Reciprocity, Recognition and Labor Value: Marx’s Incidental
Moral Anthropology of Capitalist Market Exchange
Matthias Zick Varul, University of Exeter
published in Journal of Social Philosophy Vol.41 (2010), No.1, pp.50-72
Introduction
Marx’s labor theory of value can be read, counter-intentionally but productively, as a moral
anthropology of commodity exchange in capitalist societies. Using this theory as blueprint I
will try to develop a moral grammar of capitalist market exchange involving notions of
(qualitative) equality and (negative) freedom – both finding recognition through the
allocation of (abstract) property as expression of (social) utility. I will argue that exchanges
in consumer and labor markets carry a presupposition of equitability and an
acknowledgement of productive contribution, suggesting a web of balanced reciprocity and
recognition. Yet, while this constitutes an implicit promise of justice and respect among free
and equal market citizens, it is a promise that cannot be kept because of the inevitable
inequality arising from capital accumulation. Against the background of that broken promise
inequality and exclusion are also to be understood as structural misrecognition.
To derive a “moral grammar” from basic economic operations may be viewed as
reductionistic. I should therefore emphasize that I do not claim to deduce an allencompassing explanation of capitalist moralities of exchange. Instead I will outline how
some basic structures of commodity exchange by way of implication and presupposition
affirm, stabilize and to a degree independently reproduce such moralities once they have
been politically and culturally created. It has long been established that the allegedly demoralized and de-traditionalized sphere of “the economy” is, in fact, culturally constructed
and maintained.1 This has often been ignored in a Marxist tradition that has been generally
more concerned with how capitalist relations of production affect subjectivities and culture.
Postmodern Marxists like Jack Amariglio and Antonio Callari2 try to redress the balance by
acknowledging the “mutual intereffectivity” between cultural, political and economic
processes. I will not contest the embeddedness of economic processes in non-economic
social relations. My focus in this paper will nonetheless be on the internal logic of exchange
and its moral implications. That, as Karl Polanyi insists, “a market economy can only exist in
a market society”3 means both that social institutions provide an indispensable environment
for the market and that a market society must accommodate the market, i.e. allow itself to be
shaped by the market.
The reason for this focus is that, on the one hand, theorists of embeddedness tend to
assume that market exchange in itself contributes nothing to the moral texture of a society –
or rather, that it is a major threat to that texture. On the other hand, while the traditions of
Western Marxism and the Frankfurt School discuss commodity exchange (and particularly
commodity fetishism) as culturally productive, they do so mainly in terms of ideology but
not in terms of legitimacy,4 i.e. they do not so much talk about how commodity exchange
creates and affirms webs of mutual obligation and recognition, but mainly how it deforms
personalities and distorts realities. Even the broad literature on whether or not Marx had a
theory of justice, albeit centering on commodity exchange and particularly the sale of labor
power, has not produced an account of how commodity exchange presupposes and
reproduces a morality of reciprocity and recognition. Although the role of “immanent”
standards of justice is debated, the emergence and reproduction of such immanent standards
in capitalist practices is not accounted for.5 The same is true for the contestation that for
Marx “justice” was nothing more than a bourgeois ideology,6 sanctifying the unconscious
“factual recognition” 7 of property in economic interaction by an explicit legal recognition.
Often a Marxist understanding of the normative implications of such factual recognition has
been marred by a basis/superstructure distinction that leaves no room for the normative
force of routine and practice itself – a normativity that is more immediate and less articulate
than full-blown “right” (part of the superstructure), yet not entirely without consciousness
like the, supposedly, unreflected relations of production (the basis), but “practically
intelligible”.8
2
The “commodity logic” as a moral grammar informing notions of reciprocity and
recognition cannot be understood adequately as mere distortion or disguise of real relations
of production, shielding the vested interests of the dominating classes from criticism. To the
contrary: While such notions may, at times, have contributed to mass loyalty under Fordist
regimes of production,9 they do not square at all with neo-liberal regimes of accumulation.
For this reason ideologues of this new capitalism abandoned the idea of social justice as
equitable exchange which had once been an integral part of the liberal justification of
capitalism.10 But the idea, with its potential to destabilize legitimacy of the current capitalist
order,11 retains a high everyday plausibility.
Value theory as moral anthropology
Commodity exchange as a central element of economic life has become a traditionalized
practice in the sense that it is “determined by engrained habituation”.12 This is particularly
true of the most common commodity exchanges: selling labor power and buying consumer
goods.13 These have sunken deep into the self-evidence of what Peter Berger and Thomas
Luckmann call “first level legitimacy”: justification by the mere knowledge that this is “how
things are done.”14 Regularity of conduct is habitually interpreted as moral behavior in the
sense that there is a “right and a wrong way of doing things”.15 The rules and regularities of
commodity exchange have become part of the moral grammar of capitalist societies and like
the grammar of a language, a moral grammar is acquired not by first learning and then
applying its rules but by observing and imitating examples of doing things the right way.16
To spell out those rules, I will use (but not: interpret) Marx’s value theory as a blueprint for a
moral anthropology of such habits of capitalist exchange. Marx can be read as incidental
anthropologist as, writing in the center of world capitalism (London), he remained a
“stranger in the field” – both inadvertently by hailing from an underdeveloped region
(Prussian Rhineland) and deliberately by being a communist. From this quasi-ethnographical
vantage point he delivered – as a by-product of his critique of the political economy – a
dense account of the moral assumptions contained in money-mediated commodity
exchange.
3
The use of Marx’s analysis of commodity exchange entails an abstraction from the variety
and complexity of actual market practices, as of course there is no such thing as “the
market” but only a variety of markets. 17 The “labor market”, for example, is highly
segmented because what is traded are diverse concrete labor powers attached to diverse
concrete people in diverse concrete contexts. Construction workers and hedge fund
managers do not sell their labor on the same market. Such different markets have little in
common except the evaluation of commodities in terms of general money, which as a realabstraction implies, I will argue, a reference to abstract, interchangeable labor. Talking of
“the market” can therefore be justified insofar (and only insofar) as transactions in different
markets in their aspect of quantitative evaluation through money are translatable into each other.
Money mediation does not do away with the diversity of specific markets; but it does
constitute a shared index that plays a central role in the moral grammar of capitalist
exchange.
In reading Marx as an incidental anthropologist, much of the original critical clout of his
economic analyses will be lost. However, some of it will be regained as it will emerge that the
semantics of capitalist commodity exchange presumes standards which are violoated its
outcomes. This is not just a case of an ideological appearance of justice on the one hand and
an unjust economic reality on the other; there is a more immediate moral relevance to this
discrepancy. Against the background of the moral grammar of capitalist exchange, I will
argue, the allocation of economic value is a recognition of personal worth – and the denial of
economic value becomes an act of misrecognition.
Marx had a keen understanding of both the moral implications of capitalist praxis and the
contradictions between these implications and the actual results of this praxis. But he did not
elaborate on the niceties of what he considered merely to be ideological adornments of a
doomed social order. His main concern regarding the morality of capitalism was to warn
against mistaking it for a set of timelessly valid principles – a fault he found in many
contemporary socialists.18 Yet the very fact that these principles were inscribed even into
socialist theories indicates that they are relevant social realities in their own right. They are so
efficacious (and hence real) that, in Marx’s anticipation, distribution in the first phase of
4
communism would still have to be organized according to labor value contribution and thus
apply “equal right” in terms of “bourgeois right”19 – in effect realizing the standard of justice
implied by capitalist market exchange but denied under capitalist relations of production.
