COMMODITY-FORM AND & Society, Vol.

72,METHOD
ScienceDIALECTICAL No. 3, July 2008, 295–318
295

The Commodity-Form and the Dialectical

Method: On the Structure of Marx’s
Exposition in Chapter 1 of Capital

GUIDO STAROSTA*
ABSTRACT: The last 10 or 15 years have witnessed a renewed
interest in Marx’s dialectical method and its implications for value
theory. However, most works have not sufficiently thematized the
peculiar role of the phase of analysis in Marx’s dialectical inves-
tigation generally and in his presentation in particular. Further-
more, they have not paid sufficient attention to the specific form
of the analytical process within dialectical thought, which distin-
guishes it from the kind of analysis characteristic of formal–logical
methodologies. Those two questions are crucial for a proper
comprehension of the dialectical structure of Marx’s argument
in Chapter 1 of Capital and, in particular, to clarify the determi-
nate place where the unfolding of the explanation of the deter-
minations of privately performed abstract labor as the substance
of value is to be found. That explanation is actually contained in
section 3, where Marx presents the synthetic development of the
expression of value into the money-form.

I
N THE PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION of Capital Marx
makes evident that he was well aware of the complexity of the first
steps in the critique of political economy (Marx, 1976a, 89). In-
deed, the endless debates over the real meaning and implications of
Marx’s discussion of the commodity-form seem to suggest that, if
anything, Marx’s warning actually fell short of the real difficulties at
stake. On the other hand, whether it is explicitly acknowledged or

* I would like to thank Simon Clarke, Juan Iñigo Carrera, Nicolás Grinberg and Axel Kicillof
for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The usual caveat applies.

295
296 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

not, it is clear that the diverse readings of Marx’s critique of political

economy entail different political implications (Dimoulis and Milios,
2004). Although a full discussion of the question exceeds the scope
of this paper, it should at least be noted that the investigation of those
“minutiae” which the determinations of the commodity-form “appear
to turn upon” (Marx, 1976a, 90) are of paramount importance for
the kind of political action that the critique of political economy in-
forms.1 This is shown not only in Marx’s insistence on the impossi-
bility of correctly grasping the determinations of the more abstract
social forms of capitalist society from the bourgeois standpoint of the
science of political economy (Marx, 1976a, 174), but also in the cen-
tral role these determinations played in his critique of the ideologi-
cal representations of them coming from the working-class movement
itself, e.g., Proudhonian socialism.2
Be that as it may, the central point to be argued in this paper is
that the diversity in the way Marx’s followers have read the ideal
reproduction of the determinations of the commodity-form con-
tained in Capital is closely connected to the varied methodological
perspectives from which those authors have attempted to grasp
the latter. In other words, those different interpretations of the
actual content of the first sections of Capital express different under-
standings of the very form of scientific knowledge unfolded in that
book.

1 As I have argued elsewhere (see Starosta, 2003), elaboration of the connection between
the specific dialectical form of Marx’s scientific method and its revolutionary content is
perhaps the single most important contribution of Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness.
A discussion of the fundamental political implications of the more abstract determina-
tions of capital can be found in Starosta, 2005.
2 See Clarke, 1994 and Shortall, 1994 for good reconstructions of Marx’s critique of Proud-
honian socialism based on the latter’s misunderstanding of the nature of the commodity
and money-forms. Thus, the gist of Marx’s critique of Gray’s proposal to preserve private
commodity-production while replacing the money-form with labor-time certificates issued
by a national bank, comes down to the latter’s inability to comprehend the immanent
necessity of the value of commodities to take on the independent form of money (Elson,
1979b, 135–136). Similarly, in the Grundrisse Marx ridicules Darimon’s proposal of abol-
ishing the privilege of money (that of being directly exchangeable for all commodities)
by making “by decree” all commodities directly exchangeable (Marx, 1993, 126). In all
these cases, the common thread of the Marxian critique lies in the incapacity of those
authors to grasp the necessary inner connection between the commodity- and money-forms.
This, in turn, is underpinned by a methodological shortcoming. As I argue below, theories
based on formal logic can only grasp social forms as self-subsistent entities or immediate
affirmations and not as the self-negating mode of existence of a more abstract social form
(i.e., the movement of contradiction). As a consequence, they are bound to represent their
necessary inner connections as merely external ones.
COMMODITY-FORM AND DIALECTICAL METHOD 297

The need to reconsider Marx’s presentation of the commodity-

form in Chapter 1 of Capital through a reassessment of his dialectical
method (in particular, its connection to Hegel’s Science of Logic) has
been widely recognized by a growing number of scholars. In effect,
the last 10 or 15 years have witnessed a renewed interest in Marx’s
dialectical method and its implications for value theory (see, among
others, Albritton and Simoulidis, 2003; Arthur, 2002; Moseley, 1993;
Moseley and Campbell, 1997; Murray, 1988; Smith, 1990). However,
despite all the light that these works have cast on the form of Marx’s
argument, I think that they have been mainly focused on the synthetic
aspects of Marx’s dialectical presentation (i.e., on the exposition of the
dialectical movement from the “abstract to the concrete”). In this sense,
it could be argued that this literature has glossed over two further fun-
damental aspects of Marx’s dialectical method. First, those works have
not sufficiently thematized the peculiar role of the phase of analysis in
Marx’s dialectical investigation generally and in his presentation in
particular. Second, they have not paid sufficient attention to the spe-
cific form of the analytical process within dialectical thought.3 My own contri-
bution therefore aims at filling these gaps in the literature.4
Thus, the main purpose of this paper is to provide a methodologi-
cally minded critical reading of Marx’s argument about the determi-
nations of the value-form of the product of labor in the first chapter of
Capital.5 Through this reading, I will also try to show that many of the
confusions and misunderstandings among both followers and critics
spring from an inadequate grasp of the dialectical structure of Marx’s
exposition.

