the heart of the modern meaning of freedom. Few normative ideals have been so closely associated with the emergence of modernity as freedom, and under this banner, the spread of capitalism globally was accompanied by many assurances to newly learnt freedoms, despite the colonial processes that brought it about. Freedom from the bonds of direct coercion and personal domination was promised in the equal rights of all human beings as individuals. It is essential to Marx’s account that capitalism not only brings about unheralded productive powers but acts to establish social relations on the norms of natural equality, rather than in natural hierarchy.⁵⁷ There is no mistaking Marx’s appreciation of capitalism for exactly what it promises: freedom. But just as capitalism brings about freedoms that are real and instigates revolutionary advances, Marx’s analysis magnifies the contradictions between the norm and reality of freedom that run in both directions. “Immanent critique not only measures reality against the norm,” as Rahel Jaeggi contends, “but also the norm against reality.”⁵⁸ While calls for freedom inspire and capture something real about the emergence, actuality and possibilities that arise with capitalism, for Marx, such a notion of freedom was always deployed at the same time to justify the limitation and curtailing of freedom. Freedom under capitalism is always limited, since the very relations of equality brought about by capitalism are undercut by the processes that made this dynamic and its reproduction impossible.⁵⁹ An evocative section of Capital parallels the “very Eden” of the Genesis story of the creation and fall of man with the veneration of freedom as “the innate rights of man”:

the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom! Because both buyer and seller of a commodity, let us say of labour-power, are determined only by their own free will. They contract as free persons, who are equal before the law. Their contract is the final result in which their joint will finds a common legal expression. Equality! Because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property! Because each disposes only of what is his own. Bentham! Because each looks only to his own advantage. The only force bringing them together, and putting them into relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interest of each. Each pays heed to himself only, and no one worries about the others. And precisely for that reason, either in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an omniscient providence, they all work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal, and in the common interest.⁶⁰

Marx’s appraisal of formal equality raises two crucial points. First, the inalienable human rights so essential to modern normative ideals of freedom are undermined by the emptiness and formalism of its actual expression. By pointing to the distance between the norm and reality (and vice versa), Marx is not denying the normativity apparent under capitalism, but illustrating the variance from the conception of freedom and dynamic of capitalism that on one hand lends legitimacy to its reproduction and on the other, cannot possibility live up to its principles.⁶¹ Such rights are contradictory since not only do the norms prove to fall short of their aspiration, but the promise of autonomy in commodity exchange results in the social compulsion for self-gain. The “universal” freedom of the individual becomes the freedom of private interest.

Second, Marx attributes this tragic symptom of modern freedom to be manifest in moral thought. Invoking Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism, Marx points out that if freedom is reduced to formal equality under capitalism, then modern morality is reduced to individualism. Marx calls attention to the impossibility of a moral philosophy that centres its standpoint narrowly on the individual, since it loses sight of the broader social relations that human beings are embedded within. So imagined, morality is just as limited as the freedom to buy and sell one’s labour-power. But in this forceful appraisal of the norms of freedom under capitalism by the lights of its central claims, Marx is not disavowing normativity all together. The “soberly pedantic and heavy-footed oracle” of Bentham might act as a stand in for bourgeois morality, but he does not represent normativity as such.⁶² Instead of a morality of mutual self-gain, inscribed in Marx’s insight is that each sphere—freedom, equality, property and morality—must be made social. His immanent critique is not to deny, but to show their meaning could only be sustained through the mutual recognition of human beings who see their normative practices not in self-gain, but in social freedom. Marx’s contribution as a thinker of freedom should not be understated.

The normative dimension of Marx’s critique of modern social forms challenges, and provides insights to overcome, contemporary conceptions of ethics as merely proper individual behaviour.⁶³ This critical comprehension enriches recent debates in political, moral and economic theory. To do this, I bring Marx’s early texts into dialogue with the contemporary literature on Capital. One vital strain in recent discussions is the effort to contest traditional “substantivist” understanding of Marx’s “labour theory of value” that takes value to be primarily an account of the quantity of physiological labour necessary for a commodity to be created.⁶⁴ The problem with such views is that not only is the value of a commodity simply equated with labour, but the necessary connection between the social forms of the commodity, money and capital is elided. Further, the recent revival of work on Capital has coincided with the emergence of growing interest in Hegel in Anglo-American philosophy from the pioneering work of scholars including Robert B. Pippin, Terry Pinkard and Robert Brandom.⁶⁵ Despite their general disinterest in Marx, this renaissance of post-Kantian thought sets the ground for reinterpreting the Hegel-Marx relation afresh.⁶⁶ I engage with their normative reading of Hegel, which advances a highly generative picture of rational agency as a space of reasons, to develop the implications for coming to terms with the normative aspects of Marx’s social theory.⁶⁷ These discussions have helped push Marx’s thought back into the theoretical problems of post-Kantian philosophy and away from the monopolies of economists.

