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With brief interspersed, seductive periods of prosperity, the state’s finances are always at the limit, immer am Anschlag. It seems like a law of nature. The bourgeois state is always under strain to balance its budget whilst fulfilling persistent political demands such as lower taxes and improved welfare benefits and education. In view of mounting national debt, the state may pursue an austerity policy (to the applause of capital) to lower inflation, to further ‘healthy economic growth’. But not only are the state’s finances always under strain. That’s only the start. Or only the consequence of something else.

Even those huge multinational corporations generating billions in revenues and profit are always at the limit, always under strain, under the watchful eye of the stock exchanges, to generate even more revenues and profit. Every capitalist enterprise, large, medium and small, is under unrelenting competitive pressure to produce ever more productively, i.e. to lower unit costs, as if running on the spot to survive. This unceasing pushing at the limits is sold to us as merely the flip side of improving, or at least maintaining, our standard of living (in the affluent, developed West, at least). Incessant technological progress (A.I. in the latest iteration) is represented ‘as’, i.e. in the shiny appearance of, improving our lives, even when, in the current phase of the gainful game, the struggle to earn income has shifted decisively in favour of the rich getting very much richer, and the rest being left behind with eroding material standards of living. This is portrayed in the media these days as a ‘cost of living crisis’, and nobody really knows why this has come upon us.

There are many ways of explaining how these socio-economic-political developments have come to pass over the past few decades. It is a story of politically mediated class struggle. The stories are manifold and sheer infinite in their variety and ruthlessness. The question, however, is why finances in the broadest sense are always at the limit. Here it is useful to quote Karl Marx from near the end of his unfinished manuscript for the third volume of Kapital, summarizing in two “character traits” (MEW25:886) what his analysis of the essence (whatness) of capitalism has come up with:

“The second [character trait] especially characterizing the capitalist mode of production is the production of surplus value as direct purpose and determining motive for production. Capital produces essentially capital, and it / only does this insofar as it produces surplus value.” (MEW25:887f)

This quote, like all quotations taken from a connected conceptual work, falls short. Nevertheless, it formulates concisely what I call the law of valorization of thingified value which today reigns under the empirical surface as the global law of economic movement. It is the same law forcing enterprises to continually accelerate turnover and hence also the tempo of daily life. This law is obliterated by the dogma of economic growth, usually measured by GDP, to which all conventional politics and economics pay unquestioning obeisance.

The many explanations of developments in the global capitalist economy over the past thirty or forty years remain empirical, appeasing the curiosity of those wanting to understand why all matters economic, both directly and indirectly, are always at the limit. The essential driver as such thus remains invisible; the formulation of a global law of movement in terms of valorizing thingified value seems quaintly philosophical and of no practical-political consequence. The obfuscating forms of appearance of the law of valorization on the empirical surface remain infinitely variable, attracting more or less profound and well-researched historical explanations, including in-depth journalism, that, as empirical, must always miss the point.

And the point is that they should miss the point of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, which is not an economic theory (empirically verifiable or otherwise), but a critique of ideology, namely, of those more or less coherent, but tendentiously deceptive, sets of ideas presented in the plethora of economic theories that cover up the ugly truth of capitalism. As a critique of ideology, it inaugurates a fundamental, pre-political change of mind. Another cast of mind with respect to this thing called capitalism also sheds an alternative hermeneutic light on the phenomenon of freedom.

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Capitalocene & The global law of movement.

An Invisible Global Social Value.

Three laws of movement (again).

