The magnitude of value

In examining Marx's analysis of the essential structuring social forms of capitalist society, I have focused thus far on his category of abstract labor and on some basic implications of his argument that the social relations characteristic of capitalism are constituted by labor. What also characterizes these social forms, according to Marx, is their temporal dimension and quantifiability. Marx introduces these aspects of the commodity form early in his discussion, when he considers the problem of the magnitude of value. In discussing his treatment of that problem, I shall show its central significance in Marx's analysis of the nature of capitalist society. On this basis, I will consider more closely the differences between value and material wealth, and begin examining the issue of capitalism and temporality—which will lay the groundwork for my consideration, in the last part of this book, of Marx's conception of the trajectory of capitalist development. In the process, I shall also develop further aspects of the sociohistorical theory of knowledge and subjectivity outlined above. This will set the stage for a critical examination of Jüirgen Habermas's critique of Marx, which will conclude my discussion of the trajectory of Critical Theory as an attempt to formulate a social critique adequate to the twentieth century. At that point I will be in a position to begin reconstructing Marx's category of capital.

The problem of the magnitude of value appears, at first glance, to be far simpler and more direct than that of the categories of value and abstract human labor.