49
Filozofski vestnik | Volume XL | Number 3 | 2019 | 49–71
* School of Economics and Business, University of Ljubljana
In autumn 2008, the global economy encountered a severe economic downturn. 
At the time, the common belief held was that fiscal and monetary authorities had 
enough strength to manage the inherent instabilities and systemic risk in the 
economic system. The centralised monetary system, along with its satellites –  
private banking and insurance and mortgage companies – started a domino 
effect of defaults and homeowner foreclosures, pushing national economies 
close to sovereign debt defaults. The proceeding aftermath of all these events 
is historically recorded. An alternative view, which went along the lines of ma-
jor economic interventionist actions to salvage the banking system, almost im-
mediately emerged. In March 2009, some of the leading western philosophers 
evoked the “Idea of Communism” proposing an alternative agenda to insur-
mountable social antagonisms in the capitalist system of today. The leitmotif of 
the conference can be summed up with the statement: “The communist hypoth-
esis is the hypothesis of emancipation”
1
. In a nutshell, we are confronted with 
the resurrection of the word communism, deriving from its political implications. 
Determined in this way, it completely forecloses the possibility of inquiry into 
the causes of the economic and social crisis and therefore delivers none of the 
political practices and actions, which should be the “main weapon of the Left”. 
Indeed, it becomes a sad reversal of positions when we firstly identify the cri-
tique of political economy as the sine qua non for the reinvigoration of contem-
porary communist politics and then several years later withdraw ourselves with 
an inversed XI
th
 Thesis on Feuerbach: “it is not to change the world but to try 
to interpret it”
2
. Alain Badiou had also withdrawn the initial call for political 
action in 2009 and transformed the emancipatory “programme” into a dialec-
tic of principles – collectivism against private property, a polymorphous worker 
1
 Cf. Jacques Rancière quotes Alain Badiou, “Communists without communism”, in: A. 
Douzinas and S. Žižek (Eds.), The Idea of Communism, Verso, New York 2010, p. 163. 
2
 Cf. Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times, Verso, New York 2010, p. 185. And “Interview with 
Slavoj Žižek”, in Philosophy Now, 7. 11. 2017, accessible via https://philosophynow.org/is-
sues/122/Slavoj_Zizek  
Uroš Kranjc*
The Absent Cause and Marx's Value Form
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uroš kranjc
against specialization, concrete universalism against closed identities, and free 
association against the state.
3
 Or as Jacques Rancière had put it, calling into 
account the paradox of Joseph Jacotot, whose emancipation of (communist) in-
telligence is denied by the possibility of emancipation occurring only between 
individuals, since (communist) emancipation simply cannot be brought up inter 
alia with the (individualist) emancipation of commons or that of the social body.
One would expect such a moment or momentum to be seized by some Marxist 
or leftist political action. Rather, it was seized by an anarcho-libertarian indi-
vidualist course of action. Anarcho-capitalism or its newest avatar, the Crypto-
anarchism with cryptocurrencies as its main mediator emerged on the other 
side of the Great Recession, placing in monetary orbit a new object as medium 
of exchange – the cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies can be viewed today as one 
of the immediate consequences of the central banking debacle during the times 
of economic turmoil. Observing the current course of events, we can sincerely 
question the actual fate of cryptocurrencies – whether they will grow into a sus-
tainable alternative money-commodity or will the blockchain eventually become 
integrated in its reversal, i.e. a globally fragmented authoritarian money regime. 
To turn this disposition around, we have to pose an altogether different ques-
tion: Are cryptocurrencies a “real” alternative to the universality of (fiat) money? 
More than just a handful of people actually think that a decentralized medium 
of exchange poses a concrete challenge to (supra)national central banking as 
long as it is able to maintain other functions, namely: withholding its store of 
value, expanding as a means of payment, and becoming a recognizable unit of 
account. Indeed, this is what crypto-anarchic individuals want to accomplish: 
indulge a decentralized, and more importantly, anonymous structuring of the 
exchange totality. From this point of view, they have most definitely seized the 
momentum. But their quest for reshaping the capitalist mode of production via 
the imaginary destruction of (fiat) money is a whole different matter. 
If we are to analyse the inner core of these new forms of money from the perspec-
tive of communist politics, then what is needed is a return to the critique of eco-
nomic categories and an investigation of their relations in respective totalities. 
Let us on the first take approach these issues through a provisional framework 
3
 Alain Badiou, “Reflections on the Recent Election”, Verso blog, 6.11.2017, accessible via 
www.versobooks.com/blogs/2940-alain-badiou-reflections-on-the-recent-election.
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the absent cause and marx's value form
by employing the literary/linguistic operations of metonymy and metaphor. 
Jacques Lacan strongly relied on these two operations to describe the metonym-
ic sliding of desire (object), where the lack of being is instated. And on the other 
side, a metaphorical instalment of the symptom, insofar the substitution of one 
chain for another induces the subject’s access to it (and with it to its desire-ob-
ject). Consequently, what is evoked here of course is the logic of the signifier, 
linking together the object with the subject within a certain minimal structure. 