Jürgen Habermas’ sprawling two-tome opus magnum, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Theory of Communicative Action), was published in 1981 by Suhrkamp in Frankfurt, immediately drawing a lot of attention in Germany, as well as more recently*). In the Summer Semester of 1982 I attended a seminar on this work held in the garden of the private home of Albrecht Wellmer in Alpenstraße, Constance. Wellmer had been appointed Ordinarius Professor at the University of Constance with the support of Habermas. At the time I was a post-graduate student in the alternative Sydney-Konstanz Project working toward reconstructing and extending Marx’s planned, but uncompleted, critical theory of bourgeois society,**) whose core was the Critique of Political Economy. This latter system-fragment encompasses three works by Marx: Die Grundrisse (a rough draft from 1857-1858 first published posthumously in 1941), Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (1859) and the three-volume work, Das Kapital, of which Marx himself only published the first volume in two different editions (1863 and 1867).

The culmination of the first volume of Habermas’ Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, which bears the title “Handlungsrationalität und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung” (Rationality of Action and Social Rationality), is a chapter entitled “Von Lukács zu Adorno: Rationalisierung als Verdinglichung”. The hinge between “rationalization” and “thingification”***) is provided by hopping from Weber to Lukács, as if rationalization had something to do with thingification. The first volume’s subject, viz. rationalization, thus comes to a crescendo in Habermas’ critique of thingification as presented not so much by Marx, its originator, but by Lukács, Horkheimer and Adorno. It is therefore a reckoning of Habermas with his famous predecessors in the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, itself a hybrid of philosophy and sociology. Habermas himself conceives himself as a sociologist working out an empirically based, critical theory of modern society. The prominence of whole series of sociologists’ names in Habermas’ discourse underscores that Habermas is not only at home in sociology, but is sceptical of any “ontological hopes” (TkH1:16) or “transcendental-philosophical hopes” (TkH1:16) of any a priori, i.e. pre-empirical, philosophical thinking.

In fact, Habermas does not ‘argue’ conceptually strictu sensu, but through a patchwork quilt of sociological concepts that he borrows from both well-known and lesser-known sociologists, without any proper grounding, coupling or embedding. These sociological concepts, including those key ones of rationalization and thingification, are interpreted as encapsulating historical (in this sense: empirical) developments and trends of one kind or another in modern societies. His understanding of dialectic is one of movement and counter-movement in historical developments as captured and encapsulated by empirical concepts, and not a dialectic of interconnected concepts, as initiated by Plato. This loose (some would say: sloppy) discursive style makes his theory at most plausible, suggestive, but non-binding. Mere references to authors are supposed to suffice in this rambling discourse. To think through the phenomena themselves closely would require another, more stringent and demanding approach altogether.

Habermas’ main witness for thingification is, somewhat surprisingly, not Marx, but Lukács. The extensive discussion of Horkheimer and Adorno follows later. Habermas says that “Lukács develops his concept of thingification from Marx’s analysis of the commodity-form; he refers to the famous passage in the first volume of Kapital where Marx describes the fetish-character of the commodity.” (TkH1:477) There follows the famous Marxian quote from Chapter 1, Section 4 (MEW23:86). Habermas then simplifies Marx’s formulation of commodity fetishism (which is not equivalent to thingification; cf. MEW25:838f on the “trinity” formula and MEW25:887 on the “regulation of the entire production by value”) to the “double-form of the commodity as use-value and exchange-value and the transformation of its natural form into the value-form with the aid of the Hegelian concept of abstraction, in which use-value and exchange-value relate to each other like essence and appearance”. (TkH1:477) This dubious and arbitrary assertion is entirely bogus, because the distinction between use-value and exchange-value can be seen already with a sound phenomenological eye, as did Aristotle already two millennia ago in his Politics (Book I ch. iii 1257a7–15). It nevertheless permits Habermas to dismiss any further consideration of value-form analysis, but not without inserting a cursory footnote to Hans-Georg Backhaus and others taking on the challenge of reconstructing Marx’s value-theory.****) Their work is declared useless, allegedly because “we cannot employ unreconstructed foundational concepts of the Hegelian Logic without further ado.” Habermas, of course, never attempts to interpret phenomena of essence and appearance (which does not have to rely on Hegel’s Logik and is phenomenologically easy), but remains content with shallow, empirical, sociological concepts.

