The legacy of reification: Gillian Rose and the value-form theory challenge to Georg Lukács

Introduction

Recent interest in the philosophy of Georg Lukács has pushed at the intersection between ‘orthodox Marxism’ and the intellectual inheritance of Marxist theory from neo-Kantianism and its continuation in Frankfurt School Critical Theory (Feenberg, 2014; Kavoulakos, 2018). This article points to tensions in the adaption of Marx’s concept of value through Lukács into Critical Theory. I take as my starting point the critical discussion by Gillian Rose of the relation of Critical Theory and Marx’s mature writings. Her treatment of the problem helps shine light on ongoing issues in the understanding of the concept of value in Critical Theory. More immediately, the republication of several significant works by Rose (first published in 1978, 1981 and 1993 in then respectively as Rose, 2014, 2009 and 2017) has made her early writing widely available. However, even now her work has failed to attract recent scholarly reflection, beyond a small niche (Brower Latz, 2018).

This article seeks to renew discussion of the juncture between Critical Theory and Marx’s critique of political economy, by way of an examination of Rose’s interpretation of Lukács. ¹ This critique, outlined in Part I, opens up the possibility of a value-form approach derived from a speculative reading of Marx’s categories in Capital, which I develop in Part II. ² An evaluation of the ‘beginning level’ of Marx’s value theory helps frame an appraisal of Lukács’ thought and its ongoing importance for contemporary social theory. By ‘speculative’, I follow Rose’s interpretation of Hegel’s position. She identifies with Hegel that thought must go beyond ‘tortuous antitheses’ to ‘the knowledge that the opposites are in truth one’ (Hegel, 1984: 282; Rose, 2017: 60). This truth recognises this whole as the absolute, the objective unity of thought and being. For Rose, the absolute cannot be ‘treated methodologically from the outside as an unknowable, nor “shot from a pistol” as an immediate certainty. This “whole” can only become known as a result of the process of the contradictory experiences of consciousness which gradually comes to realise it’ (Rose, 2009: 49). At first appearance this claim appears similar to Lukács’ concept of totality (Lukács, 1971: 8–15). However, Rose points to a retreat in Lukács’ thought to a type of methodological Marxism, where the totality is imposed rather than derived from contradictory experience.

Following this line of argument, I advance a value-form approach which differs in crucial ways from Lukács’ interpretation of Capital in History and Class Consciousness. While the contradictions of the commodity provide the starting point for social critique for Lukács, there is no unfolding of the subsequent categories of value, namely money and capital. In effect, the concept of value cannot be adequately grasped, and capital cannot be seen as the dominate subject of value producing society. Instead, Marx’s critique of the commodity-form becomes for Lukács a component part of a methodology which takes this critique as pregiven and the foundation for his theory of reification. The core problem can be found in Lukács’ programmatic statement:

the chapter dealing with the fetish character of the commodity contains within itself the whole of historical materialism and the whole self-knowledge of the proletariat seen as the knowledge of capitalist society (and of the societies that preceded it). (1971: 170)

Lukács posits that his concept of reification finds its origin in this crucial first chapter. He quotes from the famous passage which describes the commodity as ‘a mysterious thing’ in which the social characteristics of human labour ‘appear’ in the ‘fantastic form of a relation between things’ (Lukács, 1971: 86; Marx, 1976a: 164–5). Social relations are not seen to be between human beings but in the form of the products of their labour.

