(I) The logic of money

Engster and Russell say that I ‘underestimate’ the question of quantification. This was not intended; to the contrary I stress that this category is central to the theory of value. Value does not come in kinds but in amounts (Spectre: 81). However, this problem goes very deep. So I now sketch my initial arguments telegraphically, in order to bring out its importance.

Exchange imposes an ‘infinitely negative judgement’ on commodities, which absents all given material qualities. Each is left then simply as One, an absolute singularity, although they are given together in the field of exchange. Insofar as the One is present there, it is characterisable simply as its own ‘absence’, yet, since this absence results from the practical determinate negation of all predication, it is nonetheless present. What is there is thus the presence of absence. This ‘Dasein’ (see my discussion in Spectre: 74), however, is an indeterminate Being (as when one senses ‘a Presence’ without being able to say what is present).

How can such a Being acquire any determinacy? This arises because ex hypothesi, in exchange, every One is related to other such Ones. Since the One and the Other are, simply as exchangeables, empty of internal determination they are indiscernible, thus identifiable. Yet, in virtue of the ineliminable distance established in the polar relation of exchange, they are numerically different. The One becomes determinate as other than its other, albeit that the limit marking them off is merely otherness as such. As indiscernible they suffer ‘attraction’ to the point at which they could become just one One. This attraction is blocked insofar as they suffer ‘repulsion’ consequent on their numerical difference. Exchangeables exist as such only in this unity of identity and difference.

Since exchangeables are simply Ones their determinate relations cannot be mediated qualitatively; it is purely numerical. ‘I’ll give you six of these for three of those’ is the expression of an offer for exchange. The only thing uniting commodities at this level of abstraction is their common quality … of quantity! In pro rata exchange what so much of one commodity ‘amounts to’ is given in a certain amount of another commodity. Thus it gains a measure of itself in something other than itself. This is its ‘exchange-value’. But there are numerous other commodities; so it seems there are present a whole series of measure relations, that is to say, of exchange-values.

This is as far as the logic of Being takes us. The transition to Essence is very subtle. It arises if we take seriously the possibility that behind the series of exchange-values there is value as such, indifferent to all these putative measuring rods. To cut a long story short, this supposition is grounded only when the money form of value, in its function as unique universal equivalent, presents to commodities value in autonomous shape, therewith making of the commodity manifold ‘one One’, with a common centre of attraction in money.

What now of money’s function as ‘measure of value’? Hegel develops (in the logic of Being) the category of specifying measure, in which something is measured by something else (in our case the exchange-value of one commodity is given in terms of another). From there he goes to ‘real measure’. However, in my book (Spectre: 400), I argue that the category of ‘real measure’ must be understood as a category of Essence because it presupposes there is essential to commodities a value magnitude capable of appearing in a suitable measure. But ‘specifying measure’ does not presuppose essence because it refers to some external comparison. Hence, I employ the category of ‘real measure’ at the point when value-as-essence is indeed posited in money. Money is the measure of value-as-magnitude.

But what is there to measure? As properly quantitative, value may be considered to have an immanent magnitude. But as mere immanence it lacks any metric of its own. Only when there is a monetary medium supplying a metric to the value presupposed as intrinsic to commodities, is this presupposed dimension posited in actuality. It is not that there is an ‘immanent’ measure given, to be correlated with an ‘external’ measure. There is no immanent measure until it is posited by the existence of money and its act of measuring. Money is not the measure of something given to it; it is measure, in the first place reflexively of itself, and then as the real measure of the value which it imputes to commodities.

When we develop the notion of value as of the essence of commodities, it is materially dimensionless, even though it is posited as a mass with magnitude. This magnitude can only be actualized as pure quantity. Hence the character of the monetary medium, which supplies in its own ‘substance’, so to speak, a definite metric, is materially irrelevant. This is obscured as long as something material, like gold, serves. Ideally money has the function of making present the quantitative attribute of value simply as such. This simplicity is perfectly realized in money of account. The denomination concerned must be merely formal, for example that of Central Bank issue. Moreover, the detachment of money from any material bearer means that normally it cannot be destroyed (as can commodity money and notes), as long as records of accounts are properly ‘backed-up’.

