Fixing the Economists Article of the Week

by Philip Pilkington

Hour-long, by hour, may we two stand
When we’re dead, between these lands
The sun set behind his eyes
And Joe said, “Is this desire?” — PJ Harvey, ‘Is This Desire?‘

I’ll be honest: I hate discussing Marx, dialectical materialism and the Labour Theory of Value (hereafter: LTV). Why? Because it’s like discussing monetary theory with a hyperinflation obsessed Austrian; they don’t have enough grounding to have a discussion as they’ve only really read their side of the debate. Even those Marxists that have read Hegel come away with an understanding that is so deeply biased by Marx’s perversions of dialectical philosophy that they don’t get what poor uncle Hegel is saying at all.

Anyway, with all that in mind I’m going to here quickly lay out why the LTV requires Marx’s materialist dialectic to function philosophically. In order to understand this we must first understand how “value” functions in Hegel.

For Hegel value is an inter-subjective phenomenon that arises out of a desire for recognition by the Other. The great French Hegelian Alexandre Kojève was the one who put this most succinctly. In an excellent essay on Kojève entitled A Problem of Recognition Michael Roth summarises the answer to the question as such:

Kojeve begins with the question, “What is Hegelian man?” and answers it by explicating the structure of human desire, in contradistinction to the needs or demands of the animal. Human desire is the desire for recognition (reconnaissance), which, according to Kojeve’s Hegel, alone can lead to self-consciousness. Human desire, properly so-called, has as its object another desire and not another thing.” Thus, it is an animal desire which draws one to the body of another, but a human desire which is expressed as the wish to be desired, loved or-most generally for Kojeve-recognized by another. The essential mark of human desire is that it does not consume its object. The satisfaction of a human desire is thereby creative, since its object is empty. Desire, Kojeve says (following Hegel) is the presence of an absence. To make the same point somewhat differently: the satisfaction of human desire requires some form of mutuality (the loved one “returns” the love), or social recognition of an object’s value (a medal is given social value; the enemy fights to keep its flag). When satisfaction occurs, something new is introduced into the world (a useful object becomes beautiful; two individuals become a couple). For the satisfaction to endure, the desire qua object has to be preserved, albeit in an altered state. The simultaneous preservation and change (negation) marks the dialectic of human desire. The effort at satisfaction and conservation demands that this dialectic be linked with the development of self-consciousness. (Pp295-296, My Emphasis)