The Adventures of the Commodity: For a Critique of Value

Anselm Jappe

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2023. 232 pp., £85.00 hb
ISBN 9781839763465

Reviewed by Pedro H. J. Nardelli
About the reviewer
Pedro H. J. Nardelli is Full Professor at Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology, Finland,


In the late 1980s, a few critical theorists from Germany created a journal called Krisis: Kritik der Warengesellschaft, proposing a different reading of Marx’s mature works to build a radical critique of capitalist society. Robert Kurz, Roswitha Scholz, Ernst Lohoff and Claus Peter Ortlieb are probably the most known names. After internal disagreements, the group split in 2004, giving origin to another journal called Exit!. Their extensive writings have been mostly published in German, while many of them have been translated to other languages like Portuguese. Yet somehow, surprisingly, not many of their writings are available in English. Anselm Jappe’s The Adventures of the Commodity helps to fill this gap for the anglophone world as this book (first published in French in 2003) can be read as systematic presentation of the main theoretical contributions of this strand of Marxism.

In the preface prepared for this edition, Jappe justifies the importance of the book after the twenty years of its initial publication: as we still live in a capitalist society, the critique of its basic categories and of its fetishist social dynamic emerging therefrom is still relevant. By dealing with the essential attributes of capitalist society, ‘the critique of value’ is claimed to offer both a solid ground to assess the recurrent waves of crises in capitalism as well as a fixed point against positions that claim to be anti-capitalist but cannot go against and beyond capital’s fundamental categories like (abstract) labour, money and the commodity.

The introductory chapter presents the background of the book in its day: struggles against globalization and recurrent stock market instabilities mostly in developing countries. Like today, most explanations (from the far left to the far right) are uncapable of providing a robust critique; they lack a conceptualization of the social totality. Following Marx’s Capital, Jappe indicates that the analysis must start with the commodity because it is the ‘germ cell’ of capitalist society, and thus, contains in such a simple form the main contradictions of the more developed, complex forms that are specific of the totality of this mode of production. Another important point advanced in the introduction is the twofold character of the late works of Marx, existing one exoteric Marx and another esoteric Marx. The former is ‘the theoretician of modernization, the “dissident of liberalism” (Kurz), a representative of the Enlightenment who wanted to perfect industrial working society under proletarian leadership.’ (5) The latter is the one who critically assesses the basic categories of capital, starting from the commodity form. This distinction highlights the existing differences of Marx’s own historical time, in his interventions in the emerging workers’ movement and in his in-depth analysis of the logics of capital. In this case, Jappe argues that the exoteric Marx was important, but his main line of thought dated. Jappe then defends the understudied esoteric Marx as the one whose validity perseveres. Hence the critique of value to be presented in the book is posed in stark contrast with traditional Marxism, but similar to few other Marxist authors that have centred their work from the value form and the critique of the basic categories of Capital.

The first chapter deals with the commodity and its dual nature (13): use-value and value. Jappe reviews the first sections of Marx’s Capital (the second German edition) which contains an explanation of the commodity as a social relation that enables things produced by humans in specific processes to be exchanged. The secret is that commodities of different types, when exchanged, are equivalent, that is, they have the same value in a ratio proportional to the socially necessary labour time for their particular production (with the specific techniques available). Value then has a social form of exchange of equivalence, measured in ratios of labour time. As in Marx, Jappe stresses that the labour measured by time is abstract labour, with ‘abstract’ referring to the lack of concrete determinations in the specific characteristic of the actual labour process to produce different useful things (use-values). Through this operation, the human labour performed in capitalist society is then represented in value form and then constitutes the money form as a ‘real abstraction.’ This is claimed as the fetish that organizes capitalist society, which is not just a collective fantasy, but indeed the material way that social relations are determined and formed. In contrast to interpretations that posit value as embodied labour, Jappe contends that value defines an ontological domain through universal abstractions, which in turn are in contradiction with concrete reality. These tensions between the abstract and the concrete is claimed to be the most important feature of capitalist society, already present in its most elementary form: the commodity. This is how Marx moves from the C-M-C circuit towards the capitalist M-C-M´, and thus defines a mode of production that abstract labour requires to be materially accumulated as abstract wealth (materialized as money). This in turn demands more and more living labour so that capital, as self-valorising value (i.e. money that creates more money), can be sustained ad infinitum. But this is impossible or, following Marx, this mode of production is ‘mad.’