The immanent magnitude posited by money measure is not a magnitude of anything; so it is pure magnitude. Therefore value-as-essence is present only as a ‘negative essence’ (to borrow a term from Engster and Russell). Thus the search to show that value is of the essence of commodities reaches a paradoxical result. Money measure presupposes there is a dimension of value to measure. But this immanent magnitude is posited only by the act of money itself. There is nothing to it, then. Value is of the essence; but it is present only as its absence (just as in the original exchange abstraction).

In this manner I reply to Engster and Russell’s complaint that I do not ‘clearly distinguish money as measure of value from money as means for the realization of value’. I insist that these are co-determinate. Only the money measure makes possible the positing of value as intrinsic to commodities. If by ‘realization’ they are thinking of the realization of the value generated in production in money price, a similar point may be adduced. The becoming of value is time passing in the generation of value positing, borne by the production process of the commodity. But this immanence lacks concrete measure. Only with the shock of the encounter with other commodities, mediated by money, does time passing become reflected within itself, totalized as time passed, hence constituting a value dimension as the essence of the produced commodity. However, it is important to attend to the placing of the encounter within capitalist relations. So the immediacy of ‘clock time’ is superseded through a series of transformations, beginning with ‘socially necessary’ time.

I do not understand the objection of Engster and Russell to beginning with the exchange abstraction, as I do. However, the statement that leaps out is that ‘commodity exchange … always presupposes money from the outset’. But how is it possible to know such a complex form in advance of its derivation? When I derive the money form of value I show it is a necessary condition of the actuality of value. But this is not an external condition picked up adventitiously. I derive it immanently when I trace the dialectic of exchange in a grounding movement from abstract to concrete. Moreover this grounding movement must go on from money to capital, self-valorizing value. Ultimately it is capitalist production that value presupposes. (So far from value being ‘proved’ on the third page of Capital, it requires all three volumes!)

I conclude this section on quantification with some remarks on the presentation of value-as-concept. (This is one of the most important themes of my book; so I enlarge on it here.)

The logic of the value form requires a distinction between ‘the Concept’ (with a definite article) and ordinary concepts. The Concept is a logical figure that may be abstracted from ordinary concepts; it comprises the moments: universality, particularity and singularity. It is the very truth of ordinary concepts, indeed of everything of which we form a concept. Consider the proposition ‘Fido is a white dog’. Here ‘Fido’ is singular, ‘dog’ universal, and ‘white’ particular. But ‘dog’ is a finite concept. In my book I argue carefully that it is inexact to speak of ‘the concept of value’ as if it were a ‘finite concept’ like ‘dog’; rather, what imposes itself on the commodity manifold is value-as-Concept, which is homologous with Hegel’s ‘subjective, or formal, Concept’.

There are difficult conceptual issues involved in the exposition of value as ‘the Concept’. While its unity is always to the fore, the determination of finitude must allow value to appear as discrete instances of itself. In the treatment of real measure, I keep such discreteness at a virtual level in that there the empirical presence of a piece of gold is not required; I merely give the notional measure of the commodity in a notional amount of money. This constitutive function of money posits the presupposition that commodities are values. But it underlies the rationality of sale.

An offer to sell at a definite price is rooted in a judgement of worth. Such a judgement requires the practical application of value-as-Concept to the real empirical manifold of commodities. Here the notional measure of commodities must become phenomenally present in an alienable piece of gold or at least as a number equated in the accounts of traders. Value, as ‘the Concept’ present ideally, must be applied in the real world. Or, conversely, commodity values must be brought under their concept. For this to be possible the value present in the monetary medium must really appear in finite form as a fixed amount of itself capable of being exchanged for a commodity.

In its measure function the sum of money represented was to be taken notionally. No actual money need be present for this function to allow for comparability of values. However, whereas the function of money as measure is purely formal, the price list (while generated by subjective judgement) notionally proposes a real transfer of value if two subjective judgements coincide such that a bargain is concluded. So then money must be really (not simply virtually) active.