What, then, does this capitalist morality consist in? Marx obviously did not value capitalist
values very much, so we are left with rather cynical statements - among them the
characterization of the sphere of circulation as the “very Eden of the innate rights of man”
where “alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham”.20 In the following sections I
will develop these four principles as elements of a specifically capitalistic form of generalized
and anonymized reciprocity and recognition. I begin with equality.
Equality
‘…
and
they
exchange
equivalent
for
equivalent.’
Unlike classical economists such as Smith and Ricardo for whom the equalization of values
already was a more or less natural fact, Marx – from his quasi-ethnographical vantage point –
still was able to see the oddity of it. As his recourse to Aristotle shows he could still connect
to the traditional astonishment about a practice of exchanging qualitatively distinct and
different objects as if they were the same.21 How could this be possible? Marx interprets
commodity exchange as one of equal value as constituted by equal amounts of socially
necessary labor time. The stumbling-block here is not so much the actual inequality of
exchanged labor times22 – this is quite easily reconciled (both in everyday life and in Marx’s
theory) by factoring in intensity and skill which act as multiplication factors of “simple”
labor. But even in an exchange of actually equal labor times the cognitive leap of equating
the qualitatively different is, in an historic and cross-cultural perspective, a huge one. It
requires considerable cultural foundation work from political concepts of equity to religious
ideas of substantial identity.23 The religious/magical history of money feeds into everyday
practical understandings of value as a substance “contained” in commodities and money; an
understanding that survives the de-materialization of money by imagining a substantial
continuity of value, or by actively constructing such continuities by “earmarking” monies
5
according to sources or purposes and projecting their identity through transactions.24 Marx
heavily draws on such practical understandings. In his writings, as Diane Elson points out,
commodity exchange appears to be based on the “substantial equivalence” of commodities,
with labor as “unifying ‘common element’ or ‘substance’ which the commodities themselves
embody”. 25 The notion of exchange value as “only the mode of expression, the phenomenal
form, of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it” 26 suggests a rather
metaphysical explanation of commensurability – a secularized “spirit of the gift”, a modern
hau.27 Cornelius Castoriadis28 exposes the essentialism of the Hegelian metaphors Marx uses
to identify this “substance” of value. According to Castoriadis, Marx puts the cart before the
horses as it is not, he contends, the equality of labor that constitutes identity and hence
commensurability, but the other way round: When we exchange commodities we make a
practical statement about their equality that defies their qualitative difference. The thus
stated equality of objects then suggests the equality of a value substance contained in them.
Commodity exchange as an equalizing activity imposes commensurability and identity on a
non-identical and incommensurable reality. Exchanges emerge on the back of culturally
constituted equalizations and identifications, but are then perpetuated through a practice of
exchange which in turn presupposes substantial equality.
But why should labor be the substance referred to in this equalization? One could say that it
is what most (though not all) commodities have in common: they are the results of or (in the
case of services) the immediate expenditure of labor power – “the objectification of a given
amount of labour time”.29 Yet concrete labors are as non-identical and incommensurable as
the things they produce – their non-identity is, after all, one of the reasons for the
exchange. 30 By “making the arbitrary assumption that there is no qualitative difference
between different kinds of labour”31 the problem of commensurability is merely transferred
from products to production.
It is only through money mediation in the labor market that such a counterfactual equation
can impose itself. Where the sale not only of products but of the ability to produce becomes the
norm (and the most common source of income), labor power comes with a price tag
translating it into quantities of any other form of paid labor and its product. The worth of
6
things one can buy, the effort put into producing them, is now directly expressible in the
effort one has to make in order to obtain them. Money earned by the sale of labor power
becomes “the socially recognised incarnation of human labour”32 so that “whenever, by an
exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as
human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them.”33 Only in a capitalist
economy in which labor power itself has become the central commodity is it therefore
possible that the
purest of absurdities, the rigorous commensurability of kinds of human labour [becomes] a
fundamental social reality and thus [acquires], in the imaginary, the appearance of an
incontestable objective truth.34
Although it may only appear to be an “incontestable objective truth”, by calling it a
“fundamental social reality” Castoriadis concedes that such commensurability is not entirely
“imaginary”. The appearance of exchange value refers to an essential value underneath,
which is constituted by this very appearance. The ontological claim can be upheld as that of a
Searlesian “observer-relative feature” in the sense that “for any observer-relative feature F,
seeming to be F is logically prior to being F, because – appropriately understood – seeming to be
F is a necessary condition of being F.” 35 As Georg Simmel observed, while value is
“subjective” in that it never is a “quality of the object”, social exchange “imparts to value its
specific objectivity”,36 renders it a social fact.
Any qualitative inequality is rendered irrelevant. The fact of mutual exchangeability implies a
“homogeneous” or “uniform human labour power” that can be divided into “innumerable
individual units”. What is regarded as more highly skilled or effective labor “counts only as
simple labour intensified, or rather, as multiplied simple labour.”37 “Higher” labor simply
becomes “more” labor. 38 The equalization of labor further implies a formal equalization of
status. The “equality of commodity producers”39 seems to do away with all qualitative barriers,
leaving only quantitative differences that, in principle, appear to be surmountable by individual
effort. So, if by working twelve-hour shifts a worker in a garment factory managed to obtain
wages equal to the salary of an office worker with an eight-hour day, the two of them would
be of equal social standing despite the non-identity of their labor.
7
Equality, Inequality… and Recognition
In the process of asserting qualitative equality, however, quantitative inequalities also are
affirmed. Unequal distribution appears to be justified by the multiplication of simple labor
which constitutes “higher” labor. This lends natural objectivity to unequal evaluations of
labor which always are at least codetermined by cultural conceptions and, of course,
structures of power and domination. That the hypothetical factory worker would need to
work twelve-hour shifts to be equal to the hypothetical office worker strongly affirms the
cultural definition of manual labor as inferior. Equalization in commodity exchange
translates cultural evaluations of merit based on often very contested notions of skill, effort,
commitment etc. into a unified multiplication factor. That those notions are contested
disappears in the routine of exchange where the value of labor power is “practically
known”: 40 Reading prices backwards one’s money as incorporating one’s labor constantly
compares with the labors of all others, exactly stating its relative worth and, by implication,
that of the worker as well. 41 This is an inversion of the commodity fetish: Far from
disguising social relations between humans as mystical relations between things, these
relations between things enact relations of value/worth between people. 42 Such evaluation
may not be always happily accepted by all market participants – but the onus of justification
is on those who contest it as it comes equipped with the normative force of the factual. This
observation is supported by research on popular notions both of how income should be
distributed and how income actually is distributed in capitalist societies. 43 Reviewing such
research, Robert E. Lane comes to the conclusion that, with “the market” being perceived as
the natural, neutral and objective mechanism of comparing values
laymen, like economists, read backwards from rewards, a person’s level of pay, to discover the
source in his contribution to productivity – a doctrine of “revealed contribution” similar to
the economist’s concept of “revealed preference.”44
Thus, the equivalence of all commodities in their “total or expanded form of value” as stated
in exchange presupposes, constitutes and at the same time reveals the equivalence of labor
incorporated in the respective products.