With the value-form out of the way, Habermas can then note that Lukács himself is not content with adducing Marx’s famous commodity fetishism. “He is interested only in the thingification effect that arises to the degree in which the labour power of the producers becomes a commodity” (TkH1:478), citing Lukács (Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein 1968 S.274): “the separation of labour power from the workers’ personality, their transformation into a thing, into an object sold on the market” (thus confusing ‘verdinglichen’ with ‘verdingen’). With this gross misinterpretation of thingification, Lukács, along with those coming after him (Horkheimer, Adorno, Honneth), sabotages the possibility of ever conceptualizing the proper phenomenality of thingification via the value-form as it reigns in capitalism.

The concept of thingification is namely not restricted to the value-form of exchange-value nor to the wage-form under which workers’ labour power is subsumed when hiring it (not selling it outright) to functioning capital. The proper concept is not thingification in the vulgar sense of ‘reducing to a thing’, but thingified value, which has various forms or eidetic ‘looks’ in which it appears, starting with the commodity-form and the money-form.*****) Habermas wastes not a single word on the value-forms of wages, functioning capital, productive capital, fixed capital, circulating capital, etc. nor on those of interest (paid on loan capital) or ground-rent (flowing from leased landed property). And, beyond the capitalist economy, he has nothing to say about taxes as yet another form of thingified value that must be explicitly in view to conceptualize the modern (bourgeois-capitalist) state. Instead, he adopts a rough, intuitively ‘obvious’, concept of thingification (as subsumption of workers as ‘things’) and a couple of its value-forms without any regard to the phenomenon itself nor to how the various forms of thingified value constitute the load-bearing, interlocking, conceptual ‘infrastructure’ throughout the three volumes of Kapital. This is what is meant by material dialectic of the value-forms in the full sense (with ‘material’ here signifying ‘thingly’ and ‘forms’ signifying socio-ontological ‘ideas’). It does not suffice to simply pick juicy, evocative passages from Marx’s opus magnum and ignore the rest.

Habermas is not interested in thinking-through carefully in concepts, i.e. dialectical thinking, but is intent on laying out his borrowed-patchwork theory of communicative action, the latter figuring as the proposed panacea for instrumental rationality, in which modern human beings could come to a mutual understanding (Verständigung) through interaction, thus freeing “the communicatively structured areas of life [from their subjugation to] the imperatives of autonomous, formally organized systems of action”. (TkH1:8) Such hopes placed in communicative interaction must come to grief against, firstly, the inexorable global assertion of the pernicious principle of valorization of thingified value cycling incessantly through its multiple forms, inducing ruthless competition among all the players in the gainful game. Secondly, it comes to grief through the insinuation of the corrosive Medium of thingified value into even the most intimate niches of our life-worlds. To see that the Medium of thingified value is not fit for purpose as medium of sociation (Vergesellschaftungsmedium) for mortals on Earth however, requires first of all the phenomenological concept of thingified value itself. This is not to be had from Habermas.

Further reading: *) Stefan Breuer ‘Die Depotenzierung der Kritischen Theorie. Über Jürgen Habermas’ Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns‘ Leviathan Vol. 10 Nr. 1 1982.
Axel Honneth Verdinglichung. Eine anerkennungstheoretische Studie. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 2005.
Patrick Eiden-Offe Verdinglichung: Ein Begriffsschicksal Soziopolis 04.06.2021.

**) Critique of competitive freedom and the bourgeois-democratic state: Outline of a form-analytic extension of Marx’s uncompleted system 1984/2015. With an Appendix: ‘A Value-Form Analytic Reconstruction of Capital‘ by Michael Eldred, Marnie Hanlon, Lucia Kleiber and Mike Roth.

***) The usual English translation of Verdinglichung is ‘reification’, but I have come to prefer ‘thingification’ for its Germanic root.