Price may in principle be assigned prior to actual sales. As such it is a purely notional form of value. Only when price is agreed between the parties, do commodities and money get on the dance floor, so to speak; this objective process of exchange and circulation embodies a new logic, which is exemplified in ‘the metamorphoses of commodities’.

However, value is present at both levels of conceptual determination. Value as pure Concept divides into universality, particularity and singularity. Value as finite concept divides into universal, particular and singular. These divisions are so to speak, the particularity of the Concept itself. In the Concept, value as universality is all-pervasive, notionally infinite; as particularity, it is present as its amount; and as singularity as an amount. It is important here that the infinite value Concept does not admit of singulars which ‘fall under’ their concept, in the same way as Fido is dog-like. Although there are particular amounts to which value determines itself these remain purely notionally different; for any such amount is indistinguishable from any other identical such amount; if A and B, singly, are each worth a dollar, then to present that fact does not require two distinct dollars; it is simply the very same notional dollar, deployable infinitely. (Singular dollars we treat under the finite notion.)

But notice this means the movement of particularity is doubled: keeping within the immanence of the pure Concept, it determines itself to singularity; while unfolded into a finite realm it determines the existence of a wealth of singulars. Thus I distinguish the formal moment of singularity, which pertains to the Concept itself, from the application of the Concept to finite singulars, of which there are many. But the determination of this all-embracing universal is nothing more than its quantification. Thus there are many singular ‘values’ present, each of which has ‘a’ finite magnitude (and may be brought to judgement accordingly), so is contrasted with the infinity of the Concept.

Singularity, as a moment of the Concept, is that through which it asserts its unity with itself as a totality of form. This is distinct from the moment of universality, which is the moment at which it asserts its self-sameness, in the sense that the moment of particularity both negates the universal and yet is equally brought back to the universal. Yet if there is one Concept (here taken as logically distinct from the many concepts abstracted from the realm of finitude) the moment of singularity is taken as characterizing itself. It is that moment of selfhood which makes it possible to say that the concept is self-determining when the universal determines itself to the particular.

In making value actual, money does ‘double duty’. In giving value the dimension of magnitude, at the very same time it establishes its own role as measure of such imputed value. Value, as Concept, applies itself to the commodity manifold in accordance with the logical moments of the (formal) Concept. In its universality it is ‘infinite’, but as particularity it is determined to ‘amount’, and in its singularity it is therefore ‘an amount’. These are the strictly notional determinacies. But, to carry out the application of the pure concept to the measuring of values, it must descend to the finite value concept (as if it were similar to regular concepts); here the particular is some amount, and the determinate amounts are singulars. The difference between the infinite concept and the finite one shows up in its last moment especially. Singularity is a determination of the Concept, but singulars are commodity values predicated with determinate magnitude by the Concept.

Money is the crucial mediation that schematizes value-as-Concept with the empirical instances of value. In the value judgement the commodity is posited as a value when put into relation with an amount of the money commodity that incarnates in itself the singularity of value.

The Concept is the universal form that validates commodities as values. This is logically prior to the judgement of worth wherein the value of commodities is reflected in a determinate sum of money. The next problem is how exactly does this posit itself in finite form, i.e., predicates a specific value to commodities.

If the singularity of the Concept is an amount of money this may be a purely notional determination. However, value-as-Concept comprehends an infinity of potential amounts. To determine the singularity of the Concept to an actual amount requires the form of the finite Concept. This brings the infinity of the Concept into relation with worldly commodities. Value in its finite determination is manifest in a price list. A sum of money here has a dual character: first, it represents the absolute singularity of money in its notional form; second, as a singular item, a coin for example, it acts — not merely as a value equivalent ideally — but as practically exchangeable with commodities.

Of central importance to my account of value is that the Concept plays the same constitutive function in our ontology as the equivalent category does in Hegel’s logic. So it is wrong to speak of ‘the concept of value’ as if it were a finite concept; I speak of value ‘as Concept’; yet I show it must act as a finite concept in its relations with commodities. Only with finite concepts is it possible that each of them covers a range of singular instances. In our case value is the Concept, which applies itself to the range of commodities conceptualized by it (not us) as values. So what is the relation between the money that is value as Concept, which forms commodities as values ontologically, and the finite amount of money which equates itself, as a definite amount, with the value supposed to be borne by the commodity?