8
But if the market price (however it came about) ex post establishes a seemingly “objective”
prior valuation of individual productive contributions, would that not render just any
outcome of the market process an expression of social justice? Does not whatever the price
of a commodity is determine the value perceived as constituted by all the labor that has gone
into its production? In ordinary experience, however, there remains a difference between
what a thing is worth and what it costs. Marx’s conception of the relation between value and
achieved price as “accidental” in which the latter reflects the former only on average 45 is
grounded in such experience: Once value is affirmed in routinized exchange it gains an
independent existence relative to, but not wholly determined by, the price. When accounting
for the price of a thing (and particularly when the concept is used in contrast of that of
“value” or “worth”) we talk about how scarce it is and whether or not there is a high
demand for it. When talking about what a thing is worth we tend to talk about quality in
terms of use value (durability, beauty, utility etc.) and the nature and amount of work that has
gone into making it that use value. 46 The assumption of value constituted by use-value
generating work implies laws of variation different from those determining variations in
price. One would think of things like progress in the mode of production, variations in the
general level of skill etc. These are not necessarily parallel to fluctuations in supply and
demand thought to determine prices which change in a more erratic way. The historic
disjunction of industrial wages from product prices realized in the market supports the
perception of a relative stability of labor value.47 While product prices tend to fluctuate in the
short term, wages change much more slowly.48 Also, while prices for many consumer goods
such as, for example, cell phones or laptop computers are quite volatile, prices as
experienced in the “stylized and ritualistic” routines of grocery shopping 49 tend to leave
people with relatively stable amounts to pay at the supermarket checkout. As food items are
closely linked to the most basic aspect in the reproduction of labor power (eating), their
relative price stability contributes to the perception of an inert value of labor power. Market
prices therefore appear to float around what is thus established as labor-based value, and any
greater variations can be interpreted as anomalies. Most of the time this is surprisingly
unproblematic. The market as impersonal, seemingly objective mechanism appears infallible.
9
As Thorstein Veblen noted, the fact that “the competition runs in terms of money” ensures
that “the money unit is the standard measure of efficiency and achievement”.50 In reverse,
however, this means that where obvious efficiency and achievement go underpaid or ‘fat
cats’ go wildly over-rewarded people do perceive injustice and misrecognition. Excessive
deviations between price and value are seen as “market failure” – a notion which suggests
that normally the market would effect prices that match social valuations of useful productive
effort and thus recognize both the work of the producer and the work incorporated in the
consumer’s money. So, while in general capitalism is, as Alan Ryan puts it, “just-inappearance according to prevailing notions of justice, but […] unjust-in-reality according to
those same prevailing notions”, 51 when certain borderline plausibilities are overstretched
injustice-in-reality can be unjust-in-appearance – only that this appearance supports the
justice-in-appearance of the “normal” cases.
If one considers the importance of earned income for self-esteem52 it is easy to see that
“justice” is about more than the allocation of material resources – however important
without doubt these are. Underpayment is perceived as (and in fact is) misrecognition; and
overpayment can be scandalized as distorting the proportionality of esteem between social
positions that are conceived as standing in generalized reciprocal exchange. They jeopardize
an economy of respect which, on the one hand, includes recognition as being on equal
footing as contributors of value whose contributions differ only in amount, but not in nature
while, on the other hand, this recognition of qualitative equality includes the recognition of
relative superiority and inferiority in quantitative terms.
Such recognition is, of course, rather thin and the medium by which it is communicated
(money) rather empty. It therefore is not surprising that the recent debate around
recognition largely ignores market relations. Recognition is seen as something that is only
possible outside and even against the market.53 Axel Honneth, reintroducing the concept to
social theory, concedes that where “simple commodity exchange” prevails “the experience of
having an ability objectified is so intertwined with the mental anticipation of a possible
consumer that this experience gives the individual an intersubjectively mediated selfworth.”54 But work, he contends, is now emptied out of such personal meaning, devoid of
10
any true self-realization of the producer, 55 which “reduces the possible relationships of
recognition between people to the satisfaction of material needs”. 56 In market exchange,
according to Marx, people “exist for one another merely as representatives of, and,
therefore, as owners of commodities”. 57 In a theory of recognition recoursing to Hegel,
recognition requires more than abstract formal belonging; it requires the concrete realization of
self in production, consumption and beyond. Such expectations must be frustrated where
recognition is communicated through an abstract medium of exchange. Mediation by
commodities and money reduces the scope of recognition, i.e. it reduces what is recognized to
a generic notion of social utility that not only ignores the concrete person whose property
that utility is, but even the concrete nature of that utility itself.
I will argue, however, that such a reduced scope should not be seen purely as a loss. For one
it can also be experienced as liberation: the recognition of freedom regardless of how this
freedom is expressed. Second, precisely through its bleak materialism centering on relations
of property and through its assumedly callous utilitarian motivation the scale of such
recognition – its strength and reliability – is increased (but so is the potential scale of
misrecognition).
Freedom
‘… both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of
labour power, are constrained only by their own free
will.’
In so far as (and only in so far as) money-mediated exchange abstracts from all other qualities
of the commodity owner the exchangers are liberated from expectations that reach beyond
the immediate objects of exchange. No matter what else they think about each other, by
exchanging they practically assert their equality as market citizens and recognize their right to
be different otherwise. As long as it sells it does not matter what the producer produces and
how exactly s/he produces it. Relations of production, to the extent they are governed by a
commodity logic, involve, in principle, little of the producer’s personality – and hence also
dominate little of it.
11
This is counter-intuitive in a situation where most people have to sell their labor power, i.e.
an integral part of their personality. As Karl Polanyi points out, labor power is only a
fictitious commodity which “cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left
unused, without affecting also the human individual.”58 To hire it in effect means to hire its
owner in person. In order to be alienable it hence needs to be constituted as non-identical
with its owner. Invoking the logic of commodity exchange such a sale requires the liberty of
the seller; therefore the personhood of the worker – as goes one basic assumption of
“possessive individualism” –must not be affected by the sale.59 Such disaffection, because it
is fictional to begin with, must be made a reality through institutionalized safeguards, such as
welfare state arrangements, labor laws and systems of industrial relations. Those safeguards
are necessary to prevent conditions which, e.g. due to low demand for labor power during
economic crises, lead into de facto wage slavery, forcing workers to sell not merely their ability
to work but, in effect, themselves as well. The commodification of work always carries the
potential of turning into a commodification of the worker.60 The material unity of worker and
labor power in the process of production and their moral separation in the sphere of
circulation are central in the constant struggles around the extent to which employers are
allowed to govern workers as persons. This is not only an issue in defining the balance
between “work” and “free time” 61 but also in terms of governing workers’ personalities
beyond the workplace.62 Recognition of the freedom beyond work must not, by definition,
be recognition of the actual use made of that freedom in the construction of selfhood. It is a
“negative recognition” which Zygmunt Bauman describes as “a posture of indifference and
detachment”63 where the wider aspects of one’s personality are not relevant. In turn, the
person behind the productive performance is liberated from determination by role
expectancies beyond the spatially and temporally delineated workplace. This freedom is not
just recognized in symbolic acts but also affirmed in practice by the allocation of money, the
ticket to the world of consumer goods conceived as realm of freedom.