3 The distinction between analysis (in the sense of dissection of the “whole” into “parts” or
“identification of differences”) and synthesis (in the sense of reconstitution of the “unity”
of the whole) is not peculiar to dialectics. As I argue below, what sets the latter apart from
formal–logical methodologies is the specific form taken both by the analytical and synthetic
processes in dialectical thought. Zelený (1980, ch. 10) provides a concise discussion of
the different meanings of analysis and synthesis in science and philosophy, which also
traces back their intellectual lineage.
4 These other aspects have not been entirely absent in the literature. However, they came
up in the debate among “new dialecticians” only quite recently (Murray, 2002; Reuten,
2000). See Brown, et al., 2002, for a discussion of some of these issues through a compari-
son between critical realism and systematic dialectics. Also, it is my view that compared to
the light thrown on the synthetic aspects of Marx’s method of presentation, the nature of
the relation between analysis and synthesis in the presentation and the way in which this
relates to the formal determinations of the dialectical inquiry, have not been explored
with the same clarity.
5 In my own reading I draw on the methodological approach to the critique of political
economy developed by Iñigo Carrera (1992; 2003).
298 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

Analysis, Synthesis and the Dialectical Method: Controversies

In Capital Marx puts into motion the methodological discoveries

which allowed him to overcome the limitations of his early account of
alienated labor and its supersession. In contradistinction to the Paris
Manuscripts, and as he clearly states in the Marginal Notes on Adolf Wagner,
Marx takes as a point of departure neither the concepts of political
economy nor any concept whatsoever (Marx, 1975, 198), in order
thereby to discover alienated labor as their presupposition. As the
title of his most important work denotes, the subject whose determi-
nations the dialectical investigation proceeds to discover and present
is capital, which, as the alienated subject of social life, becomes “the
all-dominating economic power of bourgeois society” and must there-
fore “form the starting-point as well as the finishing-point” of the ideal
reproduction of the concrete (Marx, 1993, 107). In this sense, Marx’s
exposition in Capital does not advance towards the discovery of alien-
ation but starts from what the analytic stage of the dialectical inquiry
revealed as its most abstract and general form (Iñigo Carrera, 2003,
286; Meikle, 1985, 71–72).6 He starts with the immediate observation
of the simplest concretum in which the alienation of labor is expressed
in order to develop the real determinations specific to this social form
(Marx, 1975, 198). As has now been widely acknowledged, this start-
ing point is not an ideal–typical — or worse, historically existent —
simple commodity–producing society, as in the orthodoxy derived from
Engels (1980) and popularized by authors such as Sweezy (1968) and
Meek (1973).7 In Marx’s own words, he starts with the commodity as
the “economic cell-form of bourgeois society” (Marx, 1976a, 90).
However, Marx’s presentation does not directly start with the
essential determinations of the commodity-form, but from the imme-
diate observation of an individual commodity in its outward appear-
ance.8 In an exposition that will prove full of “metaphysical subtleties

6 On the methodological differences between the early critique of alienated labor in the
Paris Manuscripts and its more developed form in Capital, see Starosta, 2005, chs. 1 and 4.
7 For a critique of the Engelsian orthodoxy on this question see Arthur, 1997; 1998; Robles
Báez, 2000; and Reichelt, 1995.
8 Properly speaking, there is a previous step in Marx’s presentation. He first starts with the
form in which social wealth appears in capitalist society, namely, an “immense collection
of commodities” (Marx, 1976a, 125), the individual commodity being its elementary form.
The unfolding of the determinations behind this appearance is not completed until Vol-
ume II, where the unity of the movement of social capital itself, in the form of the circuit
of commodity-capital, is revealed as positing social wealth in the form of an immense
collection of commodities (Marx, 1978, 174–177).
COMMODITY-FORM AND DIALECTICAL METHOD 299

and theological niceties” (Marx, 1976a, 163), he shows that what de-
termines the commodity as a form of social wealth is not only that, as
any product of labor, it possesses a use-value, but that the latter acts as
the material bearer of a second attribute, namely exchange-value. The
further analysis of the commodity reveals that exchange-value is actu-
ally the form of expression of a content distinguishable from it — the
value-form, or the attribute of general exchangeability of the commodity
— the substance of which resides in the abstract labor congealed in it,
and whose magnitude is consequently determined by the socially neces-
sary abstract labor-time required for its production.
The above line of reasoning has been the subject of all kinds of
objections put forward by the different interpreters of Marx. As I
argue below, those reservations about Marx’s argument have their
source in an inadequate comprehension of, or insufficient attention
to, the nature of the crucial distinction between two different mo-
ments involved in Marx’s dialectical inquiry and presentation, namely
the stage of analysis and that of synthesis. In particular, I think that it
is confusion over these questions that lies at the basis of widespread
critiques of Marx’s line of argument about the determinations of the
commodity-form; not only by well-known critics such as Böhm-Bawerk
(1975), but also among some of Marx’s disciples.9 In brief, the gen-
eral thrust of those objections goes, Marx did not provide in Capital
an adequate “logical proof ” that commodities have a “something” in
common and that that “something” is congealed abstract labor.10

9 Thus both Reuten (1993, 107) and Arthur (1993, 76) agree that Böhm-Bawerk’s objections
to Marx’s line of reasoning about abstract labour as the substance of value are justified; not
because Marx is wrong in seeing an inner connection between abstract labor and value,
but because his grounding of that point is defective from a “systematic–dialectical” per-
spective. Unlike Arthur, who argues that the introduction of abstract labor as the substance
of value should have been postponed until the development of the capital-form, Reuten
goes even further in his distance from Marx’s presentation and makes a case against the
determination of abstract labor as substance of value. Rather, he sees the market as trans-
forming concrete labor into abstract labor (Reuten, 1993, 105).
10 A good and concise account of the essence of this critique can be found in Kay (1979,
48–58; see also Park, 2003). Specifically, Böhm-Bawerk objected that Marx did not take
into consideration common properties other than being products of labor — e.g., utility,
scarcity, and so on — as possible determinants of exchange-value (Böhm-Bawerk, 1975,
74–75). In this sense, it might be worth noting that in the process of inquiry Marx did
consider — but discarded and, hence, excluded from the presentation — “utility in gen-
eral” as the substance of value. This is evidenced by the following remarks from the pre-
paratory Manuscripts of 1861–63:
“We have seen that the basis of value is the fact that human beings relate to each other’s
labor as equal, and general, and in this form social, labor. This is an abstraction, like all
human thought, and social relations only exist among human beings to the extent that they
think, and possess this power of abstraction from sensuous individuality and contingency.
300 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

