Jappe's books is a fine introduction to the "Wertkritik" of the Krisis and Exit! groups. Hopefully an English translation will be forthcoming. I was surprised to find this review of it.
http://www.newsandletters.org/Issues/2006/Aug-Sept/Jappe_Aug-Sept_06.htm
"Jappe says that it is of primary importance today to make use of Marx's work because it criticizes the basic categories of capitalist society and is not simply concerned with distribution. Nor did Marx envision applying his theory of value to non-capitalist societies.
He discerns two tendencies in Marx. One is a so-called exoteric Marx, whom he sees as a theoretician of modernization, a dissident of political liberalism and a protagonist of the Enlightenment who wanted to perfect industrial labor society under the guidance of the proletariat. The other is a so-called esoteric Marx, who in his difficult-to-understand criticism of value production went beyond capitalist civilization. According to Jappe, only this second side of Marx can provide a fundamental comprehension of present-day reality and enable us to trace out its most remote roots.
He writes: "This criticism of the center of modernity is nowadays more topical than it was in Marx's lifetime....To bring this aspect of Marx's criticism-value criticism-to the fore...it is sufficient to read the texts [of Marx] intently, although nearly no one did that for more than 100 years." On the other hand, Jappe considers most of Marx's empirical work " obsolete" for our times. Jappe makes use of the notion that Marx conceived of abstract labor and the value created by it not as material and concrete entities but as societal abstractions. Jappe then introduces the notion "real abstraction," which he defines as "societal reality, an abstraction, which becomes reality." Although "where the circulation of goods has been mediated by money, the abstraction has become real," he emphasizes that this real abstraction takes place in the sphere of production. That is because "money only makes possible the expression of [value], but it is not its creator."
He differs here from the views of Alfred Sohn-Rethel, who situated real abstraction only in the sphere of circulation. Jappe argues that abstract labor, which creates value, dominates and determines all spheres of life in capitalist society: "In reality it is only indirectly, through the self-expansion of value, that the demands of material production in capitalist society are victorious over all social, aesthetic, religious or ethnic points of view." Things are very different in pre-capitalist societies, where "material production could be sacrificed to such considerations." In a society based on commodity production the concreteness of things is submitted to this abstraction of value as a result of abstract labor. One of the most important consequences of this is the destructive forces that it produces in capitalist society. Jappe writes of the "destructive potential" of capitalist society-destructive because what matters to it is only the capacity to transform [things into] money. The ecological crisis is one thing he has in mind.
He argues that the commodity-just like value, money and abstract labor-is a fetishistic category because abstract labor creates the value of any commodity. Jappe refers to Capital, where Marx writes: "As the foregoing analysis has already demonstrated, this fetishism of the world of commodities arises from the peculiar social character of the labor which produces them."
Jappe stresses that Marx conceived of fetishism not only as a mistaken conception of reality but also as an "inversion of reality itself" and he illustrates this with a passage from Capital in which Marx says: "To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labors appears as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material [dinglich] relations between persons and social relations between things." In his method of analysis Jappe starts with the logic of value and not with surface phenomena-like the actions of social actors or the observable classes and their conflicts in everyday life. These he sees as deduced forms, consequences of the logic of value. We do not need to be surprised about that, he writes, because in a fetishistic society there is an inversion of concrete and abstract, of human beings and means, of subject and object."
[full article at URL above]
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