Freedom acknowledged in negative recognition, of course, can only be “negative freedom”
as advocated by Isaiah Berlin, 64 i.e. a freedom that is defined by the relative absence of
external constraints – tolerance as indifference that could well be seen as part capitalist
12
alienation. As Simmel pointed out, the “lack of character” of money is responsible for
unprecedented freedom as much as for the psychopathologies that accompany alienation.65
Marx himself celebrated such “alienation” as a precondition for the self-conscious
association of free individuals that is communism. 66 With the demise of the, from an
historical distance seemingly, romantic pre-capitalist communal relations the stifling
“engulfment” in traditions and personal dependencies also has receded. As Gerald Cohen
puts it: “Alienation is the cost of rescue from envelopment by this natural and social
environment which is man’s estate before capitalism.”67 And while alienation has been the
object of much Romantic lamentation, no other social system has offered greater room for
romantic self-expression than has capitalism. It provided the negative liberty which was
championed by the Romantics’ “passionate, fanatical, half-mad doctrine that insists on the
absoluteness of the self” which “is forced – to maintain the social possibility of selfactualization – to opt for minimum impact tolerance.”68
On the other hand, such negative liberty entails a rejection of freedom as political selfgovernance which in this perspective is, in John Stuart Mill’s words, “not the government of
each by himself, but of each by all the rest”.69 It is all about individual choice and expression as
idolized in consumer culture,70 not about collective self-determination.71 One could, of course,
argue that choosing as a consumer is the equivalent of casting a vote. But in such argument
“[u]nequal pocketbooks at the store” are, as Evan Watkins puts it, falsely presented “to
mean the same thing as equal pocketbooks at the ballot box”.72 It is this inequality (and not
in its negativity, “shallowness,” etc.) that is the deficiency of negative freedom under
capitalism. The freedom of the less well off is a much smaller one than that of those with
greater spending power. If such a negative concept of freedom implies that its only limit is
the obligation of “not injuring the interests of one another; or rather certain interests, which,
either by express legal provision or by tacit understanding, ought to be considered as
rights”73, then in a society with hugely unequal property rights the freedom of the poor is
squeezed into what little space is left by the liberties taken by the rich.74 This applies to the
freedom of movement restricted by private land ownership as much as to the freedom of
speech which finds its limits in access to privately owned means of production in the media
13
industries. Inequality translates into a denial of liberty; the potential that lies in alienation
then remains un-actualized. Freedom under capitalism, like recognition, is inextricably linked
to property.
Property
‘… because each disposes only of what is his own.’
The fact that in exchange relations the exchangers recognize each other as legitimate
proprietors of the commodities exchanged has been much reflected on.75 In the following I
will therefore mainly focus on the implications of money as medium of this recognition which
have not yet been fully explored.
It is well known that misrecognition can have devastating psychological effects. Our existence
as self-conscious beings depends on an internalized perception of ourselves through the eyes
of others. 76 Acknowledgement by others is indispensable for our sense of self. But
recognition also is a reassurance of our membership in a social group – which is, quite
materialistically, a precondition for our physical survival and of our position in that group, of
our share in social power and wealth. This, to a large part, explains the psychological
importance of recognition in providing a sense of ontological security. Recognition therefore
needs to consist in more than just words and gestures. Against Honneth’s emphasis on the
psychological aspect of recognition, Nancy Fraser argues that purely symbolical recognition
which is not also expressed by a redistribution of resources remains empty. Misrecognition
and maldistribution are intrinsically linked, since “economic issues such as income
distribution have recognition subtexts” and “conversely, recognition issues […] have
distributive subtexts”.77 If recognition is to be a reassurance of membership and position, its
symbolic expression must be followed by a material confirmation in the form of a share in
social wealth. Economic distribution can, in turn, be read as also symbolically expressing
recognition, which is immediately evident in the psychological consequences of
unemployment as failure to gain such recognition in the labor market.
In the capitalist market, “symbolic” and “material” aspects of recognition are more closely
intertwined than in any other context. Money received in market exchange immediately
14
communicates recognition of labor that has, by being paid for, been “proven” socially useful.
At the same time it ensures the material actualization of this recognition in that it pays for
one’s social existence: Money as symbol has “the property of not merely representing, but being
exchange value in the actual exchange”.78 It recognizes one’s work by representing it as equal
to others’ work – and it reciprocates this work by giving access to the product of others’ work.
The defining characteristic of money is its ability to transform itself into any other
commodity;79 it is pure property – always abstract but always able to take any concrete form.
Money thus not only contains a promise of membership and position – it is the kept promise
of a share in social wealth and power.
Equating work and value, the culture of capitalism privileges money “earned” as recognition
of social utility valued in market exchange. When institutions and charitable organizations
engage in redistribution they often reduce such recognition by avoiding the use of general
money – either by “attaching strings” to the money paid out and thereby curtailing its
possible uses, or even by distributing specified vouchers or in kind;80 i.e. by not signing over
money as pure property.
Where earned money is a central medium of recognition, voluntary and domestic labor tends
to go under-recognized. Linda Nicholson 81 argued that while Marx acknowledges the
reproduction of the worker by unpaid domestic labor as indispensable for the continuation
of capitalist production, this soon is forgotten in both the production process of capital –
and also in Marx’s Capital. In the valuation of labor power reproduction is accounted for
only insofar as it requires consumables to be paid for (food, clothing, etc.), but not as it
requires immediate and usually unpaid work (cooking, dressing etc.). But if Marx undervalues
reproductive work he thereby reflects a moral economy in which it does not find the same
immediate symbolic/material recognition as paid work. Reproductive work draws worth
from other forms of acknowledgement, which might be more recognizable as recognition
for being more concrete or articulated – such as the semantics of love that surrounds even
the commercial activity of shopping as providing for others, 82 or public acknowledgment of
the nationally vital role of the mother/housewife.83 However, both private love and public
praise do not come with the same unconditional and immediately realizable recognition as
15
does income from paid work where one’s utility is translated into instant access to the use
values produced by others.
In contrast to other forms of recognition (solidarity, love, rights), monetary recognition
between market participants draws its strength from being a callously instrumental
recognition of social utility by utility – which is realized because:
‘The only force that brings them together and puts
them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the
gain and the private interests of each.’
Bentham
Capitalistic reciprocity is “instrumental reciprocity”.84 It acknowledges one personal trait as
firmly legitimizing membership and position: social utility defined by market demand. The
act of buying testifies that the bought product or service is genuinely wanted or needed; the
assumption being that nobody buys for other than selfish reasons.85 Bought possessions thus
symbolize utility. If possessions are “extensions of the self”86 the utility for myself of the
things I can buy with earned money becomes material evidence of my own utility for others.
The money which bought them acts as abstract medium translating the concrete use value of
my possessions into the concrete use value of my labor power, and back.
