Moishe on Value and Wealth

Abstract

homogeneous labor time in political economy as the a priori precondition of the social world it purports merely to describe. 8. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1978), 53; emphasis in original. 118 | CRITICAL HISTORICAL STUDIES SPRING 2020 It is worth stressing that this specific critique of capitalism is ultimately epistemological rather than moral. Moishe acknowledged that distributive injustice tends to follow from concealed domination, just as it does from overt domination. So, the absence of overt domination would not make capitalism prima facie just. But Moishe thought that to focus on the spurious legitimation of injustice as capitalism’s defining feature would to be assimilate it to noncapitalist social formations, such as feudalism in which domination is mediated by social relations and religious practices that affect the distribution, but also the interpretation, of wealth. It is thus the concealment of injustice (as epistemic problem), and not injustice itself, that is historically specific to capitalism. But even if we set our concern for social justice aside, Moishe’s idea of direct mediation is puzzling on its face. How could it bemediation if it is direct? And inwhat sense could Moishe mean it to be direct, other than to deny that the value form is mediated by money and thus dominated by finance? Moishe’s stress on the directness of social mediation in capitalist production does, I think, require a diminished stress on the role of financial intermediaries and money markets. But even allowing for his choice to emphasize production, Moishe’s philosophical view that mediation can be direct within this realm is not extensively explained in his major book on capitalism, nor is it more fully developed in later papers. Like Ben and Ed, I have few stakes in the concept of direct mediation. We see finance as a form of indirect mediation that is historically specific to our present stage of capitalism and need have no quarrel with his tendency to assume that of financial valuation is a form of mediated sociality. But we do no regard this as a knock-down argument because for us the concept of direct mediation could, perhaps, be important in understanding capitalism only to the extent that there are spheres in which finance is not important. Otherwise, direct mediation appears to be something of an oxymoron, implying at the same time as it denies the existence of a third, or mediating, term through which the relation between two other terms can be interpreted. In Peircean semiotics, for example, there is always a third, mediating, sign that refers to the relation between a signifier and the object that it signifies. The relation of the third sign to the signifier-object relation can be one of self-similarity (as in a metaphor) or contiguity (as in a metonym); it can be one of causation or of abstraction in Moishe’s sense; such abstraction can take the form of symbolization that may or may not also consist of commensuration, as when money becomes both a symbol and a common denominator of the social relations between agents and things. From a semiotic perspective, Moishe’s central concept of abstraction itself is merely a particular form of mediation that interprets production as creating wealth Moishe on Value and Wealth | 119 (accumulated exchange value) out of something else that Marx calls use value. The semiotician Paul Kockelman thus describes Moishe’s version of Marx as one in which “the commodity is at once the object to be investigated and the method of investigation. In this way, an ontology ultimately grounded in a subject-object dichotomy is one of the ideational reflexes of 19th-century capital; and must therefore be used as a theoretical tool for interpreting that form of capitalism.” In contrast to Moishe’s “dialectical” approach, Kockelman claims to ground “the commodity in a semiotic. And hence rather than systemically unfold a subject-object dichotomy, it systemically deploys a sign-object-interpretant trichotomy.” Moishe was well aware of Peircean semiotics while he wrote Time, Labor, and Social Domination—he was discussing it with Ben and Ed at the time. But they were not then working on financial derivatives, and Moishe’s decision to focus on the process of abstraction as what Kockelman calls the “subject-object dichotomy” rather than “a sign-object-interpretant trichotomy” must be seen as a conscious rejection of semiotic accounts of social performativity with which he would have been highly familiar. The roots of this rejection are, I think, deeply grounded in the theological dimensions of his view. Monotheism understands itself to be a secondary form of religion, based on a repudiation of the idolatry that accompanies polytheistic forms of worship. Stated in Moishean terms, the monotheistic critique is that idol worship is really a form of indirect mediation between humans and gods by a humanly created artifact itself worshipped as divine. The objection is not merely that the idols are not themselves gods, but that any god whose divinity is mediated by material objects is also false. A true God, in contrast, would be a transcendent being that is encountered by humans through a modality that is uniquely direct. Direct revelation is thus the monotheistic alternative to idolatry. And what would be revealed in this way is that the one true God is an exception to forms of sociality and religion that are mediated by material objects, and also to the threefold Peircean semiotics of sign-object-interpretant. The core of monotheistic thought is that such an exception, if possible, would have to be unique and singular: that there can be only one true God. Here, God alone can be experienced mystically without the mediation of a symbol or material artifact. But a mystical experience of God is still not immediate because, even at suchmoments, experiencing God is the experience of something other than the self. 9. Paul Kockelman, “A Semiotic Ontology of the Commodity,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 16, no. 1 (June 2006): 80. 10. Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 120 | CRITICAL HISTORICAL STUDIES SPRING 2020 Neither is it abstract. In one tradition of monotheism, the apophatic, God is not the universal attribute that “gods”would have in common but rather the universal signified to whom every signifier refers. It follows that nothing can be given its own name without being given the name of God who created it. For this reason, the one true God has every name and no name. But the attribution of God’s name to everything that God creates means God did not create the world by abstracting from it. And so the universal name of God is not a single common denominator that commensurates all but rather an ultimate reality that transcends the human ability to designate it by any single name. In apophatic monotheism, a direct relation to God is not a matter of abstract thought but of concrete experience. Instead of being a mere symbol that stands for God, the name of God is here a concrete universal of the type described by Hegel and Adorno as self-mediating, thereby drawing a secular analogy to the monotheistic view of divine self-creation as a way of becoming concrete rather than abstract. There is, as I will explain later, a strong resemblance between Moishe’s concept of the value form in capitalism and earlier monotheistic accounts of the Divine Names. It is enough for now, however, that the apophatic idea that there are no mediations of God—only the concealment of a universal signified by a universal signifier—lies at the heart of Moishe’s assumption that there are no interpretants in the value form, only concealment and direct revelation. The dichotomies between universal signifiers and universal signified, and between concealment and direct revelation, lie behind what Moishe means by commodity fetishism. His critique of commodity fetishism does not resemble the monotheistic critique of overt fetishism, such as the worship of idols as decommodified and supposedly sacred human objects. Unlike idol worship, fetishism of commodities, as Moishe understands it, is rather a hidden effect of commodification itself— that money has become our God—and the critique of it most closely resembles the monotheistic critique of false monotheisms. Here the critique is not of fetishization as such, but of its concealment by the role of money in commodity exchange. Being convertible into money is what makes an object a commodity. So for Moishe 11. Pseudo-Dionysius, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, ed. Colm Luibhéid and Paul Rorem (New York: Paulist Press, 1987). 12. “This self-relation, which negates the existence or difference of any other, preserves the meaning of being in a later, more developed logical form: it defines something that is simply there, given, exists and is meaningful for itself, unrelated to others. The concrete universal is thus the ‘mediation’, the relation between particulars which constitutes them, but it is itself not ‘mediated’ . . . i.e. does not depend for its existence or meaning on the relation to an other. It is ‘positive, identical, universal’, a second immediate.” Charlotte Baumann, “Adorno, Hegel and the Concrete Universal,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 37, no. 1 (2011): 84. Moishe on Value and Wealth | 121 to reveal the commodity as a fetish is to say that money functions as a false form of direct mediation in capitalism. This is his interpretation of Marx’s claim in Capital, volume 1 (chap. 1.4), that the “fetishism of commodities” is an illusion created by regarding price as a direct relation among things that conceals the social relations of production, which are concealed, rather, by the value form. But Moishe well knew that when Marx pierces the veil of money to reach the value form, those social relations, although no longer fetishized, are