Next, we wish to test the concept of cryptocurrency against this logic, aiming 
to show that they are no more than a particular variation of money-commodity 
in the capitalist mode of production and in the end leading to the structures of 
production and exchange in Marx’s conception of value form.
Starting with the metonymic relationship, we have different types of money 
(commodity money, fiat money, fiduciary money, bank money, and now crypto-
currency money) which all perform the same modalities as far as the economic 
system is concerned – they are part of the same universal Whole – the monetary 
exchange.
The metaphoric relationship completes the structure of metonymic causality; it 
does so by installing a determinate relation in the gap between two commodi-
ties (two moneys). A relation which introduces an absent cause – specific social 
relations of production – posing as a substanceless identity of abstract labour 
and concrete labour.
The aim of this provisional schema is twofold: the more obvious first point of de-
parture is the Althusserian understanding of “[t]he absence of the cause in the 
structure’s ‘metonymic causality’ on its effects is not the fault of the exteriority 
of the structure with respect to its economic phenomena; on the contrary, it is 
the very form of the interiority of the structure, as a structure, in its effects.”
4
 Our 
main focus will be Rancière’s contribution to the work Reading Capital entitled 
“The Concept of ‘Critique’ and the ‘Critique of Political Economy’” in trying to 
unveil the metaphorical relationship between the unity of abstract and concrete 
labour presented as an absent cause of a determinate social relation in the cap-
italist mode of production. This is compounded by commodity exchange (the 
totality of circulation), mediated with a specific object – a money commodity. 
4
 Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, Verso, London 2009, p. 208.
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uroš kranjc
But in order to understand where this money commodity emerges from, we have 
to make a qualitative leap, distinguishing Marx from his earlier anthropological 
writings (Economic manuscripts) and scientific delineation in Capital. We need 
to deepen our analysis of the “Dialectics of the value form”. This work (“On the 
Dialectics of the Value-form”) introduced by Hans Georg Backhaus in 1969 pre-
sents a blueprint for a research programme called New Reading of Marx (Neue 
Marx Lektüre), initiated alongside Helmut Reichelt, Alfred Schmidt and others. 
This new reading of the first edition of Capital sheds light on a dialectical con-
tradiction immanent in the “equivalent form” of value, which involves a differ-
ent interpretation in the mode of presentation from the one Marx endorses in 
the second edition of Capital. It all comes down to the following question: how 
does one construct the notion of value that predetermines the notional develop-
ment of money?
To quote H. G. Backhaus:
All the magic and hubbub which belongs the products of labour on the basis of 
commodity production’ manifests itself in the paradoxical relation in which the 
commodity is itself and at the same time its other: money. It is therefore the iden-
tity of identity and non-identity. The commodity is equal in essence to money 
and at the same time different from it. The ‘unity in difference’ is designated as 
is known with the Hegelian term “doubling” (Verdopplung). This dialectical con-
cept is used by Marx to characterise the structure of commodity-money equation: 
Commodity exchange ‘produces a doubling of the commodity into commodity and 
money, an external opposition in which they represent their immanent opposi-
tion of use-value and value. 
The commodity-money equation is the economic dissolution (Aufhebung) of the 
Principle of Identity.
5
 
To return to our metonymic relationship and the example of cryptocurrency 
among other types of money: we are dealing with an addition to the moneys 
chain, which consolidates the Universal, i.e. money-object. All these concrete 
moneys are partial displacements of the concrete universal – money. We shall 
5
 Hans-Georg Backhaus, “On the Dialectics of the Value-Form”, Thesis Eleven, 1 (1/1980),  
p. 109.
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the absent cause and marx's value form
add the following thesis: It is against this background that one should reject 
the optimistic call for sublating altogether the notion of money with reliance on 
cryptocurrencies in our capitalist institutional framework. Furthermore, if we 
want to act on communist politics via the critique of political economy, we need 
to insist on dismantling the structure of the “social relation of things”, walk 
through the “genesis of abstract value-objectivity” (Wertgegenständlichkeit) and 
unveil the relation between a subject objectifying itself as an object on the axis: 
labour – value – money. Value as the central term is on the one hand some-
thing being thought, immaterial, living only in consciousness, but also always 
only the value of a product, something material. In order to fulfil its mission, 
it must achieve a reality of its own for consciousness, which is first of all al-
ien to it and second, also takes a fantastic shape and fetishist character. Both 
the Althusserian reading of the Capital and New Reading of Marx have brought 
up different structural frameworks to disentangle the dialectical play of central 
concepts in the critique of political economy; now we must put them together 
in an orderly fashion, so as to fully comprehend and, crucially, simultaneously 
pave concrete actions leading to communist politics.   