The first point at stake in this objection has already been force-
fully made by other scholars, so I will refer to it very briefly. In a
nutshell, the question comes down to the radical methodological
difference which, as Meikle insightfully notes, separates Marx’s dia-
lectical approach to science from the formalism and atomism of
bourgeois conceptions (Meikle, 1985, ch. 3). Clearly based on the
latter, Böhm-Bawerk’s objections came from someone who could only
see science as a purely “logical construct” and not the reproduction
in thought of “how things essentially are” (Meikle, 1985, 80). Thus,
with “the characteristic empiricist gap between ‘truths’ and the enti-
ties they are supposed to be true of” (Meikle, 1985, 79), he could only
read Marx’s initial pages as an abstract, formal process of “logical
proof.” The possibility that those pages unfold the real nature and
specific self-movement of a determinate content (the commodity-
form of the product of labor) and do not contain a formal deduc-
tion was beyond Böhm-Bawerk’s formalistic field of vision (Kay, 1979,
51–52).
Second, and more important for the purpose of this paper, at
stake here is another aspect of Marx’s argument in the first pages of
Capital that has not been sufficiently or satisfactorily explored by most
scholars: the specific nature and significance of the difference be-
tween the phase of analysis and that of synthesis within a dialectical
exposition. This double movement in the dialectical presentation is not
an arbitrary stylistic or rhetorical strategy introduced by Marx but
reflects a real difference characterizing the specificity of dialectical
inquiry. The latter must involve both identification of the different
forms taken by the subject whose determinations the dialectical in-
vestigation attempts to reproduce in thought (i.e., the analytical sepa-
ration between social forms according to their relative degree of
concreteness) and the “tracking down of their inner connection” (i.e.,
the synthetic discovery of the immanent real necessity linking those

. . . We have seen that the basis of value is the fact that human beings relate to each other’s
labor as equal, and general, and in this form social, labor. The kind of political economist
who attacks the determination of value by labor time on the ground that the work per-
formed by 2 individuals during the same time is not absolutely equal (although in the
same trade), doesn’t yet even know what distinguishes human social relations from rela-
tions between animals. He is a beast. As beasts, the same fellows then also have no diffi-
culty in overlooking the fact that no 2 use values are absolutely identical (no 2 leaves,
Leibniz) and even less difficulty in judging use-values, which have no common measure
whatever, as exchange values according to their degree of utility” (Marx, 1988, 232).
COMMODITY-FORM AND DIALECTICAL METHOD 301

different forms) (Marx, 1976a, 102).11 A fundamental implication

follows from this: the exposition of the explanation proper of the
necessity underlying the relations between different social forms —
what would amount to a “logical proof ” in the language of formalis-
tic methodological approaches — is not to be found in the dialecti-
cal analysis, but in the synthetic movement of the exposition. Now, since
it is in the latter only that the unfolding of the real movement of
determination — hence the explanation — actually takes place, the
presentation of the findings of the dialectical inquiry could take, in
principle, a fully synthetic form (Iñigo Carrera, 2003, 279). However,
this is not the way Marx structured his dialectical exposition in Vol-
ume 1 of Capital (the only one he edited for publication himself);
this exposition tends to include, in a “stylized” form, brief presenta-
tions of the analytic process.12 Since this peculiar structure of Marx’s
presentation of the determinations of the commodity-form actually
recurs throughout most of Volume I and its misunderstanding has
caused so many controversies among critics and followers alike, it
might be worth providing further elaboration on this last point.13
In a nutshell, this structure of Marx’s dialectical presentation
starts by taking the immediate concrete appearance of the determi-
nate social form at stake. Through a brief analytic movement, it sub-
sequently uncovers its inner essential determination.14 The exposition

11 Here my approach differs from both Murray’s and Reuten’s. The former seems simply to
identify inquiry (what he calls “phenomenology”) with analysis and synthesis with presen-
tation (Murray, 2000, 36–38). Reuten does allow for synthetic moments in the process of
inquiry but only as “provisional outlines of inseparability of phenomena” (Reuten, 2000,
143). Moreover, although he is right to see the need for the dialectical presentation to
be fundamentally synthetic, he does not fully explore the possibility that the dialectical
researcher presenting the results of the inquiry may include “stylized” moments of analy-
sis in order to highlight the unity of the dialectical process of cognition. He only men-
tions this possibility in passing when discussing Banaji’s argument about the two-fold
starting point of chapter 1 of Capital (Banaji, 1979, 36–40; Reuten, 2000, 158). But as
I argue below, this presentational strategy plays a central role at least in the whole of
Volume I.
12 On the role and the pros and cons of this analytic moment in the peculiar structure of
the dialectical exposition in Capital I, organized around presentational “nodes,” see Iñigo
Carrera, 1992; 2003, 285.
13 For an illustration of this presentational structure with reference to the transformation
of money into capital, see Starosta, 2005.
14 Marx sometimes includes apparent (hence flawed) analytical paths in his exposition that
are revealed to be such through a movement that leads the reader back to the unmedi-
ated starting point, that is, without making any progress towards the discovery of the
underlying specific determination defining the object under scrutiny (Iñigo Carrera, 2003,
282). The presentational role of the inclusion of these flawed analytical movements is
mainly pedagogical; they serve to place more emphasis on the correct analytical path.
302 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

