Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Introduction
Conclusions
Notes
1. The term ‘technological paradigm’ was introduced by
DeVroey (1982) in order to refer to those theories
preoccupied with the reduction of prices to their labour
content, as opposed to the ‘social paradigm’, consisting of
those theories whose emphasis was on the social validation
of private labour on the market. Other lines of theory that
developed in response to the demise of the orthodox
interpretation included the neo-Ricardian abandonment of
the labour theory of value (see Steedman, 1977)—a path
that was in germ in the Ricardian reading, as evidenced by
the development of Meek’s thought (Meek, 1973: xxxii). In
turn, many Marxists reacted to the neo-Ricardian criticism
by attempting to find sophisticated mathematical solutions
to the ‘transformation problem’, with the aim of showing,
on identical terms to those of their adversaries, that Marx’s
Value form and class struggle 31
15. De Angelis does not explicitly state that he sees the class
struggle as ontologically constitutive of capitalism. Still, he
does refer at one point to the ‘ontological emptiness of
meaning corresponding to production for production’s sake’
(De Angelis, 1995: 129), which is counter posed to the
(ontological?) ‘search for meanings, the outburst of
subjectivity, the constitution of communities, etc.’ (De
Angelis, 1995: 129). In a recent contribution from a slightly
different approach, but which reaches similar conclusions
to those of De Angelis, Chris Arthur makes the ontological
character of class struggle explicit (Arthur, 2001: 34).
16. The ontologisation of the class struggle thus results in the
location of the determinations of the subjectivity, which sets
into motion the abolition of the capitalist mode of production
outside capital itself, i.e. in some radical ‘otherness’ to the
capital form that is claimed to be its absolute opposite. What
follows from this is the view that the revolutionary negation
Value form and class struggle 35
References