****) Cf. H-G. Backhaus ‘Materialien zur Rekonstruktion der Marxschen Werttheorie’ 1, 2, 3 in Gesellschaft. Beiträge zur Marxschen Theorie Nos. 1, 3, 11 1974, 1975, 1978 resp. (now in: H-G. Backhaus Dialektik der Wertform: Untersuchungen zur Marxschen Ökonomiekritik Ça ira, Freiburg i. Br. 1997).

*****) An Invisible Global Social Value.

Backhaus or Habermas?.

Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking core phenomena of political philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2019.

In this age of the hegemony of the empiricist, materialist sciences, the collapse of the mind into the brain has long since happened without ever being noticed. To be intelligent was long ago deemed to be synonymous with being ‘brainy’. It was a ‘natural’ process of degeneration from the beginning of the First Philosophy, i.e. the πρώτη φιλοσοφία of Aristotle. This First Philosophy deals with first things first, defined by Aristotle to be the investigation of τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὄν, i.e. “the being as being”, where the second “being” is best interpreted as a present participle. The first kinds of participation of beings in being are categorial, comprising the being in question’s whatness (not whoness), its howness (quality), its how-muchness (quantity), its whereness (location), etc. The degeneration of even traditional metaphysical philosophical thinking in the age of the hegemony of analytic-language philosophy is indicated already by the entry in the prestigious Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that characterizes Aristotle’s Metaphysics as ‘the study of being qua being’, amounting to a nonsensical translation of τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὄν. Never mind.

It is well known that Aristotle conceptualizes physical beings as a synthesis of εἶδος (_eidos_) and ὕλη (_hylae_), i.e. of eidetic look and matter. The eidetic look captures the being’s whatness; it has the look of what it is, which is always an interpretation of its phenomenal look. A physical being’s matter renders it material, and matter can assume different eidetic looks, such as that of a flower or a house. Flowers reproduce of themselves owing to their having within themselves a principle or capability (δύναμις _dynamis_) of self-movement, whereas houses require an external builder with the know-how of building, who knows how to manipulate timber, bricks, tiles, glass, etc. in order to realize the end-product of a finished house. Productive know-how is also the paradigm for science, which becomes technology insofar as technological know-how enables the manipulation of matter to attain a foreseen end. The core of Western science is manipulative of matter, inspired as it is with the endless will to power over all kinds of movement (aka the March of Progress). The endlessness of this will seduces it to attempt to control even immaterial kinds of movement.

Matter enables a firm, manipulative grip. That is the power of τέχνη ποιητική (_technae poiaetikae_). The technique of rhetoric, by contrast, is an art of persuasion whose immaterial ‘material’ to be manipulated is the mooded psyche of an audience. Owing to the non-material nature of the psyche, such manipulation is anything but sure-fire. It may amount to telling an audience lies it likes to hear. When it comes to exercising power over humans, it seems advantageous to seek a material basis for what and how the psyche thinks and feels. An obvious candidate for this manipulable material basis is the corporeal brain.

In Aristotle’s metaphysical thinking, the immaterial psyche is endowed with the capacity to think, called νοῦς (_nous_, mind). For today’s scientific thinking, the mind is a function of the brain. Various kinds of thinking (aka cognition) are said to take place in various definite parts of the brain, such as the frontal lobe. A major task of neuroscience is to investigate the supposed correspondences between various kinds of ostensible cognitive functions, such as memory, and parts of the brain. The mind thus becomes (interpreted, conceived as) an epiphenomenon of material brain function, rather than the mind’s being conceived as employing the brain and parts thereof as its organ, i.e. tool, for its various mental functions, such as remembering or planning or contemplating. This collapse of the mind into the brain is necessary for the progress of material-technological science. Medical science, in particular, focuses on cerebral dysfunction as the material cause of impairments in cognition and dysphoric psychic mood. This could be called deleterious material causality, which is far removed from what conversely could be termed beneficial material causality amounting to attributing to parts of the brain the power to generate certain thoughts or moods. This is the way modern science, to no avail, would like things to be.