Abstract labour and subtractive structure
In his preparatory writings on the critique of political economy, Marx starts 
Grundrisse with the analysis of simple circulation, trying to establish a succes-
sive presentational linkage for his later works ranging from 1. value, 2. mon-
ey and 3. capital in general. A parallax shift came with A Contribution to the 
Critique of Political Economy, and later Capital, when his inquires deepened 
and abstracting from “Capital in general” established “the Commodity” and its 
double character as a point of departure. In addition to its use value, a par-
ticular commodity also possesses an exchange value. Use value is its usefulness 
and utility that one derives from its usage or consumption of its natural form. 
Exchange value is something inherently different, a social property of a thing, 
exchanged on a market. Michael Heinrich in his reading of Marx introduces an 
univocal relation between commodity and labour in the following way: “If the 
commodity has a twofold character, as use value and value, than commodi-
ty-producing labour must also have a twofold character: it is labour that not only 
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produces a use value, but also value.”
6
 This means that concrete labour cre-
ates qualitatively different use values of determinate commodities. On the other 
hand, we have abstract labour, which is the originator of value, i.e. is a value 
substance, as the “crystals” of abstract labour our commodities represent “val-
ues”. As such, labour is qualitatively equal human labour and abstracted from 
its concrete character. We know that Marx relied on the dialectical distinction 
between content and form, a gap that is still being entirely ignored by contem-
porary scientific economic theories in their attempt of maximal salvation of con-
sistency. To withstand all criticisms, these theories employ evermore complex 
mathematical formulae, but at the same time face a reflection of an incomplete 
Whole – a structure with some determinate but indiscernible content.
We propose the following: there is a recurring necessity of maintaining an open 
gap between content and form, or to put it differently, a theoretical challenge to 
outline a specific structural dimension of this gap and its implicit appearing in 
social exchange. The identity between concrete and abstract labour in the form 
of an absent cause is the starting point taken by Rancière in Reading Capital with 
which he draws the demarcation line between anthropological discourse of the 
young Marx in Economic Manuscripts and the scientific discourse of Capital. This 
cut represents a revolutionizing of scientific field, moving from ideological to 
scientific strata; it is also the implementation of a new discourse abolishing the 
one put forth by classical economics. In order to achieve this, we have to follow 
Marx’s path from the first edition of Capital, “since up to now it has only been the 
substance of value and the magnitude of value which have been specified, let us 
now direct our attention to the analysis of the form of value.”
7
 Marx acknowledges 
the contribution of David Ricardo to the science of economics, but points out the 
pitfalls that would later haunt classical economics in terms of quantitative magni-
tudes of value. For him, there is an alternative route of analysis: only after the me-
diating agency of value-form can we relate labour as a value substance with com-
modity exchange based on money. The relationship between content and form 
is introduced from a certain stage on; when labour ceases to present direct and 
exclusive origin of value (valid for classical economics) and is understood as rep-
6
 Michael Heinrich, An introduction to the three volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, Monthly Re-
view Press, New York 2012, p. 48.
7
 Karl Marx, “The Commodity. Chapter One, Volume One, of the first edition of Capital”, in: 
A. Dragstedt (Ed. and Trans.), Value: Studies By Karl Marx, New Park Publications, London 
1976, p. 16.
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the absent cause and marx's value form
resented in the exchange of commodities, which realize their value based on their 
exchangeability. The significance of value form stems from its duality – natural 
form and form of exchange –, where one can observe the “genesis” of money form. 
Following Rancière, we start the analysis of value form with the relation of two 
commodities, one that furnishes the simplest value-expression for a commodity:
x commodity A = y commodity B
 or
x commodity A is worth y commodity B
Commodities A and B are distinguished in a mutually exclusive relation, i.e. po-
lar relation, it is precisely in their opposition (although one active and the other 
passive) that the inner nature of simple value form lies. We say that the first com-
modity (A) stands in the relative value-form, while the second commodity (B) has 
its place in the equivalent form. Together they form moments of the same expres-
sion of value with recourse to their reciprocal conditioning and unity. Different 
pairings of commodities easily trade places in the value form, on the other hand 
what cannot occur is a situation where one commodity would take up both sides 
of the equation. Rearranging all the moments of value form, we get:
Form of value of A = Natural form of B
The background effect of a simple equation of two commodities immediately 
sets in motion the formation of a determinate social structure. This has decisive 
consequences: the introduction of value (of a certain commodity) is structurally 
determined with the identity of two opposing and mutually excluding poles. A 
commodity in the equivalent form cannot express its value: “It furnishes only 
the material for the expression of value in another commodity.”
8
 – the structure 
of Two implies a Third. “[Commodities] are neither equal as mere things, nor 
even as items of the same substance; they are equal in determinate formal con-
ditions imposed by the structure in which this relation is achieved.”
9
 Rancière 
8
 Karl Marx, “The Value-Form”, Capital and Class 4 (Spring 1978), p. 135.