The market as aggregation of individual self-interests becomes a utilitarian field of probation
for the producers as represented by their products; the producers experience the translation
of their concrete labor into abstract labor, money, as a collective verdict on their social
utility. Herbert Marcuse sums up the existentially judgmental side of value realization from
the seller’s perspective:
The exchange value of his goods will show him whether or not they satisfy a social need. If he
can sell them at or above his production cost, society was willing to allot a quantum of its
labor-time to their production; otherwise he wasted or did not spend socially necessary labortime. The exchange value of his commodities decides his social fate.87
In the case of success, personal worth is hardly contestable – it is firmly associated with the
constant assertion of mutual need among market participants. 88 Failure, on the other hand,
constitutes a profound denial of social utility, which is most acute where the commodity is
16
an integral part of the seller’s personality: labor power. Unemployment, ultimately, amounts
to a social statement of being unworthy of one’s reproduction costs – an existential rejection,
social death.
Benefits, in contrast to market based income, communicate, if any, recognition not of being
needed but only of being needy. They constitute an unbalanced gift exchange in which the
recipients cannot adequately reciprocate and are therefore left in an inferior position. 89 As
Nancy Fraser90 points out, to avoid such imbalance in the recognition of needs they must be
politically established as rights – rights that are not just charitable and hence revocable
concessions but refer back to the struggle for recognition that brought them about. 91
Political struggles around needs mainly emerge where those who articulate needs cannot
satisfy them through the market and thus do not have the instantaneous legitimacy of the
seemingly self-evident utility of the money owner – a self-evidence that is based on “proof”
of being needed and hence is independent of any judgment beyond the ability to produce
something someone will buy.
Monetary Solidarity
With Émile Durkheim’s “organic solidarity” in mind one could think of the capitalist ethics
described so far as “monetary solidarity”. According to Durkheim, in order for the division
of labor not to result in anomy, it has to fulfill justice criteria similar to those mapped out
above: Exchange needs to take place among freely consenting persons and reflect the
“quantity of useful labor” contained in the exchanged commodities.92 But for Durkheim this
is only an effect of the well administered division of labor and not in turn implied by practices
of exchange themselves. His objection against a solidarity based on exchange is that the
exchange relation is not only anonymous but also ephemeral, lasting “never for more than some
few moments” so that “when the business has been completed, each one retires and is left
entirely on his own”.93
Social theorists responded to this observation by working out what non-market social relations
prop up the capitalist economy, keeping in check its inherent atomism and providing it with
stability: personal bonds in clan-like enterprise cultures, personal relations in market
segments, social capital, personal trust etc.94 Durkheim and with him the subsequent theory
17
tradition centering on concepts like “embeddedness” or “moral economy” underestimated
the normative implications of market practices and money mediation. Money mediation
requires trust in the relative predictability of the system of exchange at least as much as personal
trust in specific business partners; 95 it entails generalization (interconnection with all other
market participants) and permanence (continuity of market relations). Money provides a fabric
of promises, obligations, expectations etc. that organize the movement of commodities
between people. What Simmel called the indefinitely expanded “length of teleological
series”96 in the money economy constitutes a morally relevant “expanded sphere of action”,
which as Natan Sznaider97 puts it
allows people to enter, independent of their will, into universal moral relationships. The
market expands the horizons of people's moral responsibility, which were formerly limited by
exclusivist bonds of memberships in corporate groups.
Along these cognitive links money establishes a generalized set of normative expectations by
society as a whole and towards society as a whole in what looks like a universalization of
mutualized Hegelian lord/bondsman relations:98 As a producer one constantly has to fashion
oneself to social needs expressed by demand in the market. Because subsistence economy is
not an option, the ordinary citizen of capitalism is in a position of servitude of debt vis-à-vis
society. The “reciprocal and all-sided dependence of individuals”99 expressed in exchange
value constantly recalls the fact that one owes one’s very existence to society. In order to
justify and maintain that existence one has to offer one’s services (incorporated in a product
or directly as labor power) to the owners of exchange value, i.e. money. As workers
individuals are, as Marx put it, doubly free: free to dispose of themselves as they please, but
also free of any commodities whose sale could sustain them. Most of us are forced to sell
our labor power as the only commodity we can continuously dispose of. In order to live we
must, in effect, serve others. In a generalized and anonymized reciprocity like that of the
capitalist market society ideally we can choose who to serve, i.e. we are not servants of any
particular master. But we have to serve somebody in order to obtain an income that allows us
to exist as free individuals outside the workplace. And even if we are in a position to choose
our temporal masters (employers/clients), as owners of social wealth (money) each
individual master represents the mastership of society as a whole. Anticipating customers’
18
needs and wants in order to produce use value (or to shape one’s labor power accordingly),
one acknowledges an obligation to serve society to which one is indebted for one’s existence.
The consequence of not serving society in the sense of producing for the market – poverty,
dependence – could be seen as a simple matter of cause and effect. But in a social context
the effect appears not so much as a mechanical result but as a social reaction, as punishment.
Hans Kelsen100 has shown that historically the idea of retribution is at the root of the idea of
causality even with regards to natural phenomena – it is evidently even more pertinent in the
social world. Effects are felt as rewards or punishments of causes which are interpreted as
desert or guilt. Social sanctions for inaction imply that there is an obligation towards society
to be active. As Talcott Parsons observed, a transgression against “a going system of social
relationships” does not require “positive disruption”, i.e. an active violation of the rights of
others – a simple withdrawal is sufficient as it forces role partners “to do without the
benefits expected from a person’s actions” 101 . In the situation of a generalized and
anonymized reciprocity as it presents itself in the capitalist market economy, i.e. a situation
where potentially everybody is everybody else’s “role partner”, the sanctioned necessity to
produce constitutes an obligation to serve society.
Once the debt is (temporarily) repaid, one can (again: temporarily) take on the role of the
master as autonomous consumer – the ever recurring bondage is rewarded by an evanescent
lordship. Now all other commodity producers look up to the consuming subject as master to
be served. Their commodities submissively cast “wooing glances” at one’s money.102
As long as one needs money to pay the bills, buy food etc., money owned by others is like an
IOU signed by the individual to society – to be paid off by socially useful labor. But money
in one’s own pocket also works as such an IOU, or rather: a WeOU, a bill of exchange; only
this time it is one issued by society to the money-owning individual. Modern money
developed out of bills of exchange that had become de-personalized, freely tradable103 – a
generalization that turns them into a promise of reciprocation by the market as a whole.104 Each
commercial advertisement reads like a pledge of servitude, a confirmation of the consumers’
sovereignty. Consumers experience the value of their own work incorporated in their money
as commanding that of others through, in Adam Smith’s words, “the toil and trouble … which
19
it can impose upon other people”.105 Of course, if one’s contribution fails to earn more than
the most basic needs or if the experience as a consumer is that one can afford much less
than others, such denied access to social wealth communicates denied recognition. The
recognition function of advertising then turns into one of misrecognition and symbolic
exclusion.
Money, as a store of value, also gives permanency to those relations of debt. As not yet
actualized potentiality106 money projects social relations of production and consumption into
the future as “the real satisfaction or utility to be gained from an exchange from the point of
view of those being paid comes with re-exchange of the money at some future date,
probably in another place”. 107 The growing indebtedness through consumer credits,
mortgages etc. further deepens the already existing anonymous and generalized servitude of
debt, permanently committing the indebted to maintaining their social utility.
Monetary solidarity transcends the ephemeral and atomized nature of commercial exchanges
as a web of generalized and anonymous mutual commitment. However, it is not, and can not
be, one of balanced reciprocity and equal exchange – even though it projects this as its ideal.