Drawing on normative philosophy helps assess the status of “the economic” and Marx’s critique of economic thought as such. Impressive recent work on the relationship of Marx to his philosophical ancestors recasts the role of Hegelian logic in his critique of political economy.⁶⁸ However, the normative dimension of Marx’s mature work is often missing from accounts that stress its logic. Questions about the ethical implications of his critique of political economy have often been relegated to the background. I pursue these questions through the prism of Marx’s social ontology and the ethical dimensions of his value-form theory. The approach makes it possible to think beyond the classical fact/value distinction by instead conceiving of Marx’s immanent critique as also developing a concept of ethical life. This concept builds off and incorporates other traditions of ethics. Concurrently, a renewed interest in Marx’s attitude towards ethics has resulted in a series of scholarly collections in the last several years.⁶⁹ However, no full-length work has reassessed the relation between Marx’s social and ethical thought and recent work on his value-form theory.⁷⁰ This work aims to initiate a sustained discussion within that space.⁷¹

This book contributes to the renewal of Marx’s social thought in terms of his critique of modern social life and the modes of existence characteristic of capitalist social relations. I suggest that modern life cannot be reduced to the latest economic stage of the capitalist mode of production. Instead it ought to be understood as the distinctive paradigm of social relations dominated by the value-form. In Robert B. Pippin’s account, modernity is understood in terms of autonomy, “the nature of both the independence and the dependence or finitude of modern communities and individuals.”^72> For Hegel, this requires a historical and collective view of subjectivity, born by the concept of absolute spirit. Marx’s critique of modernity is similarly conscious of the antinomy between independence/dependence and communities/individuals. However, he denies that autonomy (understood as it has been from Kant onwards) can be assessed independently of the determinations of capitalist social forms.⁷³ Marx’s critique of political economy comprehends the systematic nature and structure of capitalism from a dialectical logic that identities the antinomies of bourgeois categories and social forms.

Marx’s ongoing dialogue with the tradition of ethical life in Aristotle and Hegel establishes an important philosophical component of his critique of political economy. His value-form theory builds upon Aristotle and Hegel while making his contribution distinctive. Marx turns to Aristotle and Hegel in order to show that the hidden “secret” of the commodity form is capable of grounding a coherent account of an abstract form of sociality which is historically specific to capital. By comprehending the capitalist mode of production in its conceptual determinations, Marx comes to understand the present in thought; the modern world cannot be known without deciphering capital.

In a highly perceptive comment, made only in passing in Hegel Contra Sociology, Rose observes that the theory of commodity fetishism is “the most speculative moment in Marx’s exposition of capital” since it “comes nearest to demonstrating in the historically-specific case of commodity producing society how substance is ((mis)-represented as) subject, how necessary illusion arises out of productive activity.”⁷⁴ While Rose does not demonstrate the insight and leaves it unpursued, I take this proposition to have considerable benefits for working out the conceptual categories that run across Capital. Rose alerts us to the ethical and normative purpose inherent in this theoretical critique. Marx’s dialectical procedure parallels Hegel’s speculative philosophy and should be seen not just in terms of logical derivations and transitions, but also with the normative dimension that such a procedure necessary involves. For Hegel, Geist, as absolute spirit, is the self-moving “reflection on the essential self-identity of the human community” and the subject of social life.⁷⁵ Marx extends this insight to theorise the self-movement of value, which in its self-valorisation, its constant reproduction, creates a logic which defines social life and subjects all forms of being and social practice under its force. On this basis, he finds that the alienation and domination of social being is intrinsic to capital. Marx’s deployment of Hegel prompts vital questions of subjectivity and consciousness, since for Hegel, Geist is the self-consciousness of historical and social life. Capital, on the other hand, is an alienated social form. But Marx’s interest in Capital is to unfold the social ontology of value. Capital is value-in-process, the limitless, infinite movement of things which take their socially recognisable form in commodities and money. In its continued accumulation, its limitlessness, capital is a force that self-creates by extracting the living and creative activity from human labour. The contradiction here is between the prevailing social relation which is both dynamic and self-valorising and its abstract and alienated condition of existence.

