Economy, concept, form: Poststructuralism and the Marxian theory of value

Contemporary reception of Marx's political-economic theory of value has been conditioned, on the one hand, by the contemporary theoretical critique of value as essentialist and scientistic; on the other, by the empirical difficulties perennially ascribed to the labour theory of value by mainstream economists and social scientists. This has resulted, variously, in the marginalization of the theory of value within Marxism, the divergence of the quantitative and qualitative theories of value, and the dismissal of Marxian political economy as a whole. This dissertation advances a new reading of Marx's theory of value predicated, in the first place, on the notion that Marx's value theory is indeed central to his thought. It is argued that value constitutes a distinctively Marxian kind of concept, which is to be distinguished from the brand of conceptuality proper to modern critical philosophy from Kant and Hegel onwards. This reading entails an interrogation and critique of a number of commonplaces of contemporary Marxian and poststructuralist theories, in particular largely unexamined relationships posited between economy, conceptuality, form, and subjectivity.

Chapter 1 contrasts the usage of economy as a nonconceptual figure in the work of Jacques Derrida to Marx's own approach to theory by way of concepts, with reference to the general economy of Georges Bataille. In Chapter 2, an extended reading of Alfred Sohn-Rethel's Intellectual and Manual Labour provides the context for an examination of the relationship between economic exchange, abstraction, and reification posited by Georg Lukács and subsequently taken up by thinkers of the Frankfurt School and present-day cultural theorists. Chapter 3 treats the intersection of Marx's labour theory of value with contemporary theories of subjectivity, including subjective interpretations of the labour theory by Diane Elson, J. K. Gibson-Graham, and William Corlett, as well as Moishe Postone's value-form interpretation, and argues for the complementarity of the labour theory with the Foucault's concepts of power and biopower. Finally, in Chapter 4, the status of value as a concept is further elaborated via a comparison between Derrida's hauntological reading of Marx and a reading of Marx's own gothic imagery informed by the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of becoming-animal.