This gloss gives Lukács sufficiently orthodox grounds for his theory – after all ‘orthodoxy refers exclusively to method’ (1971: 1; emphasis in original) – but at the same time it acts to obscure differences between his theory of reification and Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism, which depends on its development through the conceptual form of money to the capital form, as value-in-process. These derivations give the concept of commodity fetish its concreteness. Marx’s value theory cannot be limited to the analysis of the commodity as presented in the first chapter of Capital but must proceed to the money and capital form-determinates and to more concrete expressions of value. An equivalency between commodity fetishism and reification results in distinct problems in our understanding of capitalist social relations. Most significantly, Marx’s concepts are treated in a preliminary manner and the study of the commodification of everyday life proceeds without the unfolding of the necessary conceptual determinations, in effect losing the intended speculative nature of Marx’s concept of value. Tony Smith has recently drawn attention to this problem:

Important Marxian theorists seem to have been convinced that the beginning of Marx’s systematic theory provides a sufficient basis for a critical social theory by itself. Lukács and Adorno sometimes write as if the determinations of generalised commodity exchange developed at the start of Capital serve as a framework for comprehending the inevitable commodification, monetarisation, and fetishism of all dimensions of contemporary life. (2017: 98)

Rose worked within a form of Critical Theory but demanded Marx’s theory of value be reassessed within this tradition. Her thought responded polemically to the prominence of Habermas in Anglo-American Critical Theory but offered a critique of foundational aspects of Critical Theory from the perspective of Hegel’s speculative thought. This type of thinking goes beyond the posting of opposed concepts, which express an ‘antinomical’ form of reason associated with Kant’s critical philosophy, but instead seeks philosophical ‘truth’ in conceptual identity, the ‘knowledge of what is opposed in its very oneness, more precisely the knowledge that the opposites are in truth one’ (Hegel, 1984: 280–2; Rose, 2017: 60–1).

Rose understands the relationship between Marxism and Critical Theory not as a departure or gulf but constituting a shared project of social critique derived from an analysis of the commodity-form. On one hand, Rose was heavily influenced by the first generation of the Frankfurt School, especially Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin; on the other, by the Anglo-American New Left, which aimed at resisting the theoretical pessimism of the Frankfurt School to develop a critical theory of contemporary society. ³

Crucially, for Rose, the concept of reification in Critical Theory produced a ‘sociological’ Marxism, informed by the investigation of the commodity in modern society, which gave it significant power. Despite this strength, Rose argues Critical Theory problematically generalised the form of Marx’s critique of the commodity rather than speculatively unfolding the determinate social mediations. This limited Marxism to a method, which forced the application of theory to reality, rather than a critique that recognised the mediations necessary for an inquiry of the social whole. Following Rose, by delimitating the differences between the concept of value and Lukács’ concept of reification, it becomes possible to strengthen the role of Marx’s thought in the central concepts of Critical Theory by reintroducing a more conceptually robust Marx. When Marx’s value theory is reconstructed as a logical unfolding of social forms, rather than as a sociological methodology, Marx’s specific contribution to social theory becomes more immanent and speculative. Rather than a forced application of concepts to reality, Marx’s speculative approach allows for a dialectically concrete analysis of contemporary capitalism in which complex financial processes are shown to be determinations of value production. Contemporary capitalism can then be understood in terms of the value-form, with specific attention given to the particular social forms related to each phenomenon as the categories under investigation become increasingly concretised. In this way, the beginning level of Marx’s value-form theory allows for further analysis into the specific forms of capital in production, circulation and distribution and the subsequent varieties of industrial and financial capital. ⁴

Part I: Rose’s critical Marxism

Published in 1978, Rose’s first book, The Melancholy Science, the misleadingly titled ‘Introduction’ to Adorno, argues from the opening page that ‘Adorno’s thought depends fundamentally on the category of reification’ (2014: ix). She claims that this category has attracted a ‘strangely dominant role’ in neo-Marxist and phenomenological philosophy but generally fails to give justification for its usage. ⁵

Rose provides a dense reconstruction of reification, which she argues is ‘overworked’ and ‘made to bear an enormous weight of theoretical responsibility’ (2014: 35). This is partly because the term is superimposed by Lukács and early Critical Theory back upon Marx and Hegel, leading to conceptual confusion between alienation, commodity fetishism and reification. ⁶ Apart from a single usage of the German word Versachlichung in Chapter Three of Capital (1976a: 209; see also 1976b: 1054), Marx does not use the term reification in his discussion of fetishism in Chapter One.