Chapter two traverses another controversial topic: labour as a specific capitalist phenomenon. Jappe first reminds us that labour-power is the only commodity that can create value while producing more value than it is worth. Rereading Marx, this phenomenon only occurs because the capitalist acquires the labour-power of the worker, which is paid with its value (i.e. the cost of its reproduction, which may include its family, in a specific place and time). However, while capitalists buy the labour-power for its true value, they materially receive more as the labour-power is usually exchanged for periods of time. The time that is above the period associated with value of labour-power is the origin of surplus value. This fact brings theoretical and practical challenges. Jappe tells us that with orthodox Marxism and other related strands, the focus of both theory and practice is placed on the class struggle between labour and capital. Examples of workers’ unions in the present but also in the past which struggle for more rights (i.e. to become fairly integrated within bourgeois society) offer a typical example of an instrumental use of Marx’s Capital to support fairer wages or shorter working days, as well as civil rights. More radical readings aim at the elimination of capitalists but keeping the workers as workers, and in this case, planning would be the way to rationally organize the division of labour. Jappe’s radical critique targets the fundamental category of labour, as represented in value and then in money, such that ‘[i]t is only in capitalism that labour as such has become the synthesizing principle of society.’ (75). Convincingly, the author vindicates abstract labour not only as capitalist but also as having an ontological dimension; labour is as such a particular activity outside other social practices and relations (in contrast to other modes of production) and specific to capitalist society. This implies that a Marxist theory, constructed upon the esoteric Marx, must criticize labour, rather than defend labour against capital.

Chapter three synthesizes the first two in a profound analysis to relate value theory and the crises theory in Marx. The core of the argument is that the dynamics of the capital as self-valorising value forms a tautological process, where individual capitalists compete among themselves, aiming at higher profits. This creates a tendency to increase the share of fixed capital in comparison to variable capital (i.e. living labour, which worth reminding is the only source of value and surplus value). To maintain the mass of profits with a tendency of decreasing prices, more and more commodities need to be produced. This leads to a systemic, unavoidable tendency that labour, which is the basis of value, is pushed out of the production process. In thought-provoking pages, Jappe maintains that value ceases to be a trustworthy representation insofar as value-productive living labour significantly decreases its relevance at the social level. At the same time, the value form as the totalizing bond of capitalist society maintains itself: ‘Far from disappearing, the value form, although “objectively” superseded, increasingly enters into collision with the material content it helps to create.’ (85) From this standpoint, Jappe marks a position in still open controversies within Marxist circles, namely the validity of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as indication of a final crisis of capitalism, the ecological limits of capitalist mode of production, the question of unproductive labour, the role of democratization, the growth of the ‘service sector’ and the importance of credit and fictitious capital. It is a dense chapter that touches very important points, illustrating the alleged pessimism of the critique of value, whose theorists defend the thesis that capitalist society has entered a terminal crisis with logical, fundamental limits since the seventies.

Jappe proceeds to discuss the commodity as a historical phenomenon in different societies and as the fetishized, metaphysical mode of organization of capitalist society. Following a formal analysis based on Hegelian logic, the author contends that the simple commodity relation already contains its further development in more complex forms, moving from the abstract to the concrete, where the more complex forms are derived from the internal contradictions of simpler forms. Remarkable here is the argument that ‘capitalism is realized metaphysics, the true realism of concepts dreamed of by the scholastics.’ In this case, the strength of the esoteric Marx is that the main categories of the capitalist mode of production are indeed idealist, yet ‘constitute an appropriate description of modern society’ (107) because they are idealistic categories. Jappe therewith demonstrates that incipient commodity exchanges within history are not the same under capitalism, yet have always contained the latent potential to become it. It is worth mentioning that many critiques see this ‘logical determinism’ as problematic, but Jappe rightly argues that capitalism as a mode of production is not the necessity of a teleological historical process. However, once it emerged and dominated social relations through its abstractions, the logic of the commodity will indeed act as developmental ‘iron’ laws. Yet for all this, capitalism is not eternal, and the critique of value assesses that for more than fifty years, value has entered a terminal crisis.

Chapter five focuses on forms of fetishism found in other societies, further reinforcing the specifics of the commodity form and value in capitalist society, but also indicating its similarities with other forms in primitive social organizations based on sacred symbolism. The concluding parts of the book serve to indicate the materiality of social organizations not based on labour, commodity and value (and markets). Moreover, Jappe criticizes leftist programs as reformist at best, and the failure of Marxists from the past and the present to move beyond labour. In an argument not completely dissimilar to Althusser’s aleatory materialism, Jappe states clearly that socialism or communism is not the necessary outcome of the end of capitalism. More probable is a generalized barbarism with few isolated islands of well-being. On the other hand, the future after capitalism is not by any means already defined, and this offers the possibility of another mode of production: ‘It is therefore well worth reassessing Aristotle’s idea of the “good life” as the real purpose of society, for such an idea is diametrically opposite to the service of the fetish-god of money.’ (165).

In summary, the English translation of The Adventures of the Commodity provides a necessary introduction to the critique of value for the anglophone world, a correct assessment of the complex dynamics of capitalist society at its most fundamental level. The logical approach offers a reliable means of diagnosing current tendencies in a society constrained by certain logical perimeters imposed by the capitalist mode of production. While the use of some Hegelian logic may challenge readers unfamiliar with it, the line of thought systematized by Jappe seems necessary as an analytical tool for understanding our social reality.

28 June 2024


URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21566_the-adventures-of-the-commodity-for-a-critique-of-value-by-anselm-jappe-reviewed-by-pedro-h-j-nardelli/