As Marx says, the “ideal form of bourgeois society” is an “inverted image” of its reality.108
But this inverted image is nevertheless a significant element of capitalist reality. It is a moral
fact which is presupposed by capitalist reality, implied in its everyday practices, and hence a
constituent part of it. It lends legitimacy to a degree of inequality of both wealth and esteem
– but it also poses an obstacle to the ideological defense of ever-increasing inequalities
driven beyond any plausibility by the dynamics of capital accumulation.
Capital Accumulation
The defining element of capitalist relations of production is the pervasive commodification
of labor power. It is the purchase of labor power that transforms monetary wealth into
capital. This is possible because labor power has a very “specific use value”, which consists
in “being a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself”.109 It takes – even with all
historical and cultural allowances – less labor to reproduce labor power than one can extract
from it in the labor process. Apparently without any injustice to the worker110 the capitalist
can bag a surplus value realized by the sale of the product to which – having already sold the
20
labor power that produced it – the worker has no right of ownership whatsoever. This leads
to an ever increasing inequality of wealth; even if the starting positions had been ever equal
they soon would have been knocked off balance.
As this growing inequality does not stand in any relation to the capitalist’s own labor input,
the wealth amassed in capitalist accumulation opens up a secondary field of distribution
disconnected from the meritocratic justice expectations of primary distribution according to
productive contribution 111 – this money can be used to re-invest, i.e. further productive
accumulation, or just to gamble with in a “zone of indifference”.112 The role of production
disappears as the formula of accumulation M-C|C’-M’ is cancelled down to M-M’, i.e.
money miraculously begetting more money. This amounts to a magico-religious promise of
absolute wealth 113 to be achieved by what Thorstein Veblen called “pecuniary prowess”
rather than by productive effort – “achievement” is sidelined by “success”.114
But despite being decoupled from the sphere of production this wealth, as spending power,
still commands production, heavily influencing what counts as “social need” by constituting a
disproportionate share of the demand. 115 And since market demand is determined by
“income distribution – which in turn is a reflection of the relations of production,”116 the
ideal of a balanced alternation between the roles of “lord” and “bondsman” never is achieved.
The central moral problem here is not just one of inequality in wealth but that this inequality
translates into domination and servitude117.
This power of capital is not only based on the ability to redistribute material wealth and
thereby entice (or force) people to work. The value stored in money has a moral element and
those able to spend it do not only distribute social wealth – and freedom – but also recognition
of social utility, moral worth.118 Asymmetrical distribution, therefore, entails “asymmetrical
conditions of recognition”: In the absence of collective solidarities balancing out a lack in
monetary recognition with more traditional forms of recognition in family networks, class
cultures etc., this asymmetry leads to “new forms of social suffering” such as low self esteem
and fragile identities fuelled by a constant fear of failure.119 Capitalist relations of production
are stabilized not just by a system of material incentives – the promise of wealth – but also by
21
a system of moral incentives – the promise of worth. At the same time it may also be more
vulnerable to its moral failure than to its economic failure.
Conclusions
I do not claim that the “ideal form” of a commodity society as network of generalized
balanced reciprocity is the moral master discourse of contemporary capitalist societies. Other
discourses limit it, compete with it or complement it. A racist discourse, for example, is
often used to overrun the capitalist legitimacy of belonging through selling and buying in
order to exclude people defined as racially or ethnically different from economic transactions
or politically de-legitimize recognition gained in the market. Discourses of exclusion also
can, of course, utilize the perceived objectivity of the market as evidence for the alleged
inferiority of groups who do not achieve in the market. While what constitutes “simple” and
what constitutes “multiplied” simple labor always is codetermined by what culturally counts
as “lower” or “higher” work, the market equips such culturally preformed evaluations of
capabilities based on sexual, racial and class stereotypes with an apparent purely “economic”
objectivity. With Beverly Skeggs120 one may therefore conclude that “exchange value” is a
gendered, racialized and classed category in the first place, and that the whole idea of selfinterested decision making in the market is part of a construction of male white middle-class
rational subjectivity. But the self-interest presupposed by market exchange is not per se
“rational” in a bourgeois sense – it allows for all forms of rationality or irrationality. The sole
requirement is use value – and use value does not presuppose any such rationality in terms of
“sensible use”, “objective material utility” etc. All that is required is the satisfaction of
“human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance,
they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference”.121 Skeggs suggests that it
is through use value that the denied affects of those marginalized by and excluded from
relations of exchange can be expressed. She thereby is spelling out a criticism that is
inherent in the moral contradiction of capitalism: that it promises equality, freedom and
recognition, but then allows dominant groups to define who is worth how much property
and freedom, who is a producer of use value and who is not really needed at all.
22
The persistence of both the ideal of bourgeois society and its realities of inequality,
marginalization and exclusion can be seen as a fundamental moral contradiction of
capitalism – a natural starting point for anti-capitalist critique. Marx himself was highly aware
of the pitfalls of such a critique based on moral concepts constituted by capitalist practices
of exchange. Not just that they might turn out to be the Trojan horses of bourgeois ideology
– the implied meritocracy may not, as Brian Barry122 argues, necessarily be a humane ideal:
It denies dignity to those who simply cannot perform to whatever standards set up as
relevant. Capitalism promises distribution according to productive contribution and fails to
deliver – the question is whether such distribution is really that desirable. Under the moral
grammar outlined above, of course, it certainly would be. Its affirmation by practice prevents
an anti-meritocratic basic-income capitalist “road to communism” as proposed by Robert
van der Veen and Philippe van Parijs.123 If there ever is to be an alternative to capitalism
there will need to be a transitional period, just as Marx proposed, that still operates according
to “bourgeois right” – a market socialism that abolishes accumulation based on surplus
extraction, inheritance etc. as sources of unmerited distributive advantage roughly along the
lines David Miller suggests.124 The hoped for effect would not be – as van der Veen and van
Parijs ascribe it to Marx – an opportunity to turn market-egoists into collectivized altruists. It
is not capitalist immorality that blocks the road to communism but, to the contrary, capitalist
morality: the specifically capitalist inter-linkage of labor and consumer markets in which the
ability to consume communicates the acknowledgement of one’s ability and readiness to
produce.
1
Karl Polanyi, Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation (London: Victor Gollancz, 1945); Mark Granovetter,
“Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness” American Journal of Sociology 91 (1985): 481-510.
2
“Marxian Value Theory and the Problem of the Subject: The Role of Commodity Fetishism”, in Fetishism as Cultural
Discourse ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
3
Polanyi, Origins of Our Time, 77.
4
A good example is George Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1971), particularly the chapter
on ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’. The Frankfurt School tradition dealt with legitimacy mainly
was as an issue of “mass loyalty” verging on a Leninist theory of a bribed the working class aristocracy – most elaborated
in Wolf-Dieter Narr and Claus Offe’s Massenloyalität im Wohlfahrtsstaat (Bodenheim: Athenaeum, 1975), but it is also a
background assumption in the writings of Theodor W. Adorno, cf. e.g. Minima Moralia (New York: Verso, 1974), 186.
23
5
For a comprehensive review of this literature cf. Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 48ff.,
Norman Geras, Literature of Revolution (London: Verso, 1986), 3-57 and “Bringing Marx to Justice” New Left Review (1992),
no.195: 37-69.
