Living Amidst the Catastrophes of “the Living Contradiction”:

Abstract

Two hundred years after Marx’s birth, we find ourselves living amid thecatastrophes of what Marx terms “the living contradiction.” I argue here thatMarx’s immanent critique of capitalist society’s “economic law of motion”remains the indispensable basis for any coherent understanding of capital todayand, hence, of any revolutionary project to bring about capital’s demise andsupersession. This essay develops a careful reading of a discrete section fromGrundrisse where we find key elements of Marx’s critique in concentrated form. Ifocus on the way that Marx consistently frames capital as contradiction – a set ofbarriers or limits that capital posits, presses past, and in superseding, posits againat a higher level of contradiction – culminating in Marx’s formulation of capitalas “the living contradiction.” In conversation with contemporary value-formtheory I consider what makes this contradiction living; in particular I considerthe intertwined phenomena of class decomposition and surplus population asthe phenomenal expressions of what value-form theorists have termed “asocialsociality,” the characteristic condition of commodity-subjects under capital.Ultimately, I contend that Marx remains the seminal theorist of capitalism, andthat his immanent critique of the capital-relation and the value-form remains notmerely relevant, but necessary and indispensable if we are to understand, and,more important, survive the pervasive crises of the present.