> Not surprised to discover Angelus defending Jappe
> who wrote a very fine book
> on Debord.
I don't know about "defending" Jappe. There are a lot of points where I don't agree with the Wertkritiker. Their theory of crisis does not make much sense to me, for one thing.
Their argument is based upon the following passage from the Grundrisse:
"As soon as labour in its immediate form has ceased to be the great source of wealth, labor time ceases and must cease to be its measure and therefore exchange value of use value. The surplus labour of the masses has ceased to be the condition for the development of the general powers of the human mind. As a result, production based upon exchange value collapses."
In Capital, the reduction of the labor substance of value is the foundation of the production of relative surplus value. So it seems dodgy to me to derive a sort of automatic breakdown of capitalism from this passage.
> What is meant by Marx's empirical work?
I assume they mean his immediately political work, the texts written concerning strategic debates within the First International, etc.
> always obsolete--his value
> theory is obsolete
Well, this is the one thing, according to them, that is definitely *not* obsolete. Value and abstract labor are the central categories of capitalist society, so they are only obsolete when capitalism ceases to exist.
> Is this the old Polanyian argument that pre
> capitalist economies are
> embedded in society while capitalist economies are
> autonomous, governed by a
> strictly economic logic?
Very similar, yes. There are several sympathetic references to Polanyi in the book, and Jappe argues that Polanyi's anti-Marxism is due to a misunderstanding of what Marx was getting at.
> Also, the so called self expansion of value can find
> barriers in the
> material means of production in which capital value
> has already been sunk.
I'm not 100% certain what you are saying here, but if I do understand you correctly, I think I agree. Do you mean the logical limitlessness of value expansion runs up against real, physical limits? I agree. This is why capitalism is an ecologically catastrophic system. Elmar Altvater in several books has been developing a sort of Marxian ecology along these lines.
> So is the argument here that capital misunderstands
> itself as a pure
> abstraction or that it is in fact a pure
> abstraction.
It is an abstraction with material force, because the whole of society is subsumed to the logic of the commodity.
> Angelus, I did not find this review very helpful. It
> seemed to be speaking
> to people already in the know.
Yes, it is not a great review, I was just excited to see that the book was being reviewed outside of Germany.
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