development process – creates an entire system of new relationships, which is why man
must regain control of the means of production (his or her own thinking or acting) for him- or herself and not accept that imposed by external actors such as privately-held companies or the
state.
Implications for Philosophy
Returning to the point at which we started, with Marx’s thoughts underpinning The German Ideology, it is clear how the division of labor occurs from the ‘moment when a division of material and mental labor appears.’48 It is the precise moment when the subject-object dichotomy is created — namely, when the subjective recognition of objective existence happens though a person has yet to realize its essential unity. In this sense, Marx and Hegel agree: a thing or entity can only realize itself by actualizing itself. However, for Marx but not for Hegel, this is not a simple and singular or essential movement. Rather it is a socially created movement that will come to recognize its internal unity through an objective reality. This recognition and reconciliation, as pointed out by Althusser, was never formalized before: that is, the attempt to make various parts align into a non-given or yet to be defined whole — the ‘overdetermined’ whole — had never been formalized before.
As Althusser notes: “the whole of the Hegelian dialectic is here, that is, it is completely dependent upon the radical presupposition of a simple original unity which develops within itself by virtue of its negativity, and throughout its development ever restores the original simplicity and unity in an ever more ‘concrete’ totality.”49 And yet, as Althusser correctly concluded, Marx deviated from Hegel and his thought when he “breaks with the theoretical presuppositions of an original simple unity.”50
This understanding, when combined with what we have just learned, points to the necessity for
a Value (Labor/Capital) Relation, because Value
is the only concept that can incorporate the entire process as process, as a collection of things being created and creating other things in relation to one another. That is why the Value Relation itself must be regarded as a process that encapsulates the entire movement from Labor to Capital and even beyond to general surplus value, relative surplus value, and its final dismissal as a valid means for valuing anything. It is also why Marx could claim in The Grundrisse first that capital is ‘unhistorical’ and second it is ‘not a simple relation, but a process.’51
It is also how a person can see the entire theory coming together in what Marx refers to as the ‘dazzling money-form.’ The definitive synthesis of his theory was labor time, producing both use-value (the physical component of the man or hand-made ceramic pot) and exchange-value (the metaphysical concept defining the nature of man or hand-made ceramic pot, inherent or imposed). As labor (the more general term for labor time, the time labor itself is expended on any product) was formalized, it became the universal for exchange. It was only through this means commodities could be exchanged for other commodities (C-C) or for money (C-M),
ultimately creating a framework where money
alone, as the formal embodiment of labor time, could be exchanged for other commodities (M-C). Money (M) thus becomes the more fully expressed general form of labor (C-M-C to
The theory of labor is the basis of Marx’s Theory of Value; and as all things are products of labor (bundles of energy to be exchanged), labor/energy is Value itself, the essential nature of all things both physical and metaphysical.
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