then proceeds by synthetically unfolding the realization of that (more

abstract) determination. This stage goes on until the specific poten-
tiality defining the essential determination of the social form under
scrutiny, and whose realization the exposition is ideally reproducing,
negates itself as immediately carried by that abstract social form to
become affirmed as immediately pertaining to the more concrete
form into which it has metamorphosed. This signals that the first
presentational node has been exhausted. A new one thereby begins,
but now with the more concrete form whose genesis has been traced
in the former as the subject of the movement to be ideally reproduced.
However, the new node does not directly start with the inner deter-
minations of this more concrete social form but, again, with its im-
mediate manifestation. An analytic movement therefore precedes the
former.
Coming back to our main argument about the general aspects
of this formal structure of Marx’s presentation: as mentioned above,
it is the exposition of the dialectical synthesis that reveals the “why” of
real relations. The analytic stage only separates a social form from a
more abstract one, whose realized potentiality it carries within itself
in the form of its own immanent potentiality. In this sense, the ana-
lytic stage is not about the why but about the what. Evidently, since
the separation of social forms according to their relative degree of
abstractness/concreteness ideally expresses the objective necessity
(the real relations) residing in the object and are not the product of
the subjective caprice or imagination of the scientist, the mere refer-
ence to the “what” carries implicitly some hint of the “why.” Thus, if
the dialectical analysis reveals that the value-form is the concrete form
in which the objectification of the abstract character of private and
independent labor affirms itself as an abstract form, the separation
between the two already says something about the real relation involved.
But this something is no more than, as it were, a “pointing out,” an

Marx’s consideration of the possibility that the particular material properties of the com-
modity under investigation constitute the more abstract form behind the attribute of
general exchangeability is an example of this (Marx, 1976a, 127–128). Incidentally, it
is to be noted that this is the real meaning of what Böhm-Bawerk mistakenly saw as Marx’s
“method of exclusion,” through which he allegedly provided a “purely negative proof”
of abstract labor as the substance of value (Böhm-Bawerk, 1975, 68–69).
COMMODITY-FORM AND DIALECTICAL METHOD 303

observation. The actual ideal reproduction of that inner connection

— the explanation — takes place in the synthetic movement.15
With this in mind, it is easy to understand the main reason why
the criticisms leveled at Marx about his inadequate explanation of
abstract labor as the substance of value are not simply based on a
misunderstanding about the particularities of his argument, but are
completely off the mark. To put it simply, those critiques search for
an explanation in the wrong place, that is, in the pages where Marx
is just presenting the analytic separation of real forms, which com-
prise the first two sections of Chapter 1. Marx’s alleged explanation
of why abstract labor is the substance of value in those pages sounds
unconvincing simply because it is not there. As we shall see, the un-
folding of this particular “why” only occurs in section 3, which dis-
cusses exchange-value as the form of manifestation of value. Before
engaging in that aspect of Marx’s presentation of the determinations
of the commodity-form, let us first probe more deeply into the spe-
cifically dialectical form of the analytical moment that precedes it.16

15 In his Science of Logic, Hegel refers to this distinction between the role of analysis and syn-
thesis as the difference between the apprehension of what is and its comprehension (Hegel,
1999, 793–794).
16 Regarding Chapter 1 in particular, this presentational structure has been broadly recog-
nized quite early in the debate by Banaji (1979) and Elson (1979b). However, they both
seem to reduce the content of the synthetic stage of the presentation simply to the ques-
tion of revealing exchange-value as the necessary mode of expression of value, i.e. to the
formal necessity of the money-form. But as I argue below, the latter is precisely the mo-
ment where Marx is synthetically unfolding the necessity of privately performed abstract
labor as the substance of value. Yet, neither Elson nor Banaji explicitly addresses the ques-
tion of where exactly the “why” of abstract labor as the substance of value can be found.
Elson in particular seems to concur with Rubin (see below) that it is actually in section 4.
Murray (1988, 148–149) rightly sees the structure of Chapter 1 as comprising a “double
movement” of form to content and then from content to form. However, presumably
reducing the dialectical movement to the synthetic stage, he sees nothing particularly
dialectical in the form of the first movement (Murray, 1988, 148); hence his analogy with
Descartes’ analytical reduction of the bit of wax to primary quality matter, i.e. a search for
a “third party” or common element (Murray, 1988, 149). In reality, the general point about
the two-fold movement of analysis and synthesis in Marx’s exposition had already been
made by Rubin in his seminal work on the theory of value (Rubin, 1972, 113). However,
his understanding of the way they structure the exposition is, I think, incorrect. In a nut-
shell, Rubin considers that the content of the section on fetishism is what in reality corre-
sponds to the section on the form of value or exchange-value, i.e. the synthetic exposition
of the reason why the product of labor must take the value-form. Furthermore, although
Rubin does distinguish between the analytic and the synthetic (genetic, as he calls it) stages
of the presentation, he also seems to restrict the specificity of the dialectical argument to
the latter (Rubin, 1978, 110). In this way, the specific form of the dialectical analysis vis-
à-vis the analysis of formal logic is overlooked.
304 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

