理論讀書會
Transcritique: On Kant and Marx
周俊男 導讀
1.
Parallax (Antinomy) in Marx (Capital):
2014 年 3 月 15 日
A.
Transposition ( a space for transcritique) (134~): Germany, France, and England:
Transposition’s significance in the formation of Marx’s thoughts—Marx thought in the interstice – the transcritical space – where one has to confront different languages, thoughts, and value system (135-6).
B.
Antinomy in political economy: classical (Ricardo) vs. neoclassical (Bailey):
Classical economists held that each commodity internalizes a labor value (6). To
Bailey, values of things are little more than their relationship with other things
(including gold); there is no immanent value substance (194).
C.
Ex post facto (after the fact) vs.
ex ante facto (before the fact) : Classical economists thought of commodity in an ex post facto manner. For them, commodity is already money, and currency is just a denominator of the value
(187). Commodity may be seen as a synthesis of use-value and exchange-value only inasmuch as seen from the ex post facto, while such a synthesis does not exist ex ante facto . The value of a commodity can come into existence only after it is exchanged with another commodity, an equivalent (190).
D.
Commodity vs. money (M-C vs. C-M ’ ): Money is not merely a denominator of value, but a mediating function through which all individual commodities are exchanged, and through which the value-relation among all commodities is constantly adjusted and readjusted (22).The process M–C–M ’ is split: M-C and
C-M ’ occur in different times and places (231).
E.
Use value vs. (exchange) value: “Commodities must be realized as values before they can be realized as use-values. On the other hand, they must be test as use-values before they can be realized as values. For the labor expended on them only counts in so far as it is expended in a form that is useful for others.
However, only the act of exchange can prove whether that labor is useful for others” (Marx, Capital 1, qtd. in 190).
F.
Desire vs. drive: The desire for money or the right for exchange is different from the desire for commodities themselves. I would call this “drive” [ Trieb ] in the
Freudian sense, to distinguish it from “desire”. To put it in another way, the drive of a miser is not to own an object, but to stand in the position of equivalent form, even at the expense of the object. The drive is metaphysical in nature….But capitalist’s drive to accumulate is essentially the same. Capitalists are nothing but “rational misers,” to use Marx’s term (7).
G.
Salto Mortal e (fatal leap): The leap taken by value from the body of the
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理論讀書會
Transcritique: On Kant and Marx
周俊男 導讀 2014 年 3 月 15 日 commodity into the body of gold (money) is the commodity’s salto mortale
(190).
In the process of circulation C-M-C ’ , C-M(selling) and M-C ’ (buying) are separate, and precisely for this reason, the sphere of exchange is infinitely expandable in both space and time. Nevertheless, in this process, because of the fatal leap implicit in C-M or C ’ -M, the possibility of crises exists (207).
H.
Crisis in capitalism: The possibility of crisis exists in the split between buying and selling, and selling and paying, though this is also the very potentiality of capital (qua self-productive money) itself. In other words, surplus value, credit, and crisis forms one and the same circuitous movement of capital (220).
I.
Antinomy in surplus value (Hic Rhodus, hic salta): In the manner of Kant, Marx points out an antinomy: He says, on the one hand, that surplus value cannot be attained in the production in itself , and, on the other hand, that it cannot be attained in the process of circulation in itself . Hence, “Hic Rhodus, hic salta”
(10-11). The Marx of Capital … stresses that the surplus value comes from the difference of value systems in the circulation process, and yet that difference is created by technological innovation in production process (10-11).
It is troubling that many Marxists posit surplus value only in the “exploitation” of the production process rather than in the differences between value systems (10).
J.
State and different value systems:
Gramsci and Foucault: to think of the state only within the state, as cultural hegemony or civil society (275).
Marx: In order to grasp the state as an autonomous entity, we have to see it as existing in relationship with other states (275).
K.
Capital-Nation-State and different modes of exchange:
I have already opposed the view that sees state and nation as superstructure (in the architectonic duality with the base-economic domain) and points out that they are two different types of exchange (275-76).
Nation – reciprocity of gift and return (within agrarian communities)
State – robbery and redistribution (between state and agrarian communities)
Capital – commodity excange
2.
Transcendental form of value
A.
Money: Money is not merely a denominator of value, but a mediating function through which all individual commodities are exchanged, and through which the value-relation among all commodities is constantly adjusted and readjusted. For this precise reason, money exists as an organizer of the system of commodities, namely, a transcendental apperception X of human exchange (22).
