Abolish the Value Form Theory Form!

 

I might as well admit it... the way I think about a lot of the issues I discuss on this site was influenced by my exposure to "value form theory" (VFT) - the stream of thought of some mostly obscure, mostly German-speaking theorists who advocate for an obscure, non-Leninist form of Marx's critique of political economy: people like Hans-Georg Backhaus, Helmut Reichelt, Werner Bonefeld, and so on.  There is an overlap between the thinkers that are associated with VFT and those who have been categorized as the prophets of the "Neue Marx-Lektüre" (new reading of Marx), of whom the most famous exponent is Michael Heinrich (whose "An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Marx's Capital" is a must-read, in my opinion).  There are some parallels elsewhere, such as the earlier Russian theorist Isaak Illich Rubin and Japanese thinkers like Kozo Uno and Tomohiko Sekine.  In the English-speaking world, these ideas are popular among people who also have an interest in the so-called "communization current" - people like Gilles Dauve and the "Theorie Communiste" crowd - writers who were discussed in the pages of the "Endnotes" journal - so much so that some writers, like "Mac Intosh" see communization and value form theory as "inseparable," though I think that may be a hasty generalization that doesn't bear up under much scrutiny.  And from that scene, some of these ideas have spread to autonomists, situationists, anarchists, syndicalists, punks, and other people searching for some kind of leftist theory that would serve as an alternative to Leninist idiocy (that's how I found out about it, anyway).

I found all of this stuff pretty interesting for a while, and I bear no ill-will towards anyone who is still involved in it.  They're fine people, and what they're doing is fun, and interesting, and I have great respect for those who are engaged in some of the related scholarship.  But I'm starting to grow out of it.

VFTers are known for obsessively reading and re-reading the first few chapters of the first volume of Capital (and, a critic might say, often disregarding the rest).  Their political stance has been summed up in the well-known phrase, "Abolish the value form!"  According to many followers of VFT, the USSR may have called itself socialist, but it failed to abolish the value form, as described in these first few chapters, and thus remained capitalist.  It goes without saying that the so-called democratic socialists of the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark...) failed to abolish the value form, and remained capitalist, not to speak of someone like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who do not even pretend to be concerned with abolishing the value form, and probably wouldn't know what this phrase meant, if you asked them.  Thus VFTers tend to see themselves as further left than all the other political tendencies, and the only true representatives of Marx's critique of political economy.

Abolish the value form.  What does this slogan even mean?  How would one go about abolishing the value form?  Is there some government policy that could abolish the value form?  VFT-ers seem pretty vague on the topic, and to be honest, I have my doubts that there are any, even in pure theory, let alone in practice.

In any case, I think the value form theorists - or at least, some of their followers, who are really the only people in this "scene" that I've actually interacted with - are putting the cart before the horse.

When I say that I cannot imagine a government policy that would abolish the value-form, this should not be read as a fatalistic or transhistorical doctrine that the value-form will last forever.  On the contrary: I doubt that the value-form can last much longer - but not because of any actions of any government, or any political party. Capitalism abolishes the value-form. 

The issue is not that we have to figure out a way, somehow, to abolish the value form, whatever that could mean.  The issue is that, under advanced conditions of capitalism, value is abolishing itself.  Or perhaps "abolishing" is not a very useful term here.  Value is undermining itself.