The Phase of Analysis

In order to understand the specific form of Marx’s argument in

the first pages of Capital it is fundamental to grasp the difference be-
tween the dialectical form of the analysis and that of formal logic. Many
authors have highlighted the distinction between the abstractions of
Marx’s critique of political economy and those of conventional social
science.17 However, as Iñigo Carrera points out (2003, 250), most au-
thors have overlooked that the difference in the respective kinds of
abstraction emerges as a result of the very form of the process of cogni-
tion on the basis of which those abstractions are identified. This dif-
ference in form not only applies to the synthetic or genetic phase —
as is usually assumed — but crucially pertains to the process of analysis as
well. Theories based on formal logic analyze a concrete form by sepa-
rating what repeats itself from what does not in order to arrive at a
certain characteristic. In turn, this common attribute makes possible
the mental construction of a definition of that concrete form as that
which has this or that attribute. Conversely, dialectical thought analy-
ses a concrete form by, first of all, facing it as embodying a qualitative
potentiality for transformation. Second, by grasping that qualitative
potentiality as the concrete form in which a more abstract form real-
izes its own qualitative potentiality, i.e., its real necessity. Thus the dia-
lectical ideal appropriation of the universe of different real forms does
not proceed through an identification of the distinctiveness of forms
on the basis of the degree of repetition of certain attributes. Rather, it
analytically separates the different forms by discovering as immanent
in a particular concrete form the realized potentiality of another real
form, which is abstract with respect to the first one, but concrete with
respect to another form of which it is the realized potentiality. Hence,
while formal–logical analysis grasps the general determination of real
forms as immediate affirmations — hence self-subsistent entities — the
distinctive mark of the process of analysis in dialectical research is to
grasp, in the same analytic movement, both the concrete form under scru-
tiny and the more abstract one of which the former is the developed
mode of existence. In other words, dialectical thought grasps each form

17 The distinction has been posed in the literature as one between “real abstractions vs.
mental generalization” (Saad-Filho, 2002) or “empiricist abstractions vs. determinate
abstractions” (Gunn, 1992). “Empiricist abstractions” have also been called “formal ab-
stractions” (Clarke, 1991) or “general abstractions” (Murray, 1988).
COMMODITY-FORM AND DIALECTICAL METHOD 305

as the affirmation through self-negation of another, more abstract one

(hence, as the movement of contradiction).
In light of the above, I think that in the opening pages of chap-
ter 1 Marx is not searching for a common property in commodities.
Rather, he is searching for (i.e., not yet unfolding) the specific deter-
mination defining the potentiality of the commodity as a historical
form of social wealth. This potentiality Marx initially “discovers” by
looking at the use-value of the individual commodity, which in capi-
talist societies acts as bearer of that second, historically specific attribute
of the products of labor, namely, exchange-value. Two things follow
from this. First, that inasmuch as it is materially borne by the use-value
of the commodity, this attribute is intrinsic to the commodity itself.
Second, as argued above, Marx is not trying to prove logically the exis-
tence of a common property but the commodity itself, in its immediacy, shows
that it has that “common property” immanent in it.
Here a problem might arise because Marx does not explicitly say
what that second attribute of the commodity consists of. He just names
it (exchange-value) and then directly proceeds to its analysis. I be-
lieve the reason for this is that the meaning of that attribute was self-
evident in the name itself in light of its everyday usage at that time.
The fact that commodities have “exchange-value” simply means that
they have the power of exchangeability, that is, the aptitude to be transformed
into a different use-value without the mediation of any material transforma-
tion in bodily existence.18 What immediately follows in Marx’s exposition
is, then, the dialectical analysis of this social power of exchangeability
of commodities. That is, Marx proceeds to locate the source of this
specific potentiality intrinsic to the commodity, i.e., the more abstract
form appearing in the concrete form of the power of exchangeability.
As happens with every real form, the first thing he encounters
when facing the exchangeability of the commodity is its immediate
manifestation — the quantitative relation “in which use-values of one
kind exchange for use-values of another” (Marx, 1976a, 126). Thus,
the first step in the analysis of exchangeability is the uncovering of
the more abstract form (hence the content) behind that specific for-
mal attribute of the commodity, this being the only way in which
we can penetrate through the concrete form in which an abstract

18 I am indebted to discussions with Juan Iñigo Carrera (personal communication) for this
formulation of the fetishistic character of commodities.
306 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

form presents itself. Again, this is the immediate object of Marx’s ex-
position in the passages that follow, and not the search for a “common
something” or “third thing,” the existence of which the distinction be-
tween form and content presupposes.19 This separation between form
and content reveals that the different particular exchange relations that
a commodity establishes with other commodities are actually expres-
sions of something else that inheres in commodities and which gives
them the identical qualitative potentiality of general exchangeability in a
certain magnitude. Once form and content of the attribute of general
exchangeability are distinguished, Marx continues with the analysis
of the latter, which consists in separating that form of general ex-
changeability from the more abstract form whose realized necessity
it carries within itself as its “other.” The particular form that this
analysis takes is, again, not the search for a common element, but
for the determinate action which posits that specific attribute exist-
ing in commodities. After briefly considering and discarding the
action of purely natural forces, Marx points out that the action at stake
is a human action in one of its facets: productive labor in its general
character, or abstract labor. Commodities have this attribute of gen-
eral exchangeability as products of the abstract character of the labor
objectified in them.
And here there is a tricky aspect in Marx’s presentation, which
might have contributed to much of the confusion. Because, although
at that stage of the argument he has already shown that the common
“something” is the form of general exchangeability, he does not ac-
tually name it until separating, in turn, that form from its material
content or substance.

All these things now tell us is that human labour-power has been expended
to produce them, human labour is accumulated in them. As crystals of this
social substance, which is common to them all, they are values — commodity
values [Warenwerte].

19 In order to avoid confusions, I am not implying that the existence of a common prop-
erty and of exchange equivalence are not important elements of Marx’s arguments. My
point is that Marx is not logically proving the existence of a common property or that the
only possible substance of that common property is abstract labor. He “finds” that com-
mon property immanent in the commodity (actually, its immediate manifestation) and
then proceeds to its dialectical analysis (i.e., separation of form and content). See Kicillof
and Starosta, forthcoming, for a fuller discussion of why being the products of the
abstract character of labor is the only reasonable determination behind the value of
commodities.
COMMODITY-FORM AND DIALECTICAL METHOD 307

We have seen that when commodities are exchanged, their exchange-value

manifests itself as something totally independent of their use-value. But if
we abstract from their use-value, there remains their value, as it has just been
defined. The common factor in the exchange relation, or in the exchange-
value of the commodity, is therefore its value. (Marx, 1976a, 128.)