9
 Jacques Rancière, “The Concept of ‘Critique’ and the ‘Critique of Political Economy’”, in: 
Ideology, method and Marx: essays from economy and society, Ali Rattansi (Ed.), Rout-
ledge, London 1989, p. 106.
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highlights the crucial difference of earlier Economic Manuscripts from Capital, 
first with its immediacy of contradiction in the (anthropological) equation: es-
sence of man = alienated man’s essence; an immediate contradiction, where the 
predicate exists separated from the subject, simultaneously finds its solution 
exactly in the unity of disjunction (alienation) – the essence of man is separat-
ed from the human subject. In the second case from Capital, we are presented 
with a more mystical equation – x commodity A = y commodity B – in which 
the value qua the cause of equality relation is absent. The natural form B has 
materialized the value of commodity A in its form of appearance without any 
recourse to their inner determinations – a common third –, i.e. the identity of 
concrete and abstract labour. This identity relation, or put inversely, the scission 
immanent in the notion of labour, is the product of a social process (its result 
is the structure with an absent cause) in Marx’s conceptual apparatus known as 
social relations of production.
Rancière’s reading of Marx through metonymic causality is stated as follows: 
“what determines the connection between the effects (the relations between 
commodities) is the cause (the social relations of production) in so far as it is ab-
sent. This absent cause is not labour as a subject, it is the identity of abstract la-
bour and concrete labour inasmuch as its generalisation expresses the structure 
of a certain mode of production, the capitalist mode of production.”
10
 Defined 
in such a way, the value form unfolds the problem of objectification of labour; it 
overturns the production process into simple circulation, where commodities be-
come exchanged on the same qualitative presupposition – the mutual exchange 
of labour. If we than paraphrase Althusser’s definition of structural causality: 
value form represents the first explication of a structure of sites stemming from 
immanence of an absent cause in its effects. The structure is called simple com-
modity exchange. This kind of setting is, something Althusser also implicitly ad-
mits, identical to the problem of inner connection, internal relationship [innere 
Zusammenhang] and outward form, outward appearance [Erscheinungsform]. It 
is precisely this gap between inner essence and phenomenal “surface” that is 
crucial for Marx in his methodological gateway from an abstract interior to a con-
crete, sensuous exterior. Rancière’s key contribution to the new reading of Marx 
is his delineation of structural causality inherent in the value form. This reading 
opened a new possibility of conjoining labour and value in a specific structure, 
10
 Ibid., p. 108.
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the absent cause and marx's value form
i.e. how the value of labour can be thought in unity with production, circulation 
and exchange. But in order for Marx’s understanding of the commodity-object to 
have any grounding in value form per se, he has to deliver his famous passage: 
The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the 
fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as 
objective characteristics of products of labour themselves, as socio-natural prop-
erties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers 
to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which 
exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution, the prod-
ucts of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time 
supra-sensible or social.
11
This type of phantasmagorical form of a relation of things is only attributable to 
determinate social relations among people; on the other hand, this particular 
social character underpins our perception of economic objectivity. The transpo-
sitional structure among people and things conforms to the metonymic mani-
festation of social character, by which we mean encircling the notion of value as 
a “natural” property of things-in-themselves. Sensuous super-sensuous things 
are simultaneously forms of appearance of value and a special object insomuch 
as its properties mark social relations in a specific structure of semblance. When 
dealing with this type of forms and structure, we are confronted with the be-
longing of the constitutive lack’s non-belonging – the unity of abstract and con-
crete labour. 
Just to clarify our position, let us introduce some basic determinations of the val-
ue form. Marx intended to distinguish his labour theory of value from Ricardo’s 
transformational immediacy on the basis of the scission: content and form. For 
Ricardo, there was an immediate law: Labour is value (creating); for Marx on the 
other hand, accordingly to content-form distinction, value represents labour by 
taking on its form in the value of commodities. Consequently, the commodities 
as use-values now become “substantial bearers” of exchange-value. Exchange-
values of different things are expressed as the quantum of the same qualitative 
determination – “value-forming substance”. From here on, we can speak of 
11
 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, Penguin books, London 
1993, p. 164–165. 
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uroš kranjc
qualitative value-equality of different use values. This is immediately followed 
by the definition of “is exchange value of” equilibrating different commodities of 
the same value magnitude into an equivalent relation, x of linen = y of coat. If we 
were to interpret an equation so defined in a scientific discourse of economics, 
we would get a zero-sum game; a structure of exchange, where no changes are 
made in terms of (cardinal) values. Value-objectivity [Wertgegenständlichkeit] is 
in a capitalist social formation first and foremost expressed with this equation, 
but also one where Marx obfuscates the ambivalence in relations of equality 
[Gleichheitverhältnis] and polarity [Polaritätsverhältnis], which is internal to the 
expression »is exchange value of”. 
