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value. Second, he added to the distinction between use- and exchange-value,
the distinction between abstract and concrete labor. Third, he hit upon the
idea that workers were selling not their labor but their labor power to em–
ployers . Fourth, he wanted to prove that the very phenomenon of exchange
value was historical and transitory, and that we should anticipate a society
which would do away with it entirely (and, consequently, eliminate money).
All these changes could not transform the labor theory of value into an
explanatory theory of prices . However, this was not their real purpose. Their
contribution lay in the description of the phenomenon of exploitation as
residing not simply in the failure of workers to get the full value of what they
had produced (since they could not get it, as Marx admitted and as common
sense suggested, even in the most perfect Communist society), but in that the
workers ' human qualities, expended in the labor process, were taken from
them in the form of abstract exchange value which is subjected to its own
anonymous laws on the market . What mattered was the fact that producers
were unable
to
control their products which, as carriers of the exchange value,
turned against them in the form of quasi-natural catastrophic powers. And
the description of this phenomenon is nothing else but an extension and
specification of the theory of alienation developed by Marx in the early forties
and inherited from old young Hegelians. The reading of the
Grundrisse
is
perfectly convincing on this point. If we conceive of the theory of value as a
scientific explanation of the phenomenon of exchange, its epistemological
status will appear fairly similar to that of the Phlogiston theory in seventeenth–
century chemistry : a search for a substance or a principle which is supposed to
explain a number of empirical phenomena but
is
known only as something
that manifests itself in these phenomena and lacks any explanatory or pre–
dictive force . The same theory may be understood, on the other hand, as a
philosophical attempt
to
identify and
to
reveal a very significant side of social
life: the domination of real individuals by socially produced abstractions. Not
unlike other global constructions in the philosophy of history, such a theory is
irrefutable, unprovable, and nonpredictive, and, consequently,
it
cannot be
conceived ofas a part ofscience in the historically shaped meaning of this term
unless, as some Marxists do, we depart from this meaning and produce
another concept ofscience, purposely designed to present the work ofMarx as
the science par excellence . Yet there are no reasons, except for arbitrary
decisions of rigorously empiricist philosophers, to consider nonscientific
constructions, particularly in the philosophy ofhistory , meaningless or devoid
of cultural worth. There is nothing scandalous or regrettable in our desire to
grasp the' 'global" meaning of the world , incapable though we are of doing
this with conceptual instruments that are scientifically reliable.
I do realize that , while not alone, I am in an insignificant minority in