At the level of the Concept we observe, then, a contradiction in value between its being absolute Concept, defining the monetary dimensions of the value space, and finite Concept, existing as fixed amounts of money as if inhabiting an already given space.

The great difficulty in making progress in the dialectical presentation at this point is to trace the twist whereby value descends to finitude, as it does in price, because, determined thus, value acts as a finite concept such that there are singular values. In ‘applying’ value as Concept to the realm of singular commodities so as to constitute them as values, a mediator is required which fuses the ideality of the Concept with the empirically given manifold commodities. This is the peculiar service of money when it appears in phenomenal shape, such as coin, alongside the commodities. The commodity manifold is incoherent unless it is informed with value. However, the presupposition that commodities are values cannot be posited except through money.

Value exists a priori, as the pure transcendental form imposed on commodities in opposition to their empirical bodily shape (cf. Reuten Reference Reuten2019: 46). But for such a form to engage with commodities, in actuality, requires the presence of money. Only through the mediation of money are commodities effectively inscribed in the value form. Between the pure transcendental form of value and the material commodities, presupposed to be of value, lies the mediator money, which schematizes value, in that it has a crucial sensuous characteristic of presenting measure in a phenomenal metric to the various commodities; it is countable in unit and number, whether coins or simply money of account. What is required is that value does not float in its universality above the commodities, but that it has sufficient phenomenal reality to enter into real relations with them, such as buying and selling them.

Above I deploy Kant’s term ‘schematization’. Kant has a transcendental argument for situating his categories as a priori conditions of experience, and the problem which schematization solves is that of their effective application in an empirical judgement. As pure categories they are unable to grasp any content. This schema has a dual character Kant says. On the one side it is homogenous with the category, and with the phenomenon on the other, and so makes the application of the former to the latter in a judgement possible.

In the development of the value form there is no question of a transcendental argument. Nor is value taken as given a priori. Rather the dialectic of the value form shows how it is practically presented in a dialectic of presupposition and posit. Nonetheless it is equally true that I cannot avoid the figure of schematization here. This happens because, throughout, the pure form of value is borne by material commodities, which in their bodily substance provide a ‘shell’ for the value substance. In the logic of Being, and of Essence, no serious problem arose from this fundamental duality. But here we must bridge the gap between the Value Concept and finite judgements of worth on single commodities. This requires the singulars to be subsumed under their concept. Money achieves this for the same reasons as the demands on the schema advanced by Kant. On the one hand money is the categorial existence of value as infinite form. Yet, on the other, in order to unify effectively the commodity manifold it is present there in phenomenal shape as a finite existence, supporting empirical judgements.

Thus the self-pervasive infinite value space crystallizes into finite ‘masses of value’, that is, ‘bits’ of money, that present the singularity of the concept to commodities, positing them as ‘values’, a plural domain, as if value were a finite concept abstracted from them. But in truth value is a sui generis form imposed on commodities.

On the ideal side money must represent the universal while at the same time having the plural numerical identity that makes possible its transfer. Albeit we have coins, only their material may be collected as a class, but the collection plate contains just one amount of money. Money is always single, corresponding to the singularity of its office, not a class name like ‘animal’. However, with coin as the presence of ‘value’ alongside commodity values, it is as if ‘the animal’ materially existed as singular, apart from, and beside, the various animals.

Value as Concept has a very different status to the ordinary concepts which are always ‘the concept of something’. For example, ‘weight’ is given in its instances prior to their conceptualization as ‘weight’. The universal is derived by abstraction from them.

But commodity value is not given. It is only posited as such by their concept as it is objectively ‘schematized’ in money price.

While the universal thought-form comprehends its particularizations in thought, the value-form comprehends its particularizations through the objective relation in which such money stands to commodities. This is why a material bearer of the value concept is required alongside the commodities it comprehends as values. For the ‘inner nature’ of goods to be value requires that this presupposition be imposed on them through the commodity form, and more precisely through their objective relation to money. Through money all commodities are held within the concrete universality of value.

