The current crisis and the anachronism of value

Abstract

Marx’s maturity critical theory explains the directional dynamics of modern societies on the basis of the categories of commodity and capital as domination and heteronomy modes: it is all about people’s domination by time, by a specific historical form of temporality. In this theory, this dynamic and the apparent ontological centrality of work are the subject of criticism and not its starting point: it is explicitly stated that this is a historical specific approach and calls into question all those approaches that claim their universal and trans-historical validity. Within this framework, the duality of the commodity-form as value and usevalue underlies the duality of the capital-form as a valorization process and a work process. This duality generates a dialectical interaction that results in a complex temporary dynamic that pushes the creation of value forward and, at the same time, becomes increasingly anachronistic. The long-term trend of this historical display is resolved by the obsolescence of production based on work time, value and proletarian labour – Marx stated that the abolition of capitalism will not mean the proletariat’s self-fulfillment but its self-abolition. This possibility currently emerges in an inverted way: the increase of superfluous work, unemployment and precariousness; the transformation of increasingly life dimensions in different forms of alleged wealth – related to prices and profits – EL CAPITAL DE MARX: 151 AÑOS DEL LIBRO I 45 that would supposedly guarantee the future liquidation of increasingly complex financial instruments (as if wealth was independent from value in capitalism). This article analyses the end of the post-war Keynesian-fordist capitalism, boosted by economic crises, as an expression of the cyclic crisis of the valorization process. Crisis in which we are still immersed.