6
e.g. Allen E. Buchanan, Marx and Justice (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982), 55ff.
7
The notion of “factual recognition” of property rights is most lucidly analyzed in Andrew Chitty’s “Recognition and
Social Relations of Production” Historical Materialism 14 (1998): 57-97. Chitty shows that for Marx factual recognition of
property relations precedes its legal affirmation.
8
Theodore Schatzki, “Practice Mind-ed Orders” in The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, ed. Theodore R. Schatzki,
Karin Knorr Cetina, Eike von Savigny (London: Routledge, 2001), 47.
9
Claus Offe: Industry and Inequality (London: Edward Arnold, 1976)
10
e.g. Friedrich von Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty 2: The Mirage of Social Justice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1976); Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980)
11
cf. e.g. David Miller Principles of Social Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1999), 177ff.
12
Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkley: University of California Press, 1978), 25.
13
Andrew Sayer, “(De)commodification, Consumer Culture, and Moral Economy” Environment and Planning D 21
(2003): 342.
14
The Social Construction of Reality (London: Allen Lane, 1967), 112.
15
Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), 58.
16
Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice (Berkley: University of California Press, 1972)
17
For an overview cf. Don Slater and Fran Tonkiss Market Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).
18
For example when criticizing the idea of labor money, cf. Karl Marx, “Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie”, Marx
Engels Werke 13 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1985), 66ff.
19
Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, in Marx Engels Collected Works 24 (London: Lawrence & Wishart,
1989), 85f.
20
Karl Marx Capital I (MECW 35), (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996), 186
21
Capital I, 69f.
22
Amariglio and Callari fail to see that this problem can only emerge once the cognitive and moral barrier that normally
prevents the exchange of different things as equal is overcome (“Marxian Value Theory”, 203f.)
23
Alfred Sohn-Rethel understands Aristotle’s logical abstractions out of his exposure to the “real abstractions” taking
place in a market society, cf. “Das Geld, die bare Münze des Apriori”, in Beiträge zur Kritik des Geldes, ed. Paul Mattick,
Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Hellmut G. Haasis (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), 54ff, also cf. Karl Polanyi’s “Aristotle Discovers
the Economy”, in Trade and Market in the Early Empires ed. Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg and Harry W. Pearson
(New York: The Free Press, 1957). It can be argued that those “real abstractions” among Athenian traders built on
cognitive patterns culturally developed in the substitutions and subdivisions of religious sacrifices that lead to the
establishment of a small enough calculation unit (the obolos) then to be used as a currency in commercial exchange; cf.
Bernhard Laum, Heiliges Geld (Tübingen: Mohr, 1924). In this perspective, commodity exchange builds on cognitive
patterns acquired in gift exchange which already states the measurability of the exchanged in some form of “payment
24
system”; cf. Philip Mirowski, “Refusing the Gift” in Postmodernism, Economics and Knowledge ed. Stephen Cullenberg, Jack
Amariglio and David F. Ruccio (London: Routledge 2001), 453f.
24
Viviana A. Zelizer The Social Meaning of Money (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 21ff. We naturally assume that the
money on our bank account remains the same (and “grows”), while in fact it is a mere promise of the bank to pay us the
same nominal amount (plus interest) when we require them to do so. So the money “put aside” for, say, the children’s
education does not retain any substantial identity, but clearly is imbued with such an identity.
25
“The Value Theory of Labour” in: Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism ed. Diane Elson (London: CSE
Books, 1979), 157.
26
Capital I, 46f. Marx is very much aware of the tension between value substance as a “conservation principle” and the
fluctuation of prices that defy the necessary assumptions of invariance. For the role of value as a conservation principle
cf. Philip Mirowski “Learning the Meaning of a Dollar” Social Research 57 (1990), no.3, 689-717.
27
Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris : PUF, 1950), 157ff.
28
Crossroads in the Labyrinth (Brighton: Harvester, 1984), 260ff.
29
Grundrisse, 140.
30
Capital I, 52. Equal exchange value needs to be expressed in different use values, which is why I disagree with Igor
Kopytoff’s (and so many others’) view that “commoditization homogenizes value, while the essence of culture is
discrimination”, cf. “The Cultural Biography of Things”, in The Social Life of Things ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 1986), 73.
31
Elson “Value Theory…”, 138.
32
Marx, Capital I, 107.
33
Capital I, 84f. Isaak Illich Rubin in his Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value (Detroit: Black & Red, 1972) is one of the few
Marxist theorists to take Marx by these words and anticipate Castoriadis’ turn. Paul Sweezy points out that such an
interpretation would be circular within Marx’s overall argument, cf. Theory of Capitalist Development (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1964), 42ff.
34
Castoriadis, Crossroads, 280.
35
John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London: Penguin, 1995), 13.
36
The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge, 1990), 63 and 81.
37
Capital I, 49 and 51.
38
Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 414.
39
Rubin, Essays, 87.
40
Capital I, 187
41
ibid., 120. Research in equitable pay consistently shows that comparative pay matters at least as much as absolute pay,
the paycheck indicating social worth in relation to others (See, classically, J. Stacy Adams, “Inequity in Social Exchange”,
in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology Vol.2. ed. L. Berkowitz (New York: Academic Press, 1965).
42
This still may justifiably be called “ideological” – but it cannot be understood from the perspective of a Marxist theory
of ideology. Cf. Michael Rosen’s critique in his On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), especially pp.200ff.
25
43
for popular notions of justice cf. David Miller’s summary in his Principles of Social Justice (Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999), 61ff. There is ample research showing that distribution of income through labor markets is
generally deemed fair and just. Miller heavily draws on Jonathan Kelley and M. D. R Evans, “The Legitimation of
Inequality: Occupational Earnings in Nine Nations” American Journal of Sociology 99 (1993), no.1, 75-125. Assumptions
about income actually tend to err on the side of perceived justice, so that top incomes are assumed to be much lower
and low incomes appear to be slightly higher: cf. e.g. Bruce Heady, “Distributive Justice and Occupational Incomes:
Perceptions of Justice Determine Perceptions of Fact” British Journal of Sociology 42 (1991), no.4, 581-96; for more recent
international data cf. Lars Osberg and Timothy Smeeding “ ‘Fair’ Inequality?: Attitudes to Pay Differentials: The United
States in Comparative Perspective” American Sociological Review 71 (2006) no.3, 450-73. While there seem to be cultural
differences in accepted multiplication factors, everywhere there seem to be clear limits as to their plausibility. There are
other legitimizing factors (“responsibility” being frequently mentioned to justify managerial pay) but time, effort and skill
seem to remain central (cf. e.g. Julie Dickinson “Employees’ Preferences for the Bases of Pay Differentials” Employee
Relations 28 (2006) pp.164-83).
44
Robert E. Lane, “Market Justice, Political Justice” American Political Science Review 80 (1986) no.2, 392
45
e.g. Capital I, 116f.
46
There is evidence that such a distinction is reflected in moral judgments: When confronted with a hypothetical
situation in which a shopkeeper has the opportunity to double the price for a good because there is a sudden increase in
demand or a shortage of supply, most people would find it wrong to exploit this situation – students of economics being
an exception here (cf. Bruno S. Frey, Werner W. Pommerehne and Beat Gygi “Economics Indoctrination or Selection?