That intrinsic attribute of general exchangeability which is manifested

in exchange-value, and which is posited by the abstract character of
labor, is called by Marx value. Now, in opposition to the claims of a
great deal of contemporary literature on Marx’s theory of the value-
form, I think that the (analytic) search for the specific determina-
tions of the commodity is not achieved with the discovery of abstract
labor as the substance of value.20 Quite to the contrary, that very speci-
ficity seems to have slipped through Marx’s fingers. In effect, although
he found the specific attribute of the commodity in its value, when
he moved to account for its substance he ended up with something
that bears no specifically capitalist character: “merely congealed quan-
tities of homogeneous human labor, i.e., of human labor power ex-
pended without regard to the form of its expenditure” (Marx, 1976a,
128). But, as Marx’s “thought experiment” about Robinson on his
island illustrates (Marx, 1976a, 128), it is evident that in any form of
society human beings productively expend their corporeal powers
and that the exertion of human capacities entails both a concrete or

20 As a reaction to the ahistorical, Ricardian reading of Marx’s account of the value-form,

the “new consensus” tends to see abstract labor as a purely historical, specific social form
(Arthur, 2001; Bellofiore and Finelli, 1998; De Angelis, 1995; Kay, 1999; Postone, 1996;
Reuten, 1993; Saad-Filho, 1997). For a further elaboration of our case against the pure
historicity of abstract labor through a critique of Rubin’s approach, see Kicillof and
Starosta, forthcoming. As I argue below, abstract labor is a generic material form, a “pro-
ductive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands etc.” (Marx, 1976a, 134).
What is specific to capitalist society is the role it plays in being determined as the sub-
stance of the most abstract form of objectified social mediation, namely, value. In a re-
cent article, Murray (2000) comes very close to recognizing this through the distinction
between “physiological” abstract labor and “practically abstract” labor. A proper discus-
sion of Murray’s own solution exceeds the scope of this paper. Here I would only like to
note that Murray’s remarkable merit is to grasp the importance of highlighting the mate-
riality of abstract labor while making clear that this does not necessarily lead to an asocial
perspective on the value-form. In this way, his recent contribution to the debate provides
a necessary correction to what we see as a formalist overreaction of much recent theoriz-
ing on the value-form. See also Reuten’s reply to Murray (Reuten, 2000) and the latter’s
rejoinder (Murray, 2002). While still seeing abstract labor as capital-specific, Robles Báez
offers probably one of the best treatments of the movement of the contradiction between the
generic, physiological materiality of abstract labor and its historically specific social deter-
mination as the substance of value deriving from the private character of labor in capital-
ism (Robles Báez, 2004).
308 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

particular character and an abstract or general one. What is more,

Marx states explicitly that it is not from labor’s abstract aspect that
the fetishism of commodities derives (Marx, 1976a, 164). Thus far,
then, this stage of the analytic process does not show why this generic
materiality takes the objectified social form of value. It does not even
tell us what is the historical form of social labor that is determined as
value-producing. It only tells us what is the material determination of
that which in capitalist society is socially represented in the form of
value. This is why Marx still carries on with the analytic search for
the “formal determinants that it contains as a commodity and which
stamp it as a commodity.” This leads Marx’s dialectical analysis to give
closer scrutiny to the labor that produces commodities. As any atten-
tive reader could tell, the analytic process continues and it is only in
the section on the dual character of labor that Marx finally finds the
historically specific form of social labor that produces commodities
and, hence, value.
In effect, Marx observes that the individual commodity he is
analyzing is only one among many within a totality of different com-
modities. But the same follows for the particular labors that underlie
the varied use-values taking the commodity-form. In other words,
Marx points out that generalized commodity production presupposes
the existence of an extended social division of labor and that the latter,
as the “totality of varying deployments of useful labor” is an “eternal
necessity of nature for the sake of mediating the material interchange
between man and nature (i.e., human life)” (Marx, 1976b, 12). On the
other hand, this analysis also makes clear that the reverse relation-
ship does not hold, that is, the division of labor must not necessarily
take the social form of the production of commodities. The formal
determination of the commodity must therefore spring from the
specific social form taken by the organization of the division of labor
in our present-day society. The commodity, Marx eventually con-
cludes, is the objectification “of mutually independent acts of labor,
performed in isolation” (Marx, 1976a, 131). In other words, it is the
“labor of private individuals who work independently of each other”
(Marx, 1976a, 165), or private and independent labor (hereafter, pri-
vate labor), which constitutes the specifically capitalist form of labor.
In this social form of the human life-process, the producer has the
full conscious productive capacity to control the individual charac-
ter of his/her labor but cannot recognize and organize (i.e., he/she
COMMODITY-FORM AND DIALECTICAL METHOD 309

is unconscious about) the social determinations of human individu-

ality. Hence the inversion of those social powers into an attribute of
the product of labor, namely, the value-form. The analytic process
completes the search for the specific determinations of the value-form
by revealing that the attribute of general exchangeability of the com-
modity springs from the abstract or general character of privately per-
formed labor materialized in it. The commodity, then, becomes known
in its essential determination as the materialized general social relation
of private and independent producers.

The Synthetic Phase

It is only now that the synthetic stage of the presentation begins.

This consists in ideally following the realization of the discovered
potentiality immanent in the commodity. From then on, the com-
modity ceases to be grasped in its exteriority as an “inert” social form
— as a sheer external object — and the exposition starts to follow its self-
movement as the subject of the development of those determinations
— previously discovered through analysis — into ever more concrete
forms (Iñigo Carrera, 2003, 283).21 This is subtly indicated by Marx
at the end of his discussion of the qualitative determinations of the
relative form of value.

