Jean-François Gava

This paper takes place inside the theoretical frame restored after that the false secular Bortkiewicz-debate around the transformation problem has been solved in the years 1990 and whose flaw had not been identified for ages by most of Marxist economists, accepting its double accountancy of prices’ in money prices and workhours “prices”. Beyond the re-identification of finite values and prices, this paper aims at showing that, going back to a concept of value as an infinite working process which unifies money, time and work, machinery not only devoids every particular work of any peculiarity, but also its time, reduced to the mechanical clock movement. Once such spatialization of time occurs, succession dominates duration instead of the other way round. Time is not the time of any living movement any longer, but merely corresponds to locomotion. Hence, money as a mathematical real, is not neither quantity of anything, but pure number. Money and clock time made identical as empty numbers identify into value with devoiced work, reduced to mere, or pure, unqualified effort.work becomes real abstraction by making the real still more adequate to itself, i.e., work still simpler abstract work induces simple work.

We would like here to contribute to lower the fracture between orthodox Marxism and heterodox Marxism, which means grosso modo: between historical materialism and the critique of value. There, of course, would be for the former a high price to pay, that of an important redefinition of the philosophy of history. But the latter also should recognize that a philosophy of history is an inseparable presupposition of Wertkritik, that one has long, among heterodox Marxists, thought capable of prancing autonomously from the former.

Modern barbarity will soon get rid of the human species unless a new form of violence is found able to compete with the state, without turning into a new form a state. This new form is authoritative, legitimate intimidation. But what are the conditions to speak out authoritatively? Are they not distinctive state conditions? Moreover, does authority lie in the form of discourse? If not, because consentment has superseded mere submission, which are the authoritative sources of discourse which, though neither overtly nor primarily conflicting with the state, nor with corporations, could somehow not completely coincide with the interests of it and even work against it, though like it? This paper examines these questions.