In History and Class Consciousness, Lukács suggests that ‘the structure of commodity-relations [can] be made to yield a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them’ (1971: 82). The essence of the commodity structure relates to its ‘phantom objectivity’, the concealment of the relation between people. Lukács’ explicit ‘intention’ is to ‘base’ his account on ‘Marx’s economic analyses and to proceed from there to a discussion of the problems growing out of the fetish character of commodities’ (1971: 84). Lukács immediately equates the ‘basic phenomenon of reification’ to the fetish appearance of commodities (1971: 86).

Rose points out, however, that Lukács assumes a great deal from Georg Simmel’s use of the term ‘reification’, constructed explicitly without the theory of value. Lukács introduces to the concept the import of the category of the commodity. He subsequently establishes that reification starts with the use and exchange character of the commodity and then immediately identifies this dualism in the ‘rational mechanism’ of daily life (1971: 91; see also Markus, 2001: 4–5). According to Rose, in this move,

‘reification’ was elevated over the theory of commodity fetishism and made to do more general sociological work in a way which had important theoretical consequences. It meant that the distinction between abstract and concrete labour, on which the theory of value and of commodity fetishism logically depends, received no emphasis and thus no theory of surplus value was adopted. The theoretical foundations for a theory of class conflict or for a Marxian theory of power and the state were thereby attenuated or abandoned. (2014: 45–6)

Yet, Rose’s point about the influence of Simmel and Weber on Lukács’ philosophy is not to discount their contribution to sociological accounts of modernity, but to emphasise the impact of neo-Kantian categories into his conception of reification. This argument has important consequences. She further develops this approach in Hegel Contra Sociology, published in 1981. Here she identifies antinomies in sociological thinking from Weber, Simmel and Neo-Kantian sociology to Marxism, Lukács and Adorno through to Habermas. Rose traces the dualism in the formation of ‘scientific sociology’ by the neo-Kantian distinction between ‘values’ and ‘validity’, the moral and objective realms (2009: 14–23). She suggests the neo-Kantian paradigm applied this distinction to the mode of investigation of the social world, oscillating between irreconcilable realms. The conditions for knowledge, as a result, were trapped between oppositional categories which alternate in analytical priority but are not identified in an inner unity. Rose suggests the Kantian separation between objective and subjective validity was deeply ingrained into sociological thinking that arose in response to Kant. In this way, sociological thought saw objectivity in the method of inquiry, a notion of science that created a gulf between method and content. However critical the sociology, it remained confined to this division.

According to Rose, this problem is inherited and replicated in Marxist accounts of the social world, where the separation of Hegel’s radical method (dialectic) from his conservative system (absolute knowledge) remained as an antimony of method and content (2009: 36). Marxist sociology attempted to derive a method to ‘reveal social contractions’ in capitalism, but in dismissing the speculative nature of Hegel’s thought – as demonstrated in his critique of Kant and Fichte – even the best attempts to overcome Kant’s critical philosophy presupposed a method/content dualism (2009: 45). Subsequently, Lukács and Adorno offered sophisticated attempts to break out of the dualism of their neo-Kantian backgrounds (Lukács, 1971; Adorno, 2003), but imported the formalism of this tradition with its fusion in the concept of reification with ‘selective generalisation of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism’ (Rose, 2009: 29).

In Hegel Contra Sociology, Rose affirms and sharpens the critique of Lukács offered in The Melancholy Science. Rose expands on the nature of Lukács’ generalisation of Marx’s commodity fetishism, which he does ‘by making a distinction between the total process of production, “real life-processes” and the resultant objectification of social forms’. Accordingly, capitalist society is seen as a totality in which reification is the objectification of capitalist commodity exchange in every sphere of life. Reification determinates all social forms and the standpoint of totality charts their mediation by the totality. As a result, unmasking the appearance of each social form can only be valid from the totality and not when analysed from an isolated position. Rose suggests this view shifts from ‘a logic of identity in the direction of a theory of historical mediation’ (2009: 30–1). Lukács’ insistence on the methodological prioritisation on the position of totality, in effect, takes as its point of departure the effect of reification. This method restricts the entry point for charting social relations to the application of his particular analysis. Reification is given as an objective problem for consciousness and then examined in its specific mediations.