B.
Value form: Value form is a kind of form that people are not aware of when they
2

理論讀書會
Transcritique: On Kant and Marx
周俊男 導讀 2014 年 3 月 15 日 are placed within the monetary economy; this is the form that is discovered transcendentally” (9).According to Marx, if gold becomes money, that is not because of its immanent material characteristics, but because it is placed in the value form(7).
C.
Surplus value: “In actual fact, the rage of profit is historical starting point.
Surplus value and the rate of surplus value are, relative to this, the invisible essence to be investigated, whereas the rate of profit and hence the form of surplus-value as profit are visible surface phenomenon.” (Marx, Capital 3, qtd. in 242-43)
Surplus value, unlike profit, cannot be posited within the context of individual companies….And only where there is a difference in price between value systems: A(when they sell their labor power) and B (when they buy the commodities), is surplus value realized (239).
In distinction from “profit,” surplus value is a transcendental concept; it is not something that is visible here, empirically (244).
3.
Transcritique of the worker
In the monetary economy, buying and selling as well as production and consumption are separated. This introduces a split in the workers’ subject: as workers (the sellers of labor-power commodity) and consumers (the buyers of capitalist commodities) (20).
Surplus value is engendered only in totality by worker selling their labor power and with the money buying back the commodities they produced (239).
4. Economico-Ethical
A. Money: both economical and ethical: The ultimate conclusion of Capital is the antinomy: money should exist; money should not exist. To supersede ( aufheben ) money equals the creation of a money that would fill the conflicting conditions
(22).
B . The worker as the subject: Those who sell their labor-power commodity have no other choice but to be passive; yet again there is an exception in the structure: this is a topos where workers appear to be the subject—the place where the products of capitalist production are sold. This is the place of consumption. This is the only position where workers can stand as buyers, with their own money (288).
C. Struggle without and within:
Struggle without: not to work and not to buy (25)
Struggle within: The struggle within inexorably requires these cooperatives and
LETS as an extra-capitalist mode of production/consumption; and furthermore,
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理論讀書會
Transcritique: On Kant and Marx
周俊男 導讀 2014 年 3 月 15 日 this can accelerate the reorganization of capitalist corporation into cooperative entity (25).
D.
Labor movement and consumer movement meet
In other words, the success of the moralist intervention is guaranteed not only by the power of morality in itself, but more crucially, because it is the embodiment of the asymmetric relation between commodity and money. There, in order to begin an oppositional movement against capital, it is imperative to discover a new context where labor movements and consumers’ movements meet, and this not as a political coalition between existing movements but as a totally new movement itself (294).
E.
Communism—regulative---the other as ends:
In the context of a capitalist economy where people treat each merely as a means to an end, the Kantian “kingdom of freedom” or “Kingdom of ends” clearly comes to entail another new meaning, that is, communism (viii).
Communism should not be, in Kantian terms, a constitutive idea, namely, “an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself,” but a regulative idée , namely, an ideal which constantly offers the ground to criticize reality. An elucidation of capitalism is thereby an ethical task par excellence. Here is the transcritical juncture between political economy and morality, between Marxian critique and
Kantian critique (217).
F.
Association:
We might think of mode of exchange D [association] as representing the return of mode of exchange A in a higher dimension. It is a mode of exchange that is simultaneously free and mutual. It is the imaginary return of the moment of reciprocity that has been repressed under modes of exchange B and C. Unlike the other three modes, mode of exchange D does not exist in actuality ( The
Structure of World History , 7).
Associationism can be considered as an ethico-economic form of human relation that can appear only after a society that once passes through the capitalist market economy. It was thought that Proudhon was the first to have totalized it; according to my reading, however, Kant’s ethics already contained it (13).
G.
LETS (Local Exchange Trading System):
It was devised and practiced by Michael Linton in 1982 (23)
It is neither simply economic nor simply ethical. It creates an economico-ethical association (24).
It is so organized that the sum total of the gains and losses of everyone is zero….
In contrast to the capitalist market economy, in LETS, money does not transform into capital, not simply because there is not interest, but because it is based upon
4

理論讀書會
Transcritique: On Kant and Marx
周俊男 導讀 2014 年 3 月 15 日 zero sum principle. It is organized so that, although exchanges occur actively,
“money” does not exist as a result (23).
In this simple system exists a clue to solving the antinomy of money (23).
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