We see, then, that everything our analysis of the value of commodities pre-
viously told us is repeated by the linen itself, as soon as it enters into asso-
ciation with another commodity, the coat. Only it reveals its thoughts in a
language with which it alone is familiar, the language of commodities. In
order to tell us that labour creates its own value in its abstract quality of being
human labour, it says that the coat, in so far as it counts as its equal, i.e., is
value, consists of the same labour as it does itself. In order to inform us that

21 In a recent article, Arthur (2004, 41–42) also acknowledges this important aspect of Marx’s
presentation. However, he still maintains that Marx failed to provide in Chapter 1 an
adequate explanation for the determination of abstract labor as the substance of value
and should have postponed the introduction of abstract labor until the level of abstrac-
tion of the capital-form (Arthur, 2005, 119). The shortcoming of this view — also shared
by Lapavitsas (2005) — is that it leads to a formalistic understanding of the value-form,
which obscures the very question that the latter, in its own reified way, is meant to solve:
the establishment of the material unity of social labor when it takes the form of private
labor (Brown, 2004). This idiosyncratic separation of the form of value from its substance
at the level of the commodity-form had already been advanced by Itoh (1988). See Clarke,
1989, for a critique of Itoh’s radical separation of the theory of the form of value and the
theory of the substance of value.
310 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

its sublime objectivity as value differs from its stiff and starchy existence as
a body, it says that value has the appearance of a coat, and consequently
that in so far as the linen itself is an object of value [Wertding], it and the
coat are as like as two peas. (Marx, 1976a, 143–144.)

The unfolding of this movement spoken “in the language of

commodities” is precisely what the subsequent synthetic stage of the
presentation consists of. Value being a purely social power of the
commodity, it cannot be immediately expressed in its sensuous cor-
poreal materiality. As the capacity of the commodity to be exchanged
for other different commodities, value can only be manifested in the
social relation of exchange between commodities. Therefore, the
value of a commodity necessarily expresses itself only in the use-value
of the commodity that is exchanged for the commodity in question as
its equivalent. In this way, value takes the concrete shape of exchange-
value as its necessary form of appearance. In its most developed form,
value acquires independent existence as money and the expression
of value in the particular commodity acting as money becomes de-
termined as price. The opposition inherent in the commodity is thus
externalized through the doubling of the commodity-form into or-
dinary commodities and money. The power of direct exchangeabil-
ity of commodities negates itself as such to become affirmed as a social
power monopolized by the money-form.
It is in the course of the synthetic movement of this development,
when seen from the point of view of its qualitative content, that the
answer to the “why” questions which the analytic stage was impotent
to provide is given. In other words, it is the development of the ex-
pression of value that unfolds the explanation as to why the objecti-
fication of the abstract character of privately performed labor takes
the social form of value or, to put it differently, why private labor is
value-producing.
In a nutshell, the issue comes down to the fact that it is only the
expression of value that progressively reveals to us the problem that
the commodity-form of the product of labor is meant to solve. We
are referring to the mediation in the establishment of the unity of
social labor when performed in a private and independent manner.
And since this unity becomes condensed in the money-form, it is
the unfolding of its determinations, synthesized in the peculiarities
of the equivalent-form and derived from its general determination
COMMODITY-FORM AND DIALECTICAL METHOD 311

as the form of immediate exchangeability, that provides the answer

to the question as to why private labor must produce value.
As the other side of its two-step analytic discovery, the synthetic
ideal reproduction of the determinations of the value-form comprises
two aspects, each one respectively corresponding to the second and
third peculiarities of the equivalent form. The first one, whereby the
concrete labor that produces the particular commodity acting as
general equivalent becomes the form of manifestation of the general
character of human labor, shows, precisely, why that material expen-
diture of labor-power has to act as the social form of labor, i.e., why
the abstract character of labor is the substance of value. The second
one, whereby the private labor that produces the equivalent commod-
ity becomes the immediate incarnation of directly social labor, in turn
makes it evident why private labor must produce value at all.
In effect, through the general expression of value, all commodi-
ties relate to each other as possessing an identical social essence as
exchangeable things in the same magnitude. In other words, albeit
in a mediated form that reflects their social form of value as the im-
mediate attribute of the general equivalent, their social relation of
general exchangeability achieves its unity. But, since they are only
values as expressions of the same common social substance, i.e., ab-
stract labor, the unity of the expression of value puts us before the
unity of undifferentiated human labor. In determining the concrete
labor that produced the equivalent as the immediate mode of appear-
ance of abstract human labor, now the social relation between com-
modities itself makes plain that the different concrete labors that
produced them are but different ways in which the total labor-power
of society has been expended. Those varied useful labors now show
themselves to be what they actually are: differentiations of the expen-
diture of human labor-power or determinate modes in which the
human body has been productively exerted. In this “roundabout way,”
as Marx puts it, the development of exchange-value confronts us with
the generic problem that any society must confront, namely, the so-
cial regulation of the differentiation of human labor, which “is capable of
receiving each and every determination . . . but is undetermined just
in and for itself ” (Marx, 1976b, 20), and which is necessary for the
reproduction of human life. The exposition of the dialectical analy-
sis of the commodity had already discovered that a commodity-
producing society presupposed an extended division of labor. Now
312 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

we can see that the materialized social relation itself — the value-form
— affirms itself as the mediator in the articulation of that division of labor,
i.e., in establishing the relation between different labors as organic
specifications of human labor in general.

As values the commodities are expressions of the same unity, of abstract human
labour. In the form of exchange value they appear to one another as values
and relate themselves to one another as values. They thereby relate themselves
at the same time to abstract labour as their common social substance. Their
social relationship consists exclusively in counting with respect to one another
as expressions of this social substance of theirs which differs only quantita-
tively, but which is qualitatively equal and hence replaceable and inter-
changeable with one another. . . . It is only the kind of thing that can turn
mere objects of use into commodities and hence set into a social rapport. But
this is just what value is. The form in which the commodities count to one
another as values — as coagulations of human labour — is consequently their
social form. (Marx, 1976b, 28–29; italics in original.)

