Moishe on Value and Wealth

homogeneous labor time in political economy as the a priori precondition of the social world it purports merely to describe. 8. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1978), 53; emphasis in original. 118 | CRITICAL HISTORICAL STUDIES SPRING 2020 It is worth stressing that this specific critique of capitalism is ultimately epistemological rather than moral. Moishe acknowledged that distributive injustice tends to follow from concealed domination, just as it does from overt domination. So, the absence of overt domination would not make capitalism prima facie just. But Moishe thought that to focus on the spurious legitimation of injustice as capitalism’s defining feature would to be assimilate it to noncapitalist social formations, such as feudalism in which domination is mediated by social relations and religious practices that affect the distribution, but also the interpretation, of wealth. It is thus the concealment of injustice (as epistemic problem), and not injustice itself, that is historically specific to capitalism. But even if we set our concern for social justice aside, Moishe’s idea of direct mediation is puzzling on its face. How could it bemediation if it is direct? And inwhat sense could Moishe mean it to be direct, other than to deny that the value form is mediated by money and thus dominated by finance? Moishe’s stress on the directness of social mediation in capitalist production does, I think, require a diminished stress on the role of financial intermediaries and money markets. But even allowing for his choice to emphasize production, Moishe’s philosophical view that mediation can be direct within this realm is not extensively explained in his major book on capitalism, nor is it more fully developed in later papers. Like Ben and Ed, I have few stakes in the concept of direct mediation. We see finance as a form of indirect mediation that is historically specific to our present stage of capitalism and need have no quarrel with his tendency to assume that of financial valuation is a form of mediated sociality. But we do no regard this as a knock-down argument because for us the concept of direct mediation could, perhaps, be important in understanding capitalism only to the extent that there are spheres in which finance is not important. Otherwise, direct mediation appears to be something of an oxymoron, implying at the same time as it denies the existence of a third, or mediating, term through which the relation between two other terms can be interpreted. In Peircean semiotics, for example, there is always a third, mediating, sign that refers to the relation between a signifier and the object that it signifies. The relation of the third sign to the signifier-object relation can be one of self-similarity (as in a metaphor) or contiguity (as in a metonym); it can be one of causation or of abstraction in Moishe’s sense; such abstraction can take the form of symbolization that may or may not also consist of commensuration, as when money becomes both a symbol and a common denominator of the social relations between agents and things. From a semiotic perspective, Moishe’s central concept of abstraction itself is merely a particular form of mediation that interprets production as creating wealth Moishe on Value and Wealth | 119 (accumulated exchange value) out of something else that Marx calls use value. The semiotician Paul Kockelman thus describes Moishe’s version of Marx as one in which “the commodity is at once the object to be investigated and the method of investigation. In this way, an ontology ultimately grounded in a subject-object dichotomy is one of the ideational reflexes of 19th-century capital; and must therefore be used as a theoretical tool for interpreting that form of capitalism.” In contrast to Moishe’s “dialectical” approach, Kockelman claims to ground “the commodity in a semiotic. And hence rather than systemically unfold a subject-object dichotomy, it systemically deploys a sign-object-interpretant trichotomy.” Moishe was well aware of Peircean semiotics while he wrote Time, Labor, and Social Domination—he was discussing it with Ben and Ed at the time. But they were not then working on financial derivatives, and Moishe’s decision to focus on the process of abstraction as what Kockelman calls the “subject-object dichotomy” rather than “a sign-object-interpretant trichotomy” must be seen as a conscious rejection of semiotic accounts of social performativity with which he would have been highly familiar. The roots of this rejection are, I think, deeply grounded in the theological dimensions of his view. Monotheism understands itself to be a secondary form of religion, based on a repudiation of the idolatry that accompanies polytheistic forms of worship. Stated in Moishean terms, the monotheistic critique is that idol worship is really a form of indirect mediation between humans and gods by a humanly…