On the other hand, this development of a contradiction in the use and exchange 
value alongside the process of exchange presupposes the “cell” form of capital 
commodity. In A contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and later in 
Capital, Marx had already introduced the problem of the social division of la-
bour into abstract and concrete labour. A unity that has to be analysed against 
the backdrop of commodity exchange in order to obtain the final answer to the 
following question: “why this content assumes that form”. The value substance 
of a commodity, understood of course in the form of time duration or magnitude 
of labour-time, is social labour as labour in general of a specific social structure 
– the capitalist mode of production. A new reading of Marx conceives this labour 
in general as preceding the de facto act of exchange, so we must think of its posi-
tion in the structure as being on a new, subtracted level, evading the superficial 
analysis of commodity exchange, and simultaneously taking into account the re-
doubling in commodity and money. A contradiction between use and exchange 
value has for its ground the resolved contradiction of social-human labour, ab-
stract and concrete labour that is, firstly, subtracted and, secondly, substituted 
with the initiation of value. Moishe Postone introduces a similar configuration:
Value, then, is unfolded by Marx as the core of a form of social mediation that 
constitutes social objectivity and subjectivity, and is intrinsically dynamic: it is a 
form of social mediation that necessarily exists in objectified, materialized form, 
but is neither identical with, nor an inherent property of, its materialized form, 
whether in the shape of money or goods. The way in which Marx unfolds the 
category of capital retrospectively illuminates his initial determination of value 
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the absent cause and marx's value form
as an objectified social relation, constituted by labor, that is carried by, but exists 
“behind,” the commodities as objects.
12
  
This expansion [Movement of capital], this ceaseless motion is, within the frame-
work of Marx’s analysis, intrinsically related to the temporal dimension of value. As 
we shall see, Marx’s concept of self-valorizing value attempts to grasp an alien-
ated form of social relations that possesses an intrinsic temporal dynamic; this 
alienated form constitutes an immanent logic of history, gives rise to a particular 
structure of labor, and continually transforms social life while reconstituting its 
underlying capitalist character.
13
If we disentangle Postone’s complex formulation we actually get a crystallized 
overview of relations and objects in Marx’s critical analysis – the connections 
between value, labour, commodity, money and capital. His interpretation sug-
gests different levels of social objectivity with a direct link to the subjective mo-
ment residing inside them – it incorporates value as a form of social relation 
(circulation), reflected through the mediation of use and exchange, taking the 
material shape of a specific object, i.e. money-commodity. One of the aspects of 
the new reading of Marx is the differential abstraction of so-called “natural ex-
change”. It breaks with the transhistorical notion of product-exchange devoid of 
concrete existence from that of circulation in a concrete social mode of produc-
tion. Contemporary economics has followed the former path; for Marx, utilizing 
relative exchange ratios in terms of prices and money as a “technical-material 
instrument, cunningly devised” and where value corresponds only to subjec-
tive-aspirations is for him an unconceivable thought [Denkunmöglichkeit]. From 
this point of view, both traditional Marxist and subjectivist theories paradoxical-
ly miss the point, because they have to abstract value out of money, while on the 
other hand simultaneously seek to endorse money as an instrumental means 
for an (already) price-determined value exchange of goods. They get twirled up 
in a double measure-bind of value – labour time/utility and money. Combining 
the simple or accidental form of value, one that presupposes the equivalence of 
two commodities based on exchanged quanta of labour time, with the special 
commodity of labour power – the source of creating value and objectified labour. 
12
 Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical 
Theory, Cambridge University Press, New York 1996, p. 269.
13
 Ibid., p. 269–270. 
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It is the ability of one bearer [Träger] in the form of possessor of money or cap-
italist to find a “free” human being who sells his labour capacity for a limited 
amount of time to him in order to determine a fruitful relationship among them. 
An individual’s freedom resides in the possession of his labour-capacity (as his 
only property) and the ability to temporarily resell it for consumption to a pos-
sessor of money. The spheres of production and circulation now form this dou-
ble movement from C – M – C and M – C – M’ to expanded M – C … P … C’ – M’.
The introduction of labour-power sublates the simple commodity exchange and 
brings forward a new stage in the development of the social process; by solving 
the initial contradiction of commodity exchange and surplus value it instated the 
one between wage as the value of labour (power) against labour as the source 
of value. Rancière pinpoints this new structure by concentrating on the contra-
diction implied in simple value form, one of un/equivalent exchange, so that we 
have a special commodity in circulation – labour-power – which is the source of 
value for other commodities and is simultaneously objectified (as work-capacity) 
and exchanged for other commodities, even though the cause is absent in the 
form. It is the presupposition of the equivalence axiom that enables the com-
modity labour-power to be exchanged for all other commodities, in the end lead-
ing to an “impossible equation”, an absent cause in the structure of relations of 
production presented via value form. This structure can be understood here as 
an asymmetric relation inherently expressed with the value form – in polarity be-
tween relative value form and equivalent form. Immediately after the commodity 
labour-power has taken its place in the value form, the qualitative determinations 
change: the abstraction of exchange traverses into class struggle, both belonging 
to a particular mode of production, where social human labour corresponds to 
wage-labour. In order to get a fuller grip on the structure and places of objects 
inside the capitalist institutional framework we now need to address the second 
specific object (alongside labour) – money-commodity. Both commodities, la-
bour-power and money, within the capitalist institutional framework, need our 
utmost attention: it is in the exclusive context of this particular structure that we 
encounter an overlapping of both objects in the exchange process. 
