Exploring Marx’s Capital
Philosophical, Economic and
Political Dimensions

Jacques Bidet
Translated by
David Fernbach
Foreword to the English Edition by
Alex Callinicos


LEIDEN • BOSTON
2007

Contents
Foreword to the English Translation of Jacques Bidet’s
Que faire du ‘Capital’? by ALEX CALLINICOS ............................................ ix
Author’s Preface to the English Edition .................................................. xvii
Introduction .................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 1
Preliminary Methodological Remarks ...................................................... 5
1. Pathways: 1857 to 1875 .............................................................................. 5
2. The history of science perspective ................................................................ 8
3. The perspective of reconstruction of the system ........................................ 9
Chapter 2
Value as Quantity .......................................................................................... 11
1. Constructing a homogeneous economic space: a Marxian project
that breaks with political economy .............................................................. 12
2. Paralogisms of Marx the measurer ............................................................ 14
3. Capital: the categories of measurement undermine the theorisation
of the substance to be measured .................................................................. 16
4. In what sense does more productive labour produce more value?
The articulation of structure and dynamic ................................................ 20
5. Skilled labour as a zone of paralogism ........................................................ 21
6. Intensity: closure and fracture of the quantitative space ............................ 30
Conclusion .................................................................................................... 35
Chapter 3
Value as Sociopolitical Concept .................................................................. 37
1. Value as expenditure .................................................................................... 38
2. ‘Transformation of expenditure into consumption of labour-power’ .......... 45
3. Money and labour-value constitute one and the same point of
rupture between Marx and Ricardo ............................................................ 52
4. Value and capital as semi-concepts ............................................................ 56
5. Value and socialisation of labour: Marx’s inconsistent socialism ............ 62
6. Labour-value and the state .......................................................................... 67
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 70
Chapter 4
Value and Price of Labour-Power .............................................................. 74
1. A non-normative problematic of the norm ................................................ 77
2. Movements of value and movements of price ............................................ 84
3. The non-functionalist character of the system: its ‘openness’ .................. 91
4. A hierarchy of values of labour-power? ...................................................... 94
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 99
Chapter 5
Relations of Production and Class Relations ........................................ 103
1. Productive and unproductive labour .......................................................... 104
2. Production and social classes ...................................................................... 123
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 129
Chapter 6
The Start of the Exposition and Its Development .................................. 132
1. The question of the initial moment of Capital .......................................... 133
2. The ‘transition to capital’ .......................................................................... 153
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 166
Chapter 7
The Method of Exposition and the Hegelian Heritage .......................... 169
1. On the method of exposition of Capital .................................................... 170
2. Hegel, an epistemological support/obstacle ................................................ 183
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 193
Chapter 8
The Theorisation of the Ideological in Capital ...................................... 196
1. The place of everyday consciousness: Volume 3 ........................................ 197
2. The uncertainties in Marx’s exposition ...................................................... 209
3. The ‘raisons d’être’ of the form of appearance (in Volume One) .............. 217
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 228
Chapter 9
The Theory of the Value-Form .................................................................... 231
1. Why the historical or logico-historical interpretation cannot
be relevant .................................................................................................... 232
2. The notion of form or expression of value, as distinct from the
notion of relative value .............................................................................. 235
3. Epistemological history of Chapter 1, Section 3 ........................................ 244
4. What dialectic of the form of value? .......................................................... 250
5. The expression of value ‘in use-value’ ...................................................... 255
6. Fetishism, a structural category of the ideology of commodity
production .................................................................................................... 260
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 269
Chapter 10
The Economy in General and Historical Materialism .......................... 272
1. The various generalities that Capital presupposes .................................... 273
2. Labour-value in pure economics and in historical materialism ................ 288
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 304
General Conclusions .................................................................................... 307
References ...................................................................................................... 319