Some Empirical Results” Journal of Economic Education 24 (1993) no.3, 271-81)
47
Richard Biernacki, The Fabrication of Labor (Berkley: University of California Press, 1995).
48
William Brown and Peter Nolan show that pay structures tend to respond very slowly to changes in supply and
demand and are very much constrained by the precedent of once set ratios and wage differentials i.e. by custom and
tradition, cf. “Wages and Labour Productivity: The Contribution of Industrial Relations Research to the Understanding
of Pay Determination” British Journal of Industrial Relations 26 (1988), pp.339-61.; also cf. Siobhan Austen, Culture and the
Labour Market (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2003).
49
Jack Amariglio and David Ruccio, “Postmodernism, Marxism, and the Critique of Modern Economic Thought”
Rethinking Marxism 7 (1994) no.3: 7-35, p.23.
50
The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 218.
51
“Justice, Exploitation and the End of Morality” Moral Philosophy and Contemporary Problems ed. J. D. G. Evans
(Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge 1987), 121.
52
Robert E. Lane, The Market Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 188.
53
Fairtrade attempts to establish recognition of producers both “in” and “against” the market – with tricky moral
implications; cf. Matthias Z. Varul, “Consuming the Campesino”, Cultural Studies XX (2008), 237-255.
54
The Struggle for Recognition (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), 146.
55
Axel Honneth, “Work and Instrumental Action” New German Critique 26 (1982), 31-54.
56
Struggle for Recognition, 148.
26
57
Capital I, 95.
58
Origins…, 79.
59
C. B. Macpherson, The Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 264; also cf. Marx, Capital I, 178.
60
Matthias Z. Varul, “Marx, Morality and Management” Philosophy of Management 5 (2005), 47-62.
61
Juliet Schor, The Overworked American (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
62
Cf. e.g. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
63
“The Great War of Recognition” Theory, Culture & Society 18 (2001) no.2-3, 137-150
64
Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press 1969), 118-72
65
Philosophy of Money, 235ff.
66
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress, 1968), 84
67
“Marx’s Dialectic of Labor”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 3 (1974): 235-261, 250
68
Isaiah Berlin The Roots of Romanticism (London: Pimlico 2000), 146f., also cf. Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the
Spirit of Consumerism (Oxford: Blackwell 1987)
69
Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government (London: J. M. Dent, 1910), 67
70
e.g. Don Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 33ff.
71
Consumer culture therefore often has been diagnosed as being conducive to de-politicization – with a tendency to
reframe what should be issues of democratic decision making as issues of consumer choice; cf. e.g. Neal Ryan,
“Reconstructing Citizens as Consumers: Implications for New Modes of Governance” Australian Journal of Public
Administration 60 (2001), 104-9
72
Everyday Exchanges: (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 9.
73
John Stuart Mill Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government (London: J. M. Dent, 1910), 132
74
G.A. Cohen Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 19ff.
75
Capital I, 95; see also Carol C. Gould, Marx’s Social Ontology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978), 148ff. For Hegelian
source of this insight cf. A. Chitty, “Recognition…”.
76
This is an integral part of any theory of recognition, beginning with G. F. W. Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977), 111f.
77
Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking Recognition”, New Left Review (2000), no.3, 107-20, 118.
78
Grundrisse, 158, italicization added.
79
Costas Lapavitsas, “The Social Relations of Money as Universal Equivalent” Economy & Society 34 (2005), no.3, 390.
Being culturally and politically established, general exchangeability consequently has socially defined limits; cf. Michael
Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), Margaret Jane Radin, Contested Commodities (Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press, 1996).
80
Zelizer Social Meaning of Money, 119f.
81
Gender and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
82
Daniel Miller, A Theory of Shopping (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), 18.
83
e.g. Erica Carter, How German Is She? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
84
Gould, Marx’s Social Ontology, 147.
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85
despite the fact that the bulk of consumer purchases are made with others in mind (cf. Miller Theory of Shopping).
86
Russell Belk, “Possessions and the Extended Self” Journal of Consumer Research 15 (1988), 139-68 – going back to
Hegel’s notion that property is the existence of personality (“‘Dasein’ der Persönlichkeit”), Grundlinien der Philosophie des
Rechts (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 114; also cf. Dudley Knowles, “Hegel on Property and Personality”
Philosophical Quarterly 33 (1983), 45-62.
87
Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (New York: Humanities Press, 1954), 301.
88
Grundrisse, 242f.
89
Maurice Godelier L'Énigme du don (Paris: Fayard, 1996), 291. As Robert Lane points out “earned income is a source of
self-esteem whereas welfare income is not.”, (Market Experience,188).
90
Unruly Practices (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 183.
91
Bauman, “Great War of Recognition”.
92
The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1933), 382.
93
ibid., 203.
94
e.g. Francis Fukuyama, Trust (London: Penguin, 1995).
95
Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1979).
96
Philosophy of Money, 207ff.
97
The Compassionate Temperament (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 61.
98
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 190f., Marx Grundrisse, 157.
99
Grundrisse, 156.
100
Society and Nature. A Sociological Inquiry (London: Routledge, 2003)
101
The Social System (London: Routledge, 1951), 30ff.
102
Capital I, 120.
103
Geoffrey Ingham, The Nature of Money (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 107ff.
104
Heinz-Peter Spahn, „Die Ordnung der Gesellschaft als Zahlungswirtschaft“, in Die gesellschaftliche Macht des Geldes, ed.
Christoph Deutschmann (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2002), 58.
105
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. (Aberdeen: George Clark and Son, 1848), 29.
106
Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 218.
107
Nigel Dodd, The Sociology of Money (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), 140.
108
Grundrisse, 249.
109
Capital I, 204.
110
ibid, 205.
111
Louis O. Kelso, Mortimer J. Adler, The Capitalist Manifesto (New York: Random House, 1958).
112
Miller, Principles, 105.
113
Christoph Deutschmann, “The Promise of Absolute Wealth: Capitalism as Religion” Thesis Eleven 66 (2001), 32-56.
114
The Theory of the Leisure Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994); Sighart Neckel, „‚Leistung’ und ‚Erfolg’“, in
Gesellschaftsbilder im Umbruch ed. E. Barlösius (Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 2001).
115
e.g. Karl Marx “Value, Price and Profit” Collected Works 20, (London: Lawrence & Wishart 1985), 107.
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116
Paul M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964), 49.
117
Allen W. Wood, “The Marxian Critique of Justice”, Philosophy & Public Affairs 1 (1979), no.3, 277 Most vigorously
arguing for a reading under the aspect of power: Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx (London: Pluto, 1991), also see
Gould, Social Ontology, 157f. and Allen E. Buchanan, Marx and Justice (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982), 71.
118
Sayer “(De)commodification”, 355.
119
Anders Petersen, Rasmus Willig “Work and Recognition” Acta Sociologica 47 (2004) no.4, 338-350.
120
“Exchange, Value and Affect”, in Feminism After Bourdieu, ed. Lisa Adkins and Beverly Skeggs (Oxford: Blackwell,
2005).
121
Capital I, 45.
122
Why Social Justice Matters (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 109ff.
123
“A Capitalist Road to Communism”, Theory & Society 15 (1987), no.5.: 635-55.
124
“Socialism and the Market” Political Theory 5 (1977), no.4: 473-90.
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