Money commodity and Capital
If we return once more to Backhaus and his On the Dialectics of the Value-Form, 
we must point out the following: two commodities do not come to be set equal, 
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the absent cause and marx's value form
they are already set equal. They are set equal to a third – money – out of which 
one derives value relation as value expression. Backhaus emphasises that we 
are dealing with an equal setting, but only insofar we observe the content; how-
ever, if we observe the form, the setting is unequal. On the one side, we have 
a commodity, on the other, its value expression, i.e. money. The outcome, of 
course, is the relative and equivalent form. Even though both products differ in 
their use values and are equal in value, they are in a relation after they achieve 
their value expression in a third, e.g. gold or silver, fiat or crypto money. Once 
products engage in the form of value, their relationship introduces the notion of 
commodification (they become of same essence – absolute value), they realize 
themselves in relative ratios of value (x commodity A = y commodity B). Products 
attain their properties as commodities only after they are put together in mutual 
relation to two use values; as such they also acquire a universal (supra-natural) 
property – (exchange) value –, products of labour, i.e. sensuous things, “are 
at the same time supra-sensible or social”
14
. In the picturesque language of his 
first draft, Marx demonstrates the existence of a universal inside a totality with 
a known passage: “It is as if alongside and external to lions, tigers, rabbits, and 
all other actual animals, […] there existed also in addition the animal, individual 
incarnation of the entire animal kingdom.”
15
 Juxtaposing products of labour in 
exchange, two use values mediated through value form, results in one of them 
becoming unequal with itself, thus positing this excess in the form of difference 
“of-its-own” in a third (equilibrating) term. This is why Backhaus calls the “uni-
ty” of value and use value “the unity in self-differentiation [that] presents itself 
as the doubling of the commodity into commodity and money”
16
. To quote Marx: 
“The internal opposition (between use value and value) enveloped in the com-
modity [...] is therefore represented on the surface by an external opposition.”
17
From the Grundrisse manuscript onwards, it becomes clear that Marx wanted 
to introduce a particular commodity – money – as a medium for economic val-
ue-determination, one whose contradiction arises as a “particular that repre-
sents itself as opposite, as universal”. All exchange values must enter equaliza-
tion vis-à-vis the general equivalent; it is only thereafter that they become val-
14
 Marx, Capital: Volume I, p. 149. 
15
 Marx, “The Commodity. Chapter One, Volume One, of the first edition of Capital ”, p. 27.
16
 Backhaus. “On the Dialectics of the Value-Form”, p. 111.
17
 Marx, Capital: Volume I, p. 153. 
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ue-equal and interchangeable. Our third thing, money, also has one peculiar and 
crucial determination: money is a semblance and reality at the same time. The 
metamorphosis of commodities is mediated through price markings: two things 
connect with the third (money) and constitute a shift in form, starting with C – M –  
C and finishing in C – C. “Circulation sweats money from every pore.”
18
 After the 
extinguished exchange process, there remains no direct trace of money taking 
place, one sees only two parties with satisfied needs. Material occurrence of val-
ue in money is accounted in order to vanish, to subtract itself from the world of 
commodities. More succinctly, money-commodity gives sense to the entire chain 
of commodity circulation and paradoxically, itself remains undetermined in a 
relation connecting value with a (price-determined) world of commodities.
We have said that the general equivalent (money) assumes the form of the gen-
eral material representative of wealth, as such a particular-individual commod-
ity among all others, the animal among all concrete animals in the world. The 
relative and equivalent form constitute a relation of use and exchange value, 
but also that of commodity and money, modelled on Hegel’s essential relation
19
 
(Besondern – Allgemeinen – Einzeln). Marx follows Hegel’s dialectical steps in 
terms of a sensuous-supersensuous thing (sensible super-sensible thing) [sinn-
lich übersinnliches Ding], a subjective-objective object, determined as a real-uni-
versal or real-abstraction. Heinrich gives us clues how one should approach a 
sensuous-supersensuous thing: “The ‘super-sensuous’ of the commodity is not 
the content of value-determination, but rather the form, value, a specific ob-
jectivity of value. This supra-sensuous part of commodity gets a sensuous ex-
istence in money-commodity.”