The form of price once posited, within it money assumes its role of measure taking. For money makes practically possible the judgement of worth. In the judgement of worth we take commodities as values because money has reflected value into them. Now the reflection of this reflection is the valuing of what has been posited as value. Money as measure making is at the same time money as measure taking. The former determination makes commodities into measurable values, while the latter determines their magnitude (in the sense of registering it, what determines the value a commodity has remains to be addressed). It acts as their ‘measure’, once a standard measuring ‘rod’ is socially selected.

So here we can make the judgement: the value of this commodity is ten dollars. The commodity as always materially singular seems opposed to value because of its immediacy as a natural body. Money as pure form of value appears opposed to commodities. However, the link exists in the judgement of worth. Here value has particularized itself to a definite amount of money. Conversely, commodities are raised above their status as material singulars to that of particular embodiments of value. But there is no immediate identity in these particular shapes of value, only a relation, because one side of the equation is the value in ideal shape, as a moment of a universal concept, and on the other value is posited in single material shapes.

Thus, when money, as the tangible concept of value, appears as a particular sum, it is not therewith constituted as a singular, it remains a notional particularization. Conversely the commodity is a singular because of its material difference from others, and it is ‘a value’ only because it is valued by a particular amount of money. However, as ‘a value’ the commodity cannot be itself immediately an instance of the universal, just because it is not value outside the mediation of the price form. Albeit it is implicitly value, its actual valuation requires money.

However, the application of this notion to measure the value of commodities is fraught with doubt because this comprehends the relation of money to commodities in a broken-backed fashion. This is because, in and for themselves, commodities are use-values, and their positing as values depends on the interpenetration of this materiality with the ideality of value. The bridge is supplied when in the judgement of worth the particular value of a commodity is registered in a particular amount of money. Its value is imputed to it when it is inscribed within the value form and is granted a price.

The general point I underline here is that quantification is central to my reading of value.

(II) Ontological issues

The most general difference between my theory of capital and the position taken up by Engster and Russell arises from their attempt to impose on Marx the central Hegelian figure of the ‘speculative identity’ that grasps the unity of opposites by knowing itself in the other of itself. They cite the case of the money that realizes the productive power of labour and capital.

However, in my book I say: ‘The speculative identity of the value form, and the formed world, cannot be sustained; for there is the “excess”, escaping the Concept, which is the site of possible contingent disruption, or even—with the class struggle—its overthrow’ (Spectre: 363).

Capital’s regime of truth imposes the determinations of a ‘single false ontology’ (to use the term of Engster and Russell) to the point where even the distinction between ‘first and second nature’ may be questionable. Against this epochal hegemony of capital one must pose (with Adorno) the speculative non-identity of concept and object. In this connection I object to Engster and Russell saying labour is capital’s ‘own other’. Certainly capital interpellates living labour as simply the use-value of capital. But labour is ‘in and against’ capital, and it is the (critically adopted) standpoint of the critique of political economy in my account (contrary to that of Postone for example).

My ontology differs from that of Hegel precisely because there is in the capitalist system an original separation between the ideal and material dimensions of the bourgeois economy. This arises through the practical effects of the overcoming of ‘dissociation’ by a peculiarly abstract form of ‘association’. Given such a dual ontology, this makes a ‘Kantian’ moment inevitable when trying to identify the ‘bridge’ between them. When the limits of Hegel’s dialectic are reached, we must perforce turn to Kant. At a certain point in the presentation one must recognize the effectivity of economic determinations springing from use-value. It cannot be reducible to capital’s own other. Above I mentioned that even within the development of the value form itself the application of the Concept to the commodity manifold requires the schematism supplied by money. How much greater is the distance between circulation and production.

Because the driving force in capitalism comes from the side of form, the Kantian moment is encompassed by the dialectical presentation of the whole; but the material dimension of the economy (surplus labour for example) sustains it, even when it is thoroughly subsumed by the ideal determinations of value.