Conversely, in Hegel’s speculative thought, concrete totalities are understood logically as the unfolding of the absolute idea. In precis, the beginning examines the most universal form of the object of investigation and then the concept is unfolded in its relation to the systematic and absolute identity of object and concept. For Hegel, the speculative identity between identity and non-identity must proceed from the most abstract concept, which gives ‘the first definition’ of the absolute and then allows ‘all further determinations and developments [to be] only more specific and richer definitions of it’ (Hegel, 1969: 74). This speculative development involves the mediation of different conceptual forms (part and whole), but identities each form only in the process of its overcoming (Aufheben) into another higher form-determinate.

Rose acknowledges the advantages Lukács’ theory of reification has in cultural and political criticism over the reductive model of ‘base/superstructure’, but conceptually this form of ‘historical mediation’ relies on the application of the analysis to unveil the illusion of reified consciousness, understood from a historical standpoint of totality. Social forms are given validly only when observed from the standpoint of the totality (2009: 30–1). ⁸ At this point of her argument, there appears a counter position between the position of absolute knowledge in Hegel and the standpoint of totality in Lukács. For Hegel, the category of totality is integrally linked with absolute knowledge, as the identity and self-knowledge of the absolute idea:

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. (2010: 43; emphasis in original)

In rejecting the speculative nature of Hegel’s thought, Lukács also distances himself from the speculative dimension present in Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism – the unfolding of the commodity and value into more concrete conceptual categories specific to capitalist social forms. Instead, reification imposes the method of the critique of the commodity onto the content of further phenomena abstractly, without taking the necessary steps to justify the relation between method and content in this critique.

Further, Rose argues that by excluding Marx’s theory of value and the subsequent analysis in Capital after Chapter One, ‘reification’ becomes a ‘kind of shorthand instead of a sustained theory’. As a result, Lukács’ method is ‘invitation to hermeneutic anarchy’ (2009: 31). Rose suggests that these characteristics of reification are carried through Lukács as the ‘source of the error’ into other major Marxist and non-Marxist theorists (2014: 38, 55). She considers Adorno’s ‘obsession’ with reification to be dependent on a reading of Marx’s value theory. However in Rose’s view, Adorno’s reading is ‘highly selective’ and fails to utilise Marx’s concept of the dual form of labour and of surplus value. ⁹ Expanding on the position established in her first book, Rose offers a more detailed examination of Adorno’s critique of Lukács in Hegel Contra Sociology. She suggests that Lukács’ way out of subject/object dualism, in the historical class conscious identity of the proletariat maintains that reification is ended by ‘a change in consciousness’ but still implies that ‘the subject will dominate the object’ (2009: 33; see also Adorno, 2003: 191). Since Lukács’ ‘standpoint of the proletariat’ allows the fetish quality of commodity society to be finally revealed, what Lukács demands is only a change in consciousness.

Despite Adorno's critique of Lukács, who reduces commodity fetishism ‘to the social subject’ (2003: 197), according to Rose, he follows Lukács’ reading of Marx’s theory of value and ‘accepted his generalisations’. She writes:

Instead of understanding capitalist social, cultural and artistic forms as ‘objectifications’ or ‘facts of consciousness’, Adorno analysed them as determinants of the contradictions of consciousness. These analyses, although radically sociological, are suspended theoretically. Adorno’s rejection of all philosophy of history, all teleologies of reconciliation, whether Hegelian, Marxist or Lukácsian, meant that he could not underpin his analyses of cultural forms with analysis of those economic forms on which the cogency of the theory of commodity fetishism depends. Instead of supplementing the selective generalisation of Marx’s theory with a speculative sociology of the proletariat, Adorno completed his critique of consciousness by a subversive ‘morality of method. (2009: 34–5)

