Sohn-Rethel’s great idea was to ‘socialise’ Kant’s transcendental subject by combining it with Marx’s commodity-form. In so doing, he took on three challenges simultaneously: a) the timeless validity of modern natural science; b) the social genesis of empirically pure forms of cognition; and c) socialisation occurring through a purely social synthesis. However, Sohn-Rethel construed Marx’s value-form analysis as an empirical exchange of commodities and held that such exchange performs a real abstraction – in this way, he laboured under the very (...) semblance that money engenders at the surface of society by virtue of its function qua means of exchange. This semblance can be rendered transparent by, on the one hand, explaining value in terms of capitalist valorisation rather than as a product of abstraction, and, on the other, developing money as the measure and form of this valorisation. (shrink)

In this Part 1, Material Conditions, I look at the changing material conditions of capital in the most labour-intensive manufacturing sectors in world production. I argue that these changes are leading to a waning in monopsony power. The paper introduces a universal logic that governs competition and reshapes the chain around the question of monopsony in the global supply chain. Put simply, deregulation produces high degrees of monopsony power, increasing the value share for the lead firm. This intensifies competition, exerts (...) downward pressure, and winnows the number of suppliers able to compete. The result is a supplier consolidation. Consolidation increases the surviving suppliers’ share of value, which expands access to finance, facilitates self-investment, and raises entry barriers. In Part 2, Subjective Agency, I look at how this leads to the emergence of market spatial inflexibility, which has given labour new openings by increasingly their disruptive power. (shrink)

My article investigates Marx’s dissertation from the perspective of the categories of Hegelian logic employed in the writings on the critique of political economy and, in particular, in the analysis of the value-form (Wertform) in Capital. The aim of my contribution is to show how Marx’s early writing is not intended as a mere ‘exercice encore scolaire’ (Althusser), but as the first documented confrontation with Hegel’s logic. Marx’s early writing displays a moment of elaboration and acquisition of Hegel’s method. I (...) argue that the Epicurean atom represents a developing contradiction, and that the dissertation follows a precise Darstellung, which extends from the metaphysical and physical principle to the abstract subjectivity of Epicurean atomism. (shrink)