Marx after Hegel: Capital as totality and the centrality of production

This article reclaims the most contested legacies of Marxian theory, arguing that value is the monetary expression of labour time alone, and that the relationship with Hegel is fundamental and positive. The categories of totality and of real abstraction play a key role in Capital. They are ‘structuring’ value, and both are literally incomprehensible without a reference to Hegel’s systematic dialectics and positing of the presupposition. I distinguish the interpretation of what Marx has written from the reconstruction of the Marxian critique of political economy. The former must be the most generous as possible towards the ‘letter’ of Marx, without however hiding the tensions and contradictions. The latter must be faithful to the ‘spirit’ of Marx but going in new directions. The reconstruction of the Marxian theory that I propose (i) is a macrosocial perspective; (ii) shifts the emphasis from money as the final universal equivalent to money as prior finance (providing the monetary ante-validation in the buying and selling of labour power, and the monetary imprinting of the immediate valorisation process); (iii) looks at money and abstract labour as processual dimensions within the capitalist monetary circuit (capital is ‘money in motion’ because it is abstract labour ‘in motion’); (iv) ultimately grounds the labour theory of (surplus-)value (which is actually a value theory of (capitalist) labour) in the capitalist labour process as contested terrain. Marx’s monetary labour theory of value develops into a macro-monetary theory of capitalist production, while capital as a totality is constituted by capital as a social relation of production.