The necessity of abstract labor as the substance of value thus becomes

finally unfolded. Abstract labor is the substance of value not because
a logical argument says that it is the common property of commodi-
ties we were searching for in the name of sound principles of logic.
It becomes determined as the substance of value because in reality
value is the objectified social form that mediates the organization of
that purely material expenditure of the human body into its differ-
ent concrete forms across society. This being what the value-form
mediates, what else could be represented in that objectified form?
On the other hand, abstract labor does not cease to be a generic
material form because of this determination as the substance of value.
Hence, as stated above, the determination of labor as abstract labor
is not the reason behind its existence as value-producing. What is
specific to capitalist society is that this purely material form negates
itself as simply such to become affirmed as the producer of the (ob-
jectified) general social relation (Iñigo Carrera, 2003, 301). Once
objectified, the generic materiality of the abstract character of labor plays
a particular social role in the process of social metabolism by being
represented as the social objectivity of value.

The commodities’ social form is their relationship to one another as equal

labour; hence — since the equality of toto coelo [utterly] different labours can
COMMODITY-FORM AND DIALECTICAL METHOD 313

only consist in an abstraction from their inequality — their relationship to one

another as human labour in general: expenditures of human labour power,
which is what all human labours — whatever their content or mode of
operation — actually are. In each social form of labour, the labours of dif-
ferent individuals are related to one another as human labours too, but in
this case this relating itself counts as the specifically social form of the labours.
(Marx, 1976b, 32; italics in original.)

To recapitulate, thus far we have discussed how the development of

the expression of value and, in particular, the unfolding of the de-
terminations of the second peculiarity of the equivalent-form, con-
tains the account of the reason why abstract labor is the substance of
value. What still needs to be answered is why abstract labor is the sub-
stance of value. In other words, we have to see why human productive
activity becomes determined in capitalist society as value-producing,
the second step in the synthetic movement referred to above.
In the same way the third peculiarity of the equivalent immedi-
ately follows from the second one, so does the answer to this ques-
tion follow from the previous one. In effect, as the social incarnation
of human labor in general, the concrete labor that produces the
equivalent acquires in its immediacy the form of equality with respect
to the other concrete useful labors. In this form of immediate iden-
tity with every other concrete labor, the labor that materializes in the
general equivalent is manifested as immediately social, while the useful
labors producing the rest of commodities cannot manifest this social
character in their immediacy. Thus the expression of value in the form
of exchange-value puts before us the reason why the organization of
the division of labor must necessarily be mediated in this reified form
or, what is the same, why commodity-producing labor is essentially
value-producing. Although materially dependent upon one another
as part of the “primordial system of the division of labor,” this irre-
ducibly social character of private labors is not immediately manifested
when they are actually objectified in the direct process of production.
Hence, this necessary social articulation of private labors is realized
through the mediation of the exchange of the products of private labor
as commodities. Only at that moment is it revealed whether the ex-
penditure of the portion of social labor which each producer personi-
fies is socially useful. This is the reason why the social character of the
privately performed individual productive activities is specifically rep-
314 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

resented as a determinate objective attribute of the products of labor:

the form of their general exchangeability or their value-form. The
basis of this reified social mediation thus resides in the fact that the
unity of social labor is manifested, as Marx puts it in the Grundrisse,
only post festum, through the exchange of the products of labor (Marx,
1993, 172). Furthermore, the unity of social labor thus becomes so-
cially represented in the form of the particular private product that
the rest of commodities separate as their general equivalent and which
eventually ossifies in the money-form. In tracing the genesis of the
latter through the ideal reproduction of the expression of value, the
synthetic stage of the dialectical exposition thereby positively unfolds
the determinations of that which the analytic process could only point
out: that the value-form of the product of labor is the materialized
social relation of human beings and, therefore, the social subject of
the form of the social process of production of human-life.22

Conclusion

In this paper, I have attempted to contribute to the growing lit-

erature on the dialectical structure of Marx’s critique of political
economy by bringing out often-overlooked aspects of his argument
in Chapter 1 of Capital. First, by briefly highlighting the distinction
between Marx’s view of science as the “ideal reproduction of the real
life of the subject matter” and the formalism characterizing main-
stream methodological approaches, I established the precise nature
of Marx’s discussion of abstract labor as the substance of value which,
I argued, does not involve a purely deductive process of logical proof.
Second, the paper brought out the respective roles and signifi-
cance of the stages of analysis and synthesis in the dialectical presen-
tation and, in addition, addressed the question of the specific form of
the analytical process in the dialectical method. I believe this latter
point in particular has not been sufficiently addressed in the special-

22 Hence, the fetishism of the commodity-form could be said to be formal inasmuch as it

only pertains to the form of the process of social metabolism, its content remaining the
production of use-values and, hence, of human life. At the level of the capital-form the
fetishism becomes substantive because it refers not only to the form of the human life-
process but also to its content. As an attribute of capital, the alienated content of social
reproduction becomes determined as the production of surplus-value, with the produc-
tion of use-values, hence human life itself, as the unconscious result of its autonomized
movement.
COMMODITY-FORM AND DIALECTICAL METHOD 315

ized literature. Still, I hope to have demonstrated that it is essential

to grasp why many of the objections to the initial steps of Marx’s ar-
gument are simply misplaced and based on a reading that sees the
analytical movement unfolded in those pages through the lenses of
formal–logical methodologies. These general methodological insights
were then utilized to clarify the determinate place in Chapter 1 of
Capital where the unfolding of the explanation of the determinations
of privately performed abstract labor as the substance of value is to be found.
This is not in the first two sections of Chapter 1, as most critics of Marx
have tended to assume. But neither is it in section four on commodity-
fetishism, as many Marxists (perhaps influenced by Rubin) usually
think. As argued in this paper, the synthetic unfolding of the reason why
the abstract character of private labor constitutes the substance of value
can be found in section 3, where Marx presents the formal development
of the expression of value into the money-form.
In sum, we can now appreciate that the dialectical “minutiae”
involved in the uncovering of the determinations of the commodity-
form have far-reaching theoretical implications for the comprehen-
sion of the first steps of the critique of political economy.

Department of Sociology
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
United Kingdom
[email protected]

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