The practical life of capital, by necessity, produces and reproduces social domination.⁷⁶ This domination can only be undone by agents who become aware of this logic and act practically and rationality to overcome it. In the negation of these relations, Marx conceptualises a new social form as rational and concrete sociality as relations of interdependence. Emergent subjects with a commitment to breaking with this logic must recognise that their collective task requires the negation of capital and the establishment of institutions which are rational and enable people to see their freedom actually realised in themselves and others. The ethical organisation of free institutions must be seen in political terms since the ethical composition of social life is organised politically. Marx sees the overcoming of abstract social forms and the creation of institutions of self-rule as the form of concrete sociality that might realise the concept of freedom. This realisation is the human control of the social world, to grasp the human potential beyond the life of individual buyers and sellers of commodities. For Marx, a society of associated producers allows rationality to be institutionalised and mutually recognised.

Notes

1. Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 16 August 1867, MECW 42, 402–5/MEW 31, 323.

2. Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 16 June 1867, MECW 42, 381–82/MEW 31, 303–4.

3. Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 22 June 1867, MECW 42, 384–85/MEW 31, 306.

4. Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 7 November 1867, MECW 42, 464/MEW 31, 379.

5. Cap.1, 90/5.

6. Louis Althusser, “Preface to Capital” in Lenin and Philosophy (London: NLB, 1971), 95.

7. A representative example is Joan Robinson’s belief that value is both a “metaphysical fog” and “a great fuss about nothing,” Economic Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2021), 30, 36. My approach is indebted to a range of value-form theorists, see note 64 below.

8. Cap.1, 139/52.

9. Gr, 646/529–30. See also, Cap.1, 342/241, 367/266, 416/316.

10. Karl Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, 22 February 1858, MECW 40, 270/MEW 29, 550.

11. Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 2 April 1851, MECW 38, 325/MEW 27, 228.

12. EPM, 365/289.

13. Typically translators have rendered “Mensch” as “man.” While this specific usage has some gendered connotations, it means something akin to “fraternity of human beings.” Using a gendered term for “human beings” obscures the requirements of Marx’s idea of social freedom, which recognises and critically challenges the oppression of gender, in conjunction with the oppressions of race and class. Instead of modifying existing translations, which is cumbersome and can read awkwardly, I have opted to use gender-neutral terms like “human being,” “their,” “people” etc. throughout my exposition.

14. PR, §135, 162/252.

15. SL, 15/W 5, 24.

16. PhG, ¶397, 228/294.

17. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 1 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), I.ii.2.

18. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” in EW, 423/MEW 535.

19. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, MECW 6, 211/MEW 4, 181.

20. This view is still commonplace, see Axel Honneth’s suggestion that Locke’s concept of labour “serve[s] as a model for Marx,” “Labour, A Brief History of a Modern Concept,” Philosophy 97:2 (2022): 151.

21. To invoke Diane Elson’s apt phrase from her collection, Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism (London: Verso, 2015). C.L.R. James had earlier used the phrase, Modern Politics (Oakland: PM Press, 2013), 83.

22. Such relations depend upon the sale and reproduction of labour-power. As Lise Vogel argues, Marx’s category of “social reproduction” has dramatic implications for an analysis of gender, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 136–75.

23. Cap.3, 953/867. My emphasis.

24. Gr, 327/243.

25. Frequently Marx’s polemical comments against the moralists of his day are taken to be sufficient evidence that he rejected ethics altogether as part of “bourgeois philosophy.” This argument, while having support in textual isolation (e.g. “Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality,” MECW 6, 312–40/MEW 4, 330–59), discounts the substantive and foundational relationship between politics and ethics in Marx’s thought. While Marx rejects “empty phrases about “justice”“(MECW 24, 268/MEW 19, 164), I argue that the ethical dimension of Marx’s critical social theory is necessary to make sense of his analysis and rejection of capitalism.