(I) The totalizing concept

What is the starting point of the presentation of the capital system? I agree with Reuten that the starting point is ‘social dissociation’. However this is in no way a totalizing concept; it is a fundamental condition of existence of the capitalist system, never overcome despite the wealth of mediation that may be developed, beginning with ‘association’ through exchange, to cope with its subversion of sociality. But nor is ‘exchange’ the totalizing concept; it posits goods as commodities; but these commodities suffer the imposition of ‘abstraction’ on their relations, making ‘value’ autonomous with respect to ‘use-value’. It is value—because it is active—that is the totalizing concept, implicit in commodities, explicit in money, and self-grounding in capital. Therewith capital reproduces commodity exchange, and seeks to expand the realm of commodification.

It might be helpful here to remind ourselves what Hegel said about ‘method’. He writes that ‘the method whereby the concept develops out of itself […] is merely an immanent progression and production of its own determinations’. And he explains that ‘its progress does not depend on the assertion that various circumstances are present or on the subsequent application of the universal to such material of extraneous origin’. (Philosophy of Right §31) Furthermore ‘the immanent development of a science, the derivation of its entire content from the simple concept […] has the following distinctive feature [...]. One and the same concept [in our case value] which begins by being abstract […] consolidates its determinations […] through its exclusive agency, and thereby acquires a concrete content’ (Philosophy of Right §279).

I call attention to the central role of the agency of the concept in these remarks on method. In our case it is clear that the hegemonic agent in the system is capital, which grounds its own abstract presupposition, value, in its circuit.

It cannot be said that ‘dissociation’ reproduces itself through its own agency. It is indeed reproduced, but that is as a result of capital’s self-positing movement. Dissociation estranges producers from one another. It is overcome through a peculiar ‘second alienation’ in exchange as producers lose control over their own products (Arthur Reference Arthur1986). Nor can it be said that exchange reproduces itself. Indeed, it might fade away leaving a set of autarchic communities. Value, by contrast, in the form of self-valorizing value, does reproduce itself through its own agency and therewith develops commodity production in general.

(II) The relevance of Hegel’s logic

Both Reuten and I wish to apply a systematic dialectical method to the critique of political economy. But we differ widely in our appropriation of Hegel’s logic, with regard to which parts of his logic are relevant to this endeavour.

First, a small point: Reuten, in several places, refers to Hegel’s ‘Subjective Logic’. Nowhere in my book is this mentioned. This is because I think that Hegel was correct when he dropped the distinction, present in his Science of Logic, between Objective and Subjective Logic in his later Encyclopaedia; in that work the ‘Subjective’ is restricted to its proper place as the first part of the ‘Doctrine of the Concept’, and it is followed by the ‘Object’ and ‘The Idea’ (the ‘Subject/Object’). Even in The Science of Logic itself Hegel remarks that the expressions ‘objective and subjective logic’ are ‘very indeterminate and therefore very ambiguous’, and used by him only because they are ‘familiar’ (Science of Logic: 39).

At all events, Reuten holds that in the exposition of capital the logic of Essence is pertinent but not the logic of the Concept. (He signals his solidarity on this with our friend Tony Smith, who has consistently defended this view in his work.)

My ‘homology thesis’, by contrast, shows there is a close connection between the value form and all parts of Hegel’s logic, through that of the Doctrine of the Concept to the Idea. Roughly speaking, in my SDP, commodity relations exhibit the logic of Being, money is developed in the logic of Essence, while capital follows the logic of the Concept. Let us look more closely at this latter logic and the forms of capital.

In first part of the Doctrine of the Concept we find ‘judgement’ and ‘syllogism’. In my book I associate the first with ‘the judgement of worth’: ‘so much of this commodity is worth so much money’. This judgement is implicit in the setting of price. When two agents agree in their judgements a bargain may be concluded. More broadly the transitivity of price embodies the logic of the syllogism of equality. This is an important feature of exchange and circulation.

In the second part of the Doctrine of the Concept, a central category is that of ‘teleology’; this is surely required to explicate the forms of the metamorphoses of commodities (C-M-C´) and the general formula for capital (M-C-M´).