The critique of Marxism, according to Rose, ‘yields the project of a critical Marxism’. Here the engagement with Hegel must take place in close reference to the critique of political economy. To do this, Rose draws attention again to the weight of Capital:

The theory of commodity fetishism is the most speculative moment in Marx’s exposition of capital. 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. (2009: 232; emphasis added)

The explicit line of critique that runs through both of Rose’s early books is the insistence that the failure of Lukács and the early Frankfurt School is in the failure of their reading of Marx’s value theory. Yet, Rose herself fails to expand on what exactly Marx’s value theory is. Rose gives no account of Capital, the book or the concept. The speculative moment in Marx that Rose emphasises is left as a gloss, as the ‘necessary illusion arises out of productive activity’ (2009: 232). This account of commodity fetishism fails give a sense of either the unfolding of the categories or the self-valorisation of value as capital.

If Rose’s analysis hinges on the issues that arise from a conceptual slip between commodity fetishism and reification, it is a major issue in her work that there is no elaboration of a coherent approach to the question of value. Instead, she abstractly gestures to the promise of the theoretical (i.e. methodological) paradigm found in Marx’s writing. Although Rose provides a metacritique of Marxism’s inability to expand on Marx’s theory of value, ironically, she fails to provide a substantial account of its import for social theory – either Hegelian or ‘critical Marxist’. Additionally, she neglects to provide a substantial positive account of what such an elaboration might look like.

With this limitation in mind, I’ll give a preliminary account of how an approach to Marx’s value-form theory might proceed speculatively. This account follows Rose’s claim that the speculative moment in Marx must be recognised and restored if the necessary critique of methodological Marxism is to be followed through. This path is only possible after an appreciation of Rose’s challenge to Lukács. Building off her critique, allows for the speculative approach to capital to be advanced as a dialectic of method/content and form/substance – to take the value-form as a real abstraction that allows the movement of capital to be understood as subject. A speculative reading of Marx takes the concept of value to express a relation and a process in which is capital is a self-moving substance, the subject of a form of social life dominated by the self-valorisation of abstract labour relations. To be clear, my aim is not to simply counterpose one form of methodological Marxism with another, but to suggest how the beginning level of an analysis of value can strengthen understandings of Marx, Lukács and Critical Theory.

Part II: A speculative Marxism

The careful composition of the opening chapters of Capital, as Marx often acknowledged, draws heavily from Hegel’s Logic. Marx’s systematic mode of abstraction parallels Hegel’s (Banaji, 2015). The beginning level of Marx’s value theory considers the initial and necessarily abstract categories of value producing society. This beginning allows for the increasingly complex category of capital to be expanded upon ‘step by step’ in a systematic manner (Smith, 2017: 73). Before analysing the more concrete categories of the working day or wages, Marx begins his exposition with the most basic and abstract determinations pertaining to value and proceeds through this level progressively adding determinations. This is a process of real abstraction, which allows the complexity of the form of value to progress from its first form in the commodity to its final iteration as capital. In this way, he provides an analysis of the constitute categories of value. It is important to note that Marx’s exposition of the categories of commodity and money and the transition to capital is immanently developed. His investigation of exchange does not posit these categories in an arbitrary or accidental manner but orders the categories speculatively. Here he follows Hegel’s instance that the speculative ‘grasps the unity of the determinations in their opposition, the affirmative that is contained in their dissolution and their passing over into something else’. In this view, the speculative allows the determinate content of concepts to be understood as ‘something concrete, because it is not a simple, formal unity, but a unity of distinct determinations. For this reason, philosophy does not deal at all with mere abstractions or formal thoughts, but exclusively with concrete thoughts’ (2010: 132; emphasis in original).