26. In my view, not all actions are practices. For example, the action of a solider might require learning, skill and collective endeavour, but its imperialist ends require collective despair, destruction and death.

27. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 8.

28. MacIntyre, 7.

29. Hannah Arendt, “From Hegel to Marx” in The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 73.

30. For instance, see Peter E. Gordon, A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023).

31. EL, §14, 43/59; §236, 299/388.

32. EL, §236, 299/388.

33. Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Verso, 2009), 97.

34. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: New Left Books, 1974), §116, 180.

35. AV, 61.

36. For early versions of this thesis, see Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983) and Gillian Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism: Post-Structuralism and Law (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984).

37. This problem is evident in a recent exchange between Jacques Rancière and Axel Honneth, one a towering figure in French post-structuralism, the other in Frankfurt School critical theory. Rancière promotes a politics of equality and Honneth an ethical life of just institutions, which includes a reinvention of market socialism. The disagreement between Rancière and Honneth is at one level foundational. There is little incorporation of ethical subjectivity in Rancière, and little incorporation of political emancipation in Honneth. However, at another level the agreement between Rancière and Honneth is implicit. Regardless of the political and ethical conflicts of contemporary life, they share an attitude towards Marx. Marx might be part of the traditions they traverse, but for them he has a largely diminished importance in contemporary social theory. Their exchange demonstrates the interpretive barrier which my interpretation of Marx attempts to overcome. See Jacques Rancière and Axel Honneth, Recognition or Disagreement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). Also, Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy (London: Verso, 2006), 51–70 and Axel Honneth, The Idea of Socialism (London: Polity, 2017), 27–50.

38. Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 1.

39. Martijn Konings, Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 34.

40. The long-awaited translation of Capital, vol. 1, by Paul Reitter and edited by Paul North and Paul Reitter will hopefully furnish a new proliferation of engagement with Marx’s masterwork. I am grateful to the editors for allowing me access to the proofs of this expansive new edition. Unfortunately, the proofs reached me just as I was putting finishing touches on the book.

41. Michael Sonenscher, Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022), viii.

42. Sonenscher, 11.

43. Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (London: Verso, 2023), 123.

44. Cap.1, 486/386; Cap.2, 185/100.

45. Cap.3, 965/880–81, M 894.

46. Fraser and Jaeggi, Capitalism, 2–3.

47. Konings, Capital and Time, 9.

48. Cap.3, 969–70/885.

49. See Simon Clarke, “The Neoliberal Theory of Society” in Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader, ed. Alfredo Saad-Filho and Deborah Johnston (London: Pluto, 2005), 50–59.

50. Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings, The Asset Economy (London: Polity, 2020), 25.

51. Critical social theory today needs to return to this task, which separates the traditional and critical theories of society. See Max Horkheimer’s famous formulation in “Traditional and Critical Theory” in Critical Theory (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 225.

52. This is the great merit of Scott Meikle’s Aristotle’s Economic Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

53. Patrick Murray, The Mismeasure of Wealth: Essays on Marx and Social Form (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017), 49.

54. Marx’s portrayal of modernisation is often said to be Eurocentric. Most influentially, Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), 21, 149–57. Kevin B. Anderson’s Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) provides a robust defence of Marx against the claims of Eurocentrism in general, and Said, in particular, 9–41. Deciphering the late “Ethnological Notebooks,” Anderson details the changes and modifications in Marx’s position, which becomes a strongly “multilinear” analysis of historical development. In my view, while Said is right to detect orientalism in Marx’s 1853 article “The British Rule in India” (MECW 12, 126–27), the entire critique rests upon this text. Said overlooks the sensitivity to Indian resistance in “The Future Results of the British Rule in India,” written a month later, in which Marx puts it that the colonialised Indians should throw off “the English yoke altogether,” MECW 12, 221. It is also hard to sustain Said’s thesis when Marx’s idea in Cap.1 of “so-called original accumulation” is considered (see chapter 4, which draws on Said’s Culture and Imperialism). See also, Aijaz Ahmad, “Marx on India: A Clarification” in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 221–42.

55. Marx responds to the first vulgarisation of his thought in this respect in “Critique of the Gotha Program,” MECW 24, 87–88/MEW 19, 21.

56. The reduction of Marxism to economic distribution is one aspect of what Moishe Postone calls “traditional Marxism,” Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 7–15.