Bolder, perhaps, is that I associate the drive of capital to accumulate itself, through overcoming every restriction on its present state, with the ‘absolute negativity’ of the Idea. (Science of Logic: 746) The priority of the negative in this dialectic in practice means that all determinacy must be provisional only.Footnote ²

One issue that very likely is distorting the discussion is that my enterprise, and Hegel’s, are very different. Hegel is concerned, even in the logic, with the historical and social conditions of human freedom. I say very little about that; my book is directed to investigating the logical conditions of capital’s freedom. I show that capital’s logic has subsumed production; but I also argue that it has its limits, as I said above. However, I do not associate these limits with rejecting the Doctrine of the Concept, but by underlining that the Idea explains capital’s form, but its relation to what is formed by it is problematic as we saw.

(III) The logic of transition

Following this general discussion, I now mark a difference Reuten and I have on the logic of transition between forms. Reuten in his SDP is looking to find ‘necessary conditions of existence’ of capital. However, I discriminate two different movements in the dialectical development of capital. In what I call the ‘analytical’ side of the dialectic, I identify ‘conditions of existence’ of capital given to it externally; such ‘presuppositions’ are later shown to be ‘posited’ as the result of capital’s own movement (‘free labour’ is the obvious example, treated below). In what I call the ‘synthetic’ side, an overly abstract category is ‘grounded’ by the immanent development of a new, more concrete, form. (This is how I motivate the transition from C-M-C´ to M-C-M´ for example; also treated below.)

As to the first: Reuten underlines that his systematic dialectic at each stage uncovers necessary conditions of capitalist production. From this point of view he objects paradigmatically to the way my own development passes through a stage in which money is a commodity. (This is not a historical point but a stage in my logical development of money.) It is clearly true that present-day capitalism does not employ gold money, so gold cannot be a necessity to the system.

This is a very interesting issue. Just what happens in a dialectical transition from a lower to a higher category? I agree with Hegel that truth pertains only to the totality; and it must be systematically developed through the positing of partial truths; each transition is therefore characterized by the sublation of the existing claim to truth. Each stage, falling short of the Absolute, embodies a partial truth, which is preserved in the next stage. It thus becomes a moment of the higher category.

In general, all dialectical transitions preserve the truth so far won, while discarding as inadequate its existing defective form. For example, money is necessary to the constitution of capital. I develop it by pressing the logic of commodity exchange to its culmination in the form of the unique universal equivalent, which is given objectivity in money. In the case of a commodity money, such as gold, it is clearly an imperfection of the concept of value that there is within the system a produced commodity that is not sold, as commodities are destined to be. This contradiction is overcome with ex nihilo credit money. But that cannot be treated until later in the presentation because when money is first introduced it is too early in our exposition to develop credit money. At this stage, within its context, the only possible bearer of money is gold (or some other contingently available commodity). However inadequate to its perfected concept, money as a commodity is to be taken as a stage required by the logic of the presentation.

Reuten objects strongly to this, because his SDP restricts itself to the uncovering of necessary conditions of capital, and gold money is not a feature of fully functioning capital, in which ex nihilo bank credit is the properly capitalist money. But to bring ex nihilo money into the presentation at such an early stage is very strange because it imposes on the very abstract determinations a complex economic form not yet presented in its own terms, because it presupposes, not only capital, but a peculiar functional form of capital. Reuten seems to assume this presupposition is be accepted on the promise that banks will be posited later (Reuten Reference Reuten2019: 45).

It is true that the higher levels of my own presentation provide necessary grounds for the earlier forms. However, I see no problem about accepting along the way sufficient conditions to resolve a problem within the presentation, albeit, as here, it is a solution which has inadequacies to be overcome at a later stage. When gold is taken as the bearer of money this certainly solves the problem of developing the objectivity of money only by incorporating contingent externality, namely the selection of a commodity so to serve; but this is sufficient for the purpose of resolving the problem posed at this stage.

In this connection it is important to see that the relation of necessary and sufficient is subtle. Reuten tends to focus on necessary conditions for capital. However, it is just as important to see how far capital itself posits these presuppositions by its own immanent necessity.

Central to any investigation of capital is the recognition that ‘free’ labour is a necessary condition of capital’s constitution. Yet at its original introduction in the presentation of social forms it has no necessity of its own at all. It is an external contingency. (Economic historians have addressed the complex issue of just why certain historical contingencies allowed capitalism to develop in Western Europe, but not in many other times and places.)