20
 So, the property of super-sensuous cannot be 
attained by any sensuous instance, it [the value] needs support for its concrete 
manifestation. The immediate existence of value, i.e. value as such, is an ab-
straction; a real object can always only represent it. Doubling then firstly implies 
the existence of categories ideally (in the head), as well as the existence of the re-
al-universal [Real-Allgemeine], a real abstraction, objectification, an “objective 
form of thought”, an “absurd form” residing in economic objectivity. This dou-
bling presents itself immanently in the contradictions of price implementation 
18
 Ibid., p. 208. 
19
 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik II. Erster Teil. Die objektive Logik. 
Zweites Buch. Zweiter Teil. Die subjektive Logik, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. M., 2014, “Wesen-
tliche Verhältniss”, p. 164–185.
20
 Michael Heinrich, Wissenschaft vom Wert, Westfälisches Dampfboot, Münster 2006, p. 235. 
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the absent cause and marx's value form
(“Exchange value, posited in the character of money, is price. Exchange value is 
expressed in price as a specific quantity of money.”
21
) 
The following question arises: how are we to think the conjunction of a par-
ticular with the (real) universal, concrete and abstract, arising from value form? 
We will proceed with the aim of introducing a possible new representation of 
relations inherent in the structure of value form, one that subsumes in unity 
the economic categories regarding their ideal and real form. Marx defines mon-
ey as a universal form of wealth, a general material representative, a totality 
of particularities that form its substance. Wealth [represented in money] is (ex-
change) value as totality and as abstraction individualized and excluded against 
all commodities; or negatively, the world of commodities becomes a totality, and 
non-All, after wealth (as money) had been expunged from it. What successive-
ly follows is the development of labour and capital categories; with dialectical 
unfolding of social relations (particular and universal), concrete labour deter-
mines a notion with moments that include all particular forms of labour, from 
tailoring to agriculture, one and the other, even though it is neither first or sec-
ond, but a third as totality – human labour-in-general.
To recap: using a provisional framework of metonymy/metaphor we introduced 
a certain type of structure with two series. As far as metonymic sliding goes, 
we have interchangeable variations of concrete moneys driving monetary ex-
change, all of which correspond to the real abstraction, an object of the Whole –  
money. Money is an excess, one that completes the totality of exchange as long 
as it ceaselessly subtracts itself from exchange, thus making it non-All. However, 
a productive process propels exchange; in the range of different concrete la-
bour-creating use values, there comes along labour-in-general, abstract labour 
which mediates exchange value and their unity engenders a social process with 
an absent cause (social relations of production posited as a filled void in the 
formula x commodity A = y commodity B). The value form is a representational 
model, introducing a synthesis of two series – one with an excess, the other with 
a lack. This type of structure has been thematized on more than one occasion
22
; 
21
 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, Penguin Books, 
London 1993, p. 189.
22
 Deleuze has made a stringent case for the dialectic of excess and lack in his Logic of Sense. 
Nonetheless, we owe it to Badiou for maintaining a decisive minimal difference in the 
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we must understand it as the abandonment of our provisional framework and 
proceed towards an attempt of thinking together in a relational structure of val-
ue form: labour as the substance of value and money as a semblance.
Now we can pose the following question: What does this internal exclusion of 
money-commodity bring about in its developed form? Or, alternatively, what 
implication does Marx’s (monetary) theory of value bring? Why should one 
perceive his (monetary) theory of value as a theory of Capital [Kapitaltheorie]? 
Marx strives toward an unempirical notional development of his theory of value, 
evident in “Urtext to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” and in 
consequent texts of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. The goal 
is the unfolding of categories in a dialectical gateway: value-money-capital. He 
cautions us on two points: the specificity of conditions in the capitalist mode of 
production and the particular dimensions of a third when differentiating simple 
un-totalized commodity exchange from circulation of commodities C – M – C 
and money M – C – M.
Observing both paths of circulation, i.e. C – M – C and M – C – M, introduces 
certain differences; the first movement starts and finishes the process with com-
modities, while the second does so with money (as capital). In the first instance 
we are dealing with a relentless subtracting of money-commodity out of circu-
lation. Value is thus extinguished when its form, monetary object, is being sub-
tracted out of simple circulation. In the second movement both commodity and 
money function only as different modes of value existence, money as general 
and commodity as particular, which is now an automatic subject. Hence, value 
as such reaches its higher sense, interchanging forms of commodity and money, 
and by changing its own magnitude becomes a self-valorizing process, author-
izing Marx to write: capital is money, capital is commodities. So, this second 
movement is the origin of the self-valorizing process that induces surplus-value, 
where money as capital begins to reside and attributes to a conscious bearer –  
the capitalist. This type of inversion or “personification of things” and their sub-
jectivization are characteristic of economic categories that need support for the 
valorization of capital commodity. If the condition for valorization is not sat-
isfied, money retains its basic form; it “petrifies” in value, whence no change 
logics of lack and excess, subscribing to the division of algebra in topology, elaborated in 
Theory of the Subject.   
