Systematic Dialectic of the Value-Form: Christopher Arthur

Chapter 3 considers Christopher Arthur’s reconstruction of Marx’s critique of political economy as a systematic dialectic ofvalue-forms. It argues that while Arthur’s homology between capital as subject and Hegel’s Geist certainly captures theperverse nature of capitalist social relations to the extent that it grasps the manner in which abstract social forms dominatesociety in its current state, it does so at the cost of losing the radical root of Marx’s critique. In Arthur, ontological primacyis given over to the value-forms of economic objectivity themselves rather than to the contradictory human praxis thattakes on these forms. Through an appreciation of Simon Clarke’s critique of Arthur’s conception of alienated labour, thechapter argues that a sufficient critique of capital must also be a critique of labour as the historically specific form of humanpraxis that disappears in the appearance of economic objectivity.