If theory presupposes free labour is present then this would be sufficient (together with other conditions) to kick-start capitalism. However, the presupposition of free labour is finally posited only at a much more concrete level, when we see how the trade cycle continually reproduces a reserve army of labour as an immanent necessity of its own movement. But when the presentation presupposes free labour in the first place such necessity is lacking, its presence is purely contingent.

I now pass from the analytic side of the SDP (which identifies the ‘conditions of existence’ that must be presupposed to enable a transition), to the synthetic dialectic. With the latter a transition is required to ground a more abstract form of value in a more concrete. For example let us consider that from the metamorphoses of commodities (C–M–C′) to the general formula for capital (M–C–M′). Under the protocols of SDP this is not to be motivated by some quasi-causal story about a tendency within C–M–C′ for some agent to seek to make money. Rather, the question addressed is: what form of value will secure, not just the preservation of C–M–C′ (which as such might fade away) in a more concrete shape, but the greater stability of value as a self-subsistent reality?

When a commodity is sold for money with a view to then acquiring a different commodity, C–M–C′, this is an example of finite teleology with the moments (means, activity, end) externally related to one another. The transition from this to M–C–M′ is vindicated in terms of method because value in the former is simply a transitory effect of the movement of use-value. Value is more securely grounded if it is made the very aim of circulation, as in M–C–M′.

Money is available, as such, for many deployments; it is therefore possible for it to be used as capital. But for it to be necessary that it develops to money as capital requires that it be inherently an end in itself, not merely that it be taken in the service of some external purpose. This ‘qualitative’ point we now develop by addressing the ‘quantitative’ aspects characteristic of money as a store of value, namely that it has no inherent limit; for it may simply accumulate as a fund indefinitely. However, I wish to advance the stronger claim: that value, as an end, must aim beyond any present limit. For money to set itself as its own end it must become different from itself while remaining itself. Since the only quality of value is quantity, the sole possible aim is thus increase.

If value is to become its own end it must realize itself as Concept. It will be recalled that value-as-Concept is present only through its incarnation, money, which must determine itself to an amount. It is as ‘an amount’ that it is present to circulation; but the Concept is distinct from any instance for it is their negative unity. However, the resolution is that in its movement money increases from one transient amount to another. This is the way value presents itself as Concept. The static opposition of amounts, and their universal concept, is resolved only as money practically unites these amounts when capital runs through in succession its own instances, M, M′, etc., not resting in any. It is always in the process of self-transcendence. As absolute form capital dynamically unites its form with the content it gives itself.

The Concept cannot stand aloof from finitude because it really exists only in some finite determination, i.e., negation, of the pure infinity which is the Concept. The Concept sums things up only in their negative unity, that which they are not. So here money takes finite form as ‘an amount’; but this negates the infinity of value-as-Concept. However, the ‘contradiction’ between the quantitative limitation and the qualitative lack of limitation of money means there is no inherent stop to the aim of accumulation. Because value-as-Concept is not adequately realized in any finite sum, one absurdly imagines it could transcend such limitation in an infinitely large sum. But such a notion of measurelessness is the finite infinite, not the true terrain of infinity i.e., self-reference. To realize value as an end-in-itself the finite must go beyond itself. So the concept realizes itself in the movement from one sum to a greater as it passes dynamically through its finite determinations without being tied down.

Money as capital can never be at rest. It is always in the endless process of becoming what it has in it to be. So, to become something other than what it already is, while remaining itself, money-as-capital must not merely be preserved but increased, as it determines itself to these shapes in succession. Capital asserts itself as subject over against every such moment by sublating them in its process of self-valorization. Yet the subject must descend to its substance when taking its measure of itself. Thus absolute ‘reason’ (rooted in ‘the fluidity of the Concept’) must descend to the categories of ‘understanding’ (which deals in fixed definitions) when setting exchange ratios, or when drawing up annual accounts, as if capitalism were like a natural system.

When capital incorporates an increment, it gathers itself up for a new cycle, thus resulting in both the renewal of its elements, money and commodities, and renewing capital bent on accumulation.