The Adventures of Vergesellschaftung

This paper engages in a dialogue with opposite approaches whose importance is that they take seriously the issues of abstract labour and capitalist ‘socialisation’ (Vergesellschaftung). On the one side there is Michael Heinrich’s view about the Marxian ‘monetary theory of value’, stressing the nachträgliche Vergesellschaftung, whereas abstract labour exists only in monetary circulation of commodities, hence in ex post ‘socialisation’, within a non-commodity money approach. On the other side, there is Roberto Finelli, insisting that labour is already immediately fully ‘social’. This latter position is untenable in literal terms and is unilateral (actually erasing money from any essential role in value theory), but its merit is to show how unilateral is also the view of abstract labour within a perspective reducing Vergesellschaftung only to an a posteriori dimension. This limit results from the Neue Marx-Lektüre’s almost exclusive focus on the first three chapters of Capital. I show that in Marx the nachträgliche Vergesellschaftung in universalised commodity circulation gives way in the later chapters to the unmittelbaren Vergesellschaftung: the ‘immediate socialisation’ in the capitalist labour process, where abstract labor not only counts as, but actually is, already abstract in production. Rubin and Napoleoni saw, in complementary ways, that for Marx abstract labour already exists as (potential and latent) ‘value/money in motion’ in immediate production. I argue, with Graziani, that the two socialisations requires a third and prior one: the ante-validation of capitalist labour through finance to production. Abstract labour is a process. The capitalist monetary Kreislauf (circuit) is the other side of the coin of the abstraction of labour as a process, from labour-power (initial finance) to living labour (production) to objectualised labour (ideal money) to the final validation (real money).