By JADIR ANTUNES*

Presentation of the recently released book by Zaira Vieira

1.

The work Dialectics and value in Marx and the classics of Marxism, by Zaira Vieira, which I now have the honor to present, the result of her doctoral thesis in Philosophy defended at Université Paris Nanterre and now translated into Portuguese, is a monumental discussion on, perhaps, the most important question of Karl Marx's thought and work: the question of the method of exposition.

Zaira Vieira's work is not only interested in exposing, debating and criticizing the main conceptions on the question of method, but, above all, in affirming her own original conception on the issue. Her central thesis, supported by a rich, extensive and complex bibliography, is based on the correct primacy that the theory of value in The capital presupposes a series of concepts and problems that will only be exposed and developed by Karl Marx throughout the exposition of the set of his critical positions regarding capital and its valorization process.

Such assumptions, still hidden in the brief presentation of the value problem exposed in the first section of The capital, are being exposed and, thus, determining and enriching what at the beginning appears as a great and arduous abstraction, as is the nature of the beginning of The capital, only throughout Marx's mature work.

The problem of value as a generic and abstract concept, as a social substance common to the world of commodities, as a substance that dominates the apparent world of equality and reciprocity of the simple circulation of commodities, becomes or appears, slowly, through the immanent logic of the object itself investigated by Marx, as a capitalist exchange between capital and labor power and, therefore, an unequal exchange, an exchange of non-equivalents, insofar as the worker delivers more value and more labor than he receives from the capitalist.

This same exchange, now of non-equivalents, according to the logic of the object itself investigated and exposed by the letter of Karl Marx, soon dissipates and becomes mere circulation without exchange, a mere change of hands of wealth without exchange, without reciprocity and without equivalence, when surplus value is accumulated and converted into capital and the capitalist begins to buy labor with the worker's own labor, as appears in the section on the reproduction of capital.

If at the beginning of the exhibition of The capital, in this abstract beginning in which value appears as a mere gelatin of labor as such, in which the agents of exchange appear in the abstract figures of buyer and seller of external and alienable things, in which the worker does not yet appear as the seller of a commodity that is neither differentiated nor separated from the body and soul of the seller, in which classes and the essential difference between the true agents of the exchange process are abstracted, as early as chapter four, however, this world of abstractions, of freedom, equality, reciprocity and equivalence, a world on which liberal ideology feeds, collapses to reveal the worker selling himself as a commodity in exchange for money.

Immediately afterwards, in the fifth chapter and inside the factory, the production process appears as a process of consumption of the purchased merchandise, as consumption of the body, of a living human body, as consumption of the physical and intellectual energies of the seller himself, of the labor force merchandise, the merchandise that underpins the existence of all other merchandise and the entire process of simple exchange that initially appeared in the exposition.

According to Zaira Vieira's correct thesis, the simple circulation of commodities, things being produced and exchanged as commodities, equal labor time as a measure of value, fetishism, reification, and the dominion of money over human life are not, in fact, comprehensible in and of themselves, since their correct understanding requires advancing reading and exposition beyond the domains of simple exchange presented in the first section of The capital.

The correct understanding of this beginning requires the advancement of the exposition according to the demands of the investigated object itself, since it requires the exposition of the as yet unexposed assumptions of the being of capital: the existence of the worker as a seller of labor power, of the seller separated from the ownership of the means of production and subsistence, of the seller who, separated from these means, possesses only the power to work but not the means and materials necessary for the conversion of this power into reality, since these means and materials are now properties of a being foreign to the world of work, of a being who only sees work as the source of valorization of his capital.

2.

It is thus, conceiving the need for a complete and total reading of The capital that Zaira Vieira analyzes and criticizes the vast Marxist literature on the problem of value and the method of exposition employed by Marx in The capital. The first in line to be criticized by Zaira Vieira is Friedrich Engels, the first and most influential of all interpreters of Karl Marx and The capital which attributes an empirical and factual character to the beginning of this book, considering the beginning as a supposed simple mode of production of goods in which the law of value would have directly prevailed, a mode of production that would have historically preceded capitalism.

The second of them is Vladimir Lenin who, unaware of the floorplans, in which the problems related to Marx's method were better exposed, recommends reading the Science of Logic of Hegel as a means of overcoming Karl Marx's methodological gaps.

After these, and based on a fruitful analysis of Marx, based especially on the readings of Roman Rosdolsky and György Lukács, there follow the works of a list of renowned interpreters such as Martin Nicolaus, Moishe Postone, Hans-Georg Backhaus, Della Volpe, Norberto Bobbio and Louis Althusser, which are patiently analyzed and criticized by Zaira Vieira.

The author tirelessly strives to show the abstract character of the beginning, and that this abstraction is due precisely to the fact that it is the beginning of a dialectical process of exposition that rises from the most immediate, simple and formal determinations of the object investigated to the deepest and most hidden real determinations, such as the determinations that begin to emerge from the second section, in which the purchase and sale of labor power arises, up to the ultimate determinations that are produced from this second section, such as those that arise from the production of surplus value, the accumulation and reproduction of capital, the primitive accumulation of capital and, finally, from classes, the class struggle, the negation of the negation, the expropriation of the expropriators, the crisis of capital and the total failure of the process of valorization of value as a whole that emerge at the end of the exposition in the letter of chapter XXIV – The so-called primitive accumulation.

Wanting to find all the concrete and fundamental determinations right at the beginning of the exhibition, refusing to go through and patiently, dialectically analyze the entire exhibition The capital, refusing to intimately connect the most abstract concepts to the most complex and concrete ones and to understand the most complex and concrete ones as presuppositions and foundations of the most abstract and primary ones, the interpreters pointed out and criticized by Zaira Vieira, with the exception of Vladimir Lenin and in a certain sense also Friedrich Engels, thus fell, infertile and lifeless, into the arms of positivism, structuralism and academic scientism.

Their legacies, therefore, did not produce any movement, did not inspire any generation of revolutionary activists and never went beyond the walls of the magazines and research institutes of European universities. The work Dialectics and value in Marx and the classics of Marxism, by Zaira Vieira, is, for these reasons, a work of obligatory reading and study for the rescue of the critical, dialectical and revolutionary vivacity of Marx's thought, work and method, a method that aims to explain not only the meaning, nature and logic of the fundamental economic categories of capitalist society, but, above all, to scientifically explain the nature of the way of life dominated by capital and how this same way of life creates, contradictorily, the material and spiritual means necessary for its own revolutionary overcoming.

*Jadir Antunes Professor of Philosophy at Unioeste. Co-author, with Hector Benoit, of The problem of the capitalist crisis in Marx's Capital (Editorial Pack).

Reference

Zaira Vieira. Dialectics and value in Marx and the classics of Marxism. Jundiaí, Paco Editorial, 2024, 392 pages. [https://amzn.to/4jG6yjA]