Kinetic Communism

This chapter argues that since the fetish of value is something produced kinetically, its alternative, communism, must also be something understood kinetically, that is, having its own form of motion. In particular, the previous chapters have aimed to show that what is fundamentally at stake in the difference between material production and fetishism is the transparency and direction of the form of motion. Only when the social form of motion is left fully uncovered by coats, mirrors, and fogs can it be collectively organized without devalorization, appropriation, and mystical domination. Communism is the material social condition in which production is treated not as if it were coming from what is produced but as a threefold metabolic process itself. The thesis of this chapter then is that previous social forms of motion have always relied on a certain degree of fetishism of this motion.

Kinetic Theory of Value I

This chapter inverts the standard interpretation of “value in motion” so that value itself is woven from a continual pattern of action and is not some discrete thing that merely moves from point A to point B. Value needs to “stand with its feet on the ground” again by making movement genuinely primary to its being (C, 163). Marx’s theory of value is a fundamentally kinetic theory of value in which matter-in-motion forms the being of value. Value is not just a function of social, political, technical, and human relations. Matter-in-motion is primary to and constitutive of the being of value itself.

Devalorization

This chapter shows that the process of primitive accumulation or direct appropriation is and must be internal to Marx’s theory of value. This is the case for precisely the methodological reasons Marx describes in his postface to the second edition of Capital. The core concepts in the “mode of presentation” (use-value, exchange-value, and value) describe the strictly immanent conditions or core “logic of capitalism” but are also derived from the historical “mode of inquiry.” Since primitive accumulation is part of the historical mode of inquiry, there must be a conceptual place for primitive accumulation in the mode of presentation itself. If not, then the mode of presentation is strictly speaking inadequate to the mode of inquiry—something that any dialectician, and Marx himself, must reject.

Marx and Motion

This chapter explains Marx’s theory of motion first as it is developed in his dissertation on Epicurus, Democritus, and Lucretius and then as it is developed in his books leading up to the Capital volumes. The argument is that Marx developed an original dialectics of motion that stayed with him throughout his life and work. In short, his materialist naturalism was the foundation for his critique of capitalism and economics. Marx’s interest in motion preceded his analysis and critique of capitalism and is the larger framework within which his economic and social critique should be understood.

Kinetic Theory of Value II

This chapter argues that the other three value-forms each unfold (entfaltete) continually from the onefold movement introduced in chapter 7. Money emerges not from natural value or from divine command but strictly from the material-kinetic conditions of transport that bear and support it through each of the value-forms. The simplex form is therefore not something merely inadequate to money but in fact a constant and constitutive kinetic condition of relationality that supports and bears money as a general equivalent. Money, therefore, is not a thing but a kinetic process of value creation that emerges historically and must be continually reproduced through the devalorization process that bears its motion. The key original thesis of this chapter is that the origins of money are not, as is commonly thought, in the “movement of value” but in the movement of matter that bears and transports value.

The Patriarchy of Value

This chapter closely reads the third section of Capital chapter one as a crucial and illuminating foundation to Marx’s theory of value: the appropriation of women’s labor. This brief introductory section, found right before the start of Marx’s kinetic theory of value, thus links the first two sections of chapter one to the third section by indicating that it is precisely the twofold nature of the devalorization and value creation process immanent to the commodity that shapes the patterns of motion that occur in the exchange relations of commodities. To understand value in motion, it is first necessary to see how the source of motion itself is “home-baked” in the patriarchy of value. This is the aim and argument of this chapter.

The Birth of Value

The goal of this chapter is to show the material conditions for the idea of use-value through a close reading of the first two pages of Capital. Distinct from most interpretations, it begins from Marx’s earlier theory of things, of which commodities are particular types, and his theory of material production, within which human labor is one particular type. Chapters 1 and 2 have laid some of this groundwork. This chapter aims to remedy one of the shortfalls of previous interpretations of Capital: that they have tended to begin and end the analysis of the commodity and of labor strictly at the level of the human. This chapter looks more closely at the material and nonhuman basis of the commodity.

Method and Critique

The aim of this chapter is to show the previously unacknowledged continuity between Marx’s earlier method of kinetic materialism with the methodology he lays out at the beginning of Capital. Furthermore, and more generally, it shows that Marx’s critical method in Capital has nothing to do with any sort of determinism, reductionism, or anthropocentrism. Instead, this chapter argues that Marx’s method is consistent with and anticipates the method of new materialism. Marx offers new materialism a historical new materialism in which history plays an important role in shaping the present. This chapter offers a close reading of the first few lines of Capital and a new materialist theory of critique.

Conclusion

The conclusion summarizes the main arguments of the book, their limitations, and the direction of future research. Marx did not hold a labor theory of value. He never used this term, not even once. Primitive accumulation did not happen just once or first in sixteenth-century England but is a constitutive process of all value creation. Primitive accumulation is the becoming of value itself. Marx did not believe in fixed developmental laws of nature and society, or at least held incompatible views on this topic. This book has tried to show that Marx’s theory of kinetic dialectics, from his doctoral dissertation to Capital, offers instead an open and pedetic view of nature and history. Marx was not a crude, mechanistic, or reductionistic materialist and certainly not an atomist, as his doctoral dissertation makes explicit. His theories of value, alienation, and exploitation are neither humanist nor anthropocentric concepts.

Fetishism and the Form of Motion

The argument of this chapter is that there is one final feature of value: domination. The threefold movement of the birth of value involves devalorization, appropriation, and domination. These are not developmental stages but all occur at the same time, as three aspects of the same process of value creation. Domination, in particular, occurs when a single part of the value generating process turns back against the whole process itself as if this single product were the cause of the very process that produced it. Marx calls this radical inversion “the fetishism of the commodity.”