57. This point is not to diminish the role of slavery and other subjugation, just to suggest the normative assumptions of capitalism are inherently contradictory.

58. Rahel Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2018), 203.

59. Capitalism has always relied on violence; this condition of existence is what Marx outlines as “original accumulation.”

60. Cap.1, 280/184. Translation modified.

61. See Jaeggi’s discussion of the procedure of immanent critique in Critique of Forms of Life, 199–206.

62. Cap.1, 758/640.

63. This view takes Kantianism and utilitarianism to be the dominant moral paradigms. These positions are examined in chapter 2.

64. Important contributions include the pioneering work of Isaak Illich Rubin and Roman Rosdolsky; the systematic dialectics of Tony Smith, Patrick Murray and Christopher J. Arthur; the Open Marxism of Simon Clarke and Werner Bonefeld; Diane Elson; Moishe Postone; and the Neue Marx-Lektüre associated with H. G. Backhaus and Michael Heinrich. See also, Konings, Capital and Time, 8–13, Stefan Eich, The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022), 125–33; Nick Nesbitt, The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (Charlottesville: Virginia, 2022) and Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (London: Verso, 2023).

65. Fredric Jameson has criticised this trend, especially Pippin, as predicated on a “lowering of the volume of Hegel’s dialectical claims” to a “rescue operation, which makes Hegel respectable and allows him re-entry into the fraternity of professional philosophers,” The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit (London: Verso, 2010), 10–11. Jameson obscures the insights that may be gained from such scholarship. More significantly, he too easily dismisses the philosophical significance of a revival of Hegelianism and with it, the possibilities for a positive Marxist engagement. Martin Hägglund aims at such a synthesis, bringing to bear the insights of this interpretation of Hegel and the normative value of Marx’s thought, see This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019). Hägglund helps open the way for a renewed discussion of Hegel and Marx in light of Anglo-American Hegel scholarship and value-form theory. For a critique of Pippin, see Michael Lazarus, “The Lives of Marx: Hägglund and Marx’s Philosophy after Pippin and Postone, Historical Materialism 29:4 (2021): 246–50. Michael Lazarus, ed., A New Hegelian Marxism: Debating Martin Hägglund’s This Life (New York: Routledge, forthcoming), contains important debates over the Hegel-Marx relationship following Hägglund’s innovative interpretation.

66. Pinkard engages with Marxism in his work, but his attention is more historical and Marx’s analysis or attempted solutions to the problems of modern life is not especially bearing on his conclusions. There are important recent exceptions, including Arash Abazari, Hegel’s Ontology of Power: The Structure of Social Domination in Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2020), David James, Practical Necessity, Freedom and History: From Hobbes to Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021) and Frederick Neuhouser, Diagnosing Social Pathology: Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Durkheim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

67. In particular, Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

68>. Fred Moseley and Tony Smith, eds., Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Logic (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016).

69. Michael J. Thompson, ed., Constructing Marxist Ethics: Critique, Normativity, Praxis (Leiden: Brill, 2015). See my review, Contemporary Political Theory 15:4 (2016): 472–76. Unfortunately, Vanessa Wills’s Marx’s Ethical Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024) will become available too late to be considered.

70. Tony Smith’s Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism: Marx and Normative Social Theory in the Twenty-First Century (Leiden: Brill, 2017) is an illuminating account of the normative impact of Marx’s concept of value. Smith’s critique of contemporary liberal political philosophy has implications for Marx’s relationship to ethical thought as a whole.

71. For this reason, I have decided to leave to one side the interpretive issues, however interesting, arising from the debate on Marx and justice that was a central feature of 1980s “Analytic Marxism.” See Allen W. Wood, Karl Marx (London: Routledge, 1981), 123–56; Richard W. Miller, Analyzing Marx: Morality, Power and History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); and for an assessment as well as contribution, see Norman Geras, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice” in Literature of Revolution (London: Verso, 1986), 3–57.

72. Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 149.

73. Gr, 158/91.

74. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, 232.

75. Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 228.

76>. While I agree with crucial elements of William Clare Roberts’s notion of nondomination in Marx’s Inferno: A Political Theory of Capital (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), my idea of freedom from domination runs in quite a different direction by drawing from Marx’s value-form theory a normative account of (mis)recognition.