The term ‘psyche’ is replaced by ‘consciousness’ in order to exclude (religious, metaphysical) connotations of ’soul’. The immaterial is anathema to modern science (even though, paradoxically, modern physics countenances light to be immaterial). ‘Thinking’ becomes brain-based ‘cognition’. Mainstream philosophical thinking offers no resistance to this degeneration, but rather enthusiastically embraces the dissolution of mental activity into the firing of cerebral neurons. The general public remains clueless and goes along with this degenerative ‘progress’, whose veracity is ostensibly affirmed by employing the empiricist methodology of ‘evidence-based’ science. Modern science suppresses any suspicion that there could be any kind of truth other than the facticity of correct facts.

Further reading: Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking core phenomena of political philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2019.

Michael Eldred on the Digital Age: Challenges for Today’s Thinking An interview with M.G. Michael and Katina Michael, M&K Press, Wollongong 2021.

Our Brains, Our Selves by Masud Husain.

Whereless mind & soul?.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo (OHT) De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Life’s but a gainful game for players
Who wend and weave their moves upon the field,
And either win or lose. It is a game
Played by suckers, full of false promise,
Bamboozling all.

Further reading: An Invisible Global Social Value.

Cf. William Shakespeare Macbeth Act 5 Scene 5.

Modern mathematized physics postulates the principle of the universality of its laws. They are postulated to be the same throughout the universe, even though we humans only observe movements of the cosmos from Earth with various sorts of antennae or ‘telescopes’ in the broadest sense, from binoculars through to the very large antenna, Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, spread out in outer space to catch what physicists theorize to be gravitational waves corresponding to curved space-time in Einsteinian general relativity theory.

Since Newton at the latest, the laws of physics are expressed in equations in which the variables stand for physical quantities. Physical phenomena become mathematical symbols and quantitative empirical data become crucial for testing theoretical models. Initially these equations focused on formulating the law-like cosmological motion of physical celestial bodies, especially of the planets in our solar system. Einsteinian relativity theory radically altered Newtonian mechanics by postulating the relativity of all cosmological phenomena relative to an observer’s apparatus receiving signals from a cosmological event of any kind at the absolute speed of light, c. Henceforth time itself is interpreted as the path taken by electromagnetic radiation (light) from a physical event to an observer subject’s apparatus, incorporating a clock to register the signal’s time of arrival. Time in Einsteinian relativity is clock-time, the most superficial conception of time we humans have, as counted off physical movement. This seems not to worry physicists. It never crosses a physicist’s mind that time may not be a physical phenomenon.

Einstein’s brilliance in formulating his relativity theories included his seeking the equivalence of Newtonian principles when switching to relativistic space-time, perhaps the most important of these being the principles of conservation of energy and of momentum in physical collisions. Whereas in Newtonian physics, mass m is (axiomatically postulated to be) conserved in any collision, the relativistically transferred principle of conservation of momentum forces mass itself to be proportional to the velocity at which a physical entity is travelling. Hence rest mass, m0, differs from relativistic mass, m. Consequently, in hypothesized 4-dimensional space-time, conservation of momentum in the fourth temporal dimension enforces an equivalence of mass with kinetic energy, whereas in Newtonian 3-dimensional space it is implicitly assumed that the speed of light is infinite, so that the time variable is not relativistic at all, but universal. Hence there is no fourth temporal dimension at all.

The most famous consequence of the relativistic principle of conservation of momentum and thus the equivalence of mass and energy, is formulated in the equation E=m.c^2 or, in words, energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared. This astonishingly elegant result bequeaths us nuclear energy, including nuclear bombs. The mathematical model works.