To grasp the distinct determinations of value, Marx comprehends the social forms specific to capital as real abstractions. As with Hegel, the abstraction of categories allows Marx to understand abstract social forms concretely. This task recognises the specificity of the exchange of commodities to the form of value and the associated form of abstract labour. As Adorno points out:

Exchange itself is a process of abstraction. Whether human beings [die Menschen] know it or not, by entering into a relationship of exchange and reducing different use-values to labour-value they actualise a real conceptual operation socially. This is the objectivity of the concept in practice. (2018: 156)

Marx’s starting concept is the most general pertaining to the object of analysis and his presentation develops each category in a sequence of transition. One side of a dialectical unity is developed, given determinations, then flipped as the other side is shown to process countervailing tendencies and an identity that transforms the content into to a new conceptual form. The contradictions of within each form provide the immanent movement for the transition from one category to the next. The negative pole of the form acts against its positive opposite, ‘constantly striving to overcome’ itself and allow for a new relation that preserves the truth the form at a more concrete level (Marx, 1976b: 1037). The simple and immediate opposition of use and exchange value in the first chapter is given conceptual depth as Marx proceeds logically to the movement of commodities by circulation via the mediation of money and then finally to the self-valorisation of value as capital.

Capital opens with the sequence of the social forms intrinsic to modern society as characterised by political economy: commodity, money, capital. His point of departure is the movement between the particularity and immediacy of the commodity and the universality and abstractness of value as the social relation specific to modern society. Value is a totality (‘reflected-into-itself, for all categories of capital are categories of value’; Banaji, 2015: 39–40; emphasis in original), but Marx develops the category of value through the real abstraction of form-determinations. From the form of the commodity through the money-form, Marx proceeds speculatively to the category of capital. In this way, value is the totality of the commodity-form, the money-form and the capital-form. The value form contains these expressions of value as distinct determinations, speculatively ordered so to best comprehend their composition and movement in the social world. Value is ever present as the self-preserving moment in all further developments and immanent in all determinations of capital as the historically specific social relation of wealth. The relation between substance and form in Marx’s categories allows for the expressions of objectified human activity to be grasped as socially constituted experiences which are rendered abstract in our world.

Marx’s point of departure, his abstraction of the commodity form allows him to proceed from this determination through value and its alienated composition as abstract labour. Value is the expression of the objectification of human labour – reflecting an alienated form as abstract labour. For Marx, abstract labour is the substance of value. Marx’s concept of labour shows its dual character – abstract and concrete – when it takes the historically specific social form of capitalist productive relations. Marx writes in Chapter One:

Whence, then, arises the enigmatic character of the product of labour, as soon as it assumes the form of a commodity? Clearly, it arises from this form itself. 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; and finally the relationships between the producers, within which the social characteristics of their labours are manifested, take on the form of a social relation between the products of labour. (1976a: 164)

However, the riddle of these sections of Chapter One has been the application of this theory of commodity fetishism without the subsequent concept of capital. Lukács is largely uninterested in the concept of capital (and even Rose mentions it only in passing). ¹⁰ Chapter One provides a central account of the nature of commodity relations, which the fetish character is indispensable, but Marx never intends this for this analysis to substitute the derivation of more concrete determinations, as offered throughout Volumes Two and Three of Capital. Furthermore, these determinations are impossible without a robust concept of capital. Even when Lukács quotes Marx from Capital, Volume 3, describing the social form of capital as ‘self-expanding value’ and money as the ‘fetish form of capital’, he glosses these processes in terms of reification (1971: 93–4). Lukács offers this quotation to support his claim that ‘the structure of reification progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more definitely into the consciousness of man’ (1971: 93). These form-determinations are understood by Lukács as the conditions for reification, however he retreats from an investigation of the social form and proceeds with an account of rationalisation from the exchange relation, drawing off Simmel and Weber (1971: 95–103).