Today’s mathematized physics presents itself as the foundational science for the theoretical explanation of ‘everything’ (despite the persisting stumbling block of a lack of theory of quantum gravity). This hubristic claim is pretty much accepted throughout the scientific community, including even the social sciences, since they do not have the methodological wherewithal to critique the claim. Today’s sciences are also conveniently separated into multiple silos called disciplines that defy unification, except that they are all methodologically empiricist. Empiricist thinking renders them all impotent to dig any deeper than facts.

Physics’ pretension to be foundational for all science is contradicted from the start by pointing out that there are kinds of movement that are not physical, and, in particular, not physical (loco)motion, which is the kind of physical movement amenable to mathematization. This kind of thinking is out of its depth when trying to interpret and conceptualize other kinds of movement including, besides mental movement, especially social interplay. Exchanging greetings or goods cannot be reduced to a physical movement, since such movements rely of mutual esteem and estimation between a plurality, i.e. at least a dyad, of players. Physical efficient causality admits of interaction between different causal forces, but not of interplay. Economic life requires exchanges of various sorts negotiated among among a plurality of players, even for indigenous peoples. Moreover, even their kind of economic life within ancient customs does not remain unaffected by today’s global capitalist economy. Their entire way of life may be destroyed by capitalism. Witness the history of European colonialism.

But what is capitalism? And what is its own law of movement? The movement of a capitalist economy cannot be somehow reduced to physical movement. The truth of capitalism and its law of movement is ugly rather than fair, and is therefore suppressed and covered up by deceptive ideologies. The simplest, and therefore deficient, schematic formula (not equation) for capital is:
M — C — M+ΔM,
where M and C stand for the money and commodity forms or ‘looks’ of thingified value, respectively, and ΔM stands for the ‘look’ of surplus thingified value. Thingified value itself is a phenomenon that remains invisible on the empirical surface; it requires a deeper kind of thinking (which may be called phenomenological or socio-ontological or speculative, among other terms) to be brought to light. The medium of thingified value is today the universal Medium of sociation, irreducible to the physical. So much for the pretensions of physics to lay down the laws of movement for ‘everything’. The global law of movement is the limitless valorization, i.e. augmentation and accumulation, of thingified value moving circularly through its intermeshing, complementary forms or ‘looks’ (comprising also labour power, raw materials, products, landed property, interest-bearing capital, investment capital, among others). Thingified value as this ubiquitous Medium of sociation remains invisible to today’s (’evidence-based’) scientific thinking, even in the social science of economics which, properly speaking, can ill afford this blindness.

The Medium seeps everywhere, affecting, for better or worse, every aspect of sociation from intimate privacy to the political to the geopolitical. For example, the modern state struggles to govern its populace within the strictures and constraints of the hitherto unknown, invisible Medium (in its value-forms of taxes, duties, fees, budgets, welfare benefits, environmental protection schemes, etc. etc.). Valorization of the Medium cannot be steered by the capitalist enterprises, nor by the state, nor by anything resembling a world government. Whether and the extent to which the Medium valorizes turns out as a retrospective (not a prospectively foreseen) result of the more or less ruthlessly competitive gainful game. Hence the economists, central banks, investors et al. are all continually waiting for the latest data on how the economy is doing.

Successful valorization is the (unreliable) precondition also for strength in today’s ruthless geopolitical power plays that, more often than not, are over commodity resources ripped from the Earth to feed the Medium’s unceasing valorization. Geopolitical hegemony of a nation requires the Medium’s superior valorization for that nation. And yet political scientists, political analysts, historians, journalists and politicians weighing in on debates over geopolitics have no inkling, let alone knowledge, of the global law of thingified value’s valorization. The same holds true for the social sciences in general.

Further reading: Wolfgang Rindler Relativity: Special, General and Cosmological 2nd. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006 Chapter 6 Relativistic particle mechanics.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Capitalocene & The global law of movement.

An Invisible Global Social Value.

Three laws of movement (again).