Lukács fails to offer an account of the necessary relation between these social forms and capital. In this way, he presupposes the concept of capital. This is particularly problematic since it fails to consider how the phantom objectivity of the commodity becomes universal and self-moving value as capital. Like the commodity, capital has a fetish character, since:

Capital is not a thing, any more than money is a thing. In capital, as in money, certain specific social relations of production between people appear as relations of things to people, or else certain social relations appear as the natural properties of things in society. (1976b: 1005; emphasis in original)

Capital is a social relation that can only be grasped conceptually after the development of the commodity and money forms. In Marx’s view, capital itself is a form of value which consists in the form of social labour specific to commodity production. Capital realises itself as value by the production and circulation process, in ‘the moments of its metamorphosis’, appearing as money and then as a commodity, ‘then again as exchange value, then again as use value’. Each part of this derivation from one form-determination is ‘the transition to the other. Capital is thus posited as value-in-process, which is capital in every moment’ (1973: 536). This form is movement without limit, infinite process. Capital is the self-expansion of value, expressing itself in the forms of commodities and money in this process which function

only as different modes of existence of value itself, the money as its general mode of existence, the commodity as its particular or, so to speak, disguised mode. It is constantly changing from one form into the other, without becoming lost in this movement; it thus becomes transformed into an automatic subject. (1976a: 255)

What is significant in this analysis is that since value is the substance of abstract labour and capital value in-process, the self-movement of value through the valorisation of capital not only exercises the subjectivity of capital, but also expresses the alienated objectivity of human labour. In this way, the social forms specific to capital can only be comprehended speculatively from an understanding of value as a process constituted by the alienated and abstract character of commodity production. It also allows for capital to be further specified as a ‘pseudo-subject’, since capital is nothing but a relation. Capital is a ‘paradoxical’ relation in which, as Smith observes:

Capital is Everything, an Absolute Subject subsuming every nook and cranny of social life to the imperatives of commodification, monetarisation, and valorisation. But capital is equally Nothing in and of itself, a mere Pseudo-subject, a parasite, a ghost, a ‘vampire’, whose self-valorisation turns out to be nothing but a forced appropriation of the creative powers of living labour (and the powers of science, machinery, nature, pre-capitalist cultural achievements, and so on, that living labour mobilises). In one sense these capacities are capacities of capital. But in another sense capital, as pure form, has no capacities on its own. Once created and mobilised, the capacities of living labour remain capacities of living labour, even after they have been incorporated within capital circuits as moments of capital’s self-valorisation. (2017: 129)

Conclusion

Rose helps reassess the relation between Marx’s value theory and Critical Theory and offers a distinctive theoretical path for a reconstruction of Marx’s Capital which provides a social theory adequate to modern capitalism. Despite the tentative nature of her discussion, she illuminates important tensions between Marx’s value theory and its reception. These insights point back towards a philosophical reading of Marx which asks what is necessary for a critical theory of society. Her challenge helps understand Marx’s critique of political economy not as a method in which the critique of the commodity can be applied to pregiven social phenomena, but that the method of thought must interrogate the content of social forms. In this way, Marx’s critique of political economy is the unfolding of forms associated with value production. Marx’s analysis of the social forms specific to capital, illuminate a set of relationships mediated by the production and circulation of commodities for exchange. Marx’s analysis of capital points to essential aspects and dynamics of capitalism as a set of social relations. These social forms remain fundamental to our contemporary world. His critique of the categories of political economy allow for an analysis of social relations that remain central to the operation of today’s financial markets and systems. His speculative exposition examines the social forms of experience that arise from processes that are made abstract and appear fetishised in modern life. For Marx, value dominates modern life, objectifying human labour to the abstractions of the market. The exchange of commodities is predicated on the abstract substance of labour-value. The enduring relevance of Marx’s understanding of capital is the comprehension of this relation as a process of self-valorisation. Rose’s ‘lament over reification’ (2014: 35) sharpens the distinction between reification and commodity fetishism, illuminating important tensions between Marx’s value theory and its reception. Rose open a path of investigation which points back towards a philosophical reading of Marx and asks once more: what is necessary for a critical theory of society?