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65
the absent cause and marx's value form
occurs. On the other hand, when we are confronted with the form M – M’, then 
money represents itself in a “crude and conceptually undifferentiated” form of 
capital. Why such an a-conceptual form? Because the process leading to its final 
result (M’) is obliterated, what is presented is only the point of initiation of M 
and the closure of M’. Such valorization can of course occur as a product of use 
value, a particular one whose ability is to add value – labour-power. “Labour 
is the only use value which can present an opposite and a complement to mon-
ey as capital, and it exists in labour capacity, which exists as a subject.”
23
 The 
subtraction of money and separation of money as capital from the functional 
capacity of creating use values obfuscates the asymmetrical relation of pro-
duction between capitalist and wage-labourer. Marx devotes an entire chapter 
to the externalization of capital relation, stating: “As interest-bearing capital, 
and moreover in its immediate form of interest-bearing money capital (the oth-
er forms of interest-bearing capital, which do not concern us here, are derived 
from this form and presuppose it), capital obtains its pure fetish form, M - M’ be-
ing the subject, a thing for sale.”
24
 Here the desire of money, the fleeting occur-
rences of money-object in circulation, overturns into the drive of capital, where 
money as capital enters an infinite circular movement and deploys its “ingrown 
existence of interest” for the sake of the automatic production of surplus-value. 
Herein lies its utmost fetishist form, its begriffslosigkeit. The distinction between 
the final movements of C – C and M – M’ fixates the different capacities mon-
ey represents; as far as initial social human value-building goes, it demarcates 
the wage-labourer from the capitalist. This happens when money steps over 
the Rubicon, meaning that the functioning capital is de facto self-reflexive with 
money-capital. Once it sets foot in capitalist production, in which money can be 
transformed into capital on the basis of self-valorization, the outcome comes in 
the form of profit. We must be precise here and not miss a decisive doubling of 
absence in cause: in the first series we lose the money-object, while in the sec-
ond we lose money-as-interest-bearing-capital, capital entertaining its own pre-
suppositions in money-form and giving itself sense with self-commodification. 
A gap emerges, a parallel to one existing in psychoanalysis between desire and 
23
 Karl Marx, The Original Text of the Second and the Beginning of the Third Chapter of “A 
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (the Urtext) in: Karl Marx and Frederic 
Engels, Collected Works. Vol. 29, Lawrence and Wishart, London 1968, pp. 507.
24
 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume III, Penguin Books, London 
1981, p. 517.
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drive, sustaining the difference in enveloping products of human labour, money 
and capital with the notion of value.
There is one more insight we must undertake in our analysis. Marx says: 
“Fundamental changes have taken place in the course of the transition from form 
A to form B, and from form B to form C. As against this, form D differs not at all 
from form C, except that now instead of linen gold has assumed the universal 
equivalent form.”
25
 We must emphasize an additional aspect: In transitioning 
from form C (universal equivalent form) to form D (money form), we also en-
counter a significant qualitative difference. The equivalent form posits a random 
commodity in the place of a universal equivalent, apart from serving its “initial 
useful purpose” it functions also as a means of exchange/payment and unit of 
account. It is still in-itself a useful thing that does not change significantly over 
space and time (omitting the inherent natural depreciation of material) and still 
in becoming a thing for-itself. Linen will always be linen. Inversely, a money-com-
modity possesses among previous functions also a third, namely store of value. 
Marx indirectly develops this functionality in a chapter in Capital called “Money, 
or the Circulation of Commodities”, where money now posits the relation among 
creditors and debtors and is perceived as a chain of payments in the form of cred-
it-money
26
. Our aim is to underline the underemphasised notion of interest-bear-
ing presupposition of money-capital as money-object instated in value form, 
which introduces a specific temporality into the circulating world of commodities.   
Temporality
Interest-bearing capital once more confronts us with the problem of form: before 
us stands surplus value in the form of appearance, first in profit and later in its 
most mediated and concrete form – interest. We are dealing with Begriffslosigkeit, 
an “absurd” or “perverted” form, an “irrational” form, “the mother of all crazy/
displaced forms”, the utmost representative form of relations within the capi-
talist institutional framework. We must never lose sight of Rancière’s appraisal 
of all missing intermediate terms in unfolding this begriffslose form -  M’ = M + 
ΔM: “The Begriffslosigkeit expresses the disappearance of all the intermediary 
terms whose connection makes the relation M to M’ possible. It thereby express-
25
 Marx, Capital: Volume I, p. 162.
26
 Ibid., p. 238.
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67
the absent cause and marx's value form
es the disappearance of what underlies this connection and makes it possible, 
the capitalist relations of production.”
27
 We began our analysis with use values 
of products of labour and made them into empirical, sensuous things that meet 
our needs, proceeded to a sensuous-supersensuous character of commodities, 
money or capital. We now arrive at supersensuous determinations of prices 
or interest. The connection between the three encompasses the value – mon-
ey – capital relation; where capital becomes a commodity, the price of which 
is expressed in interest and its “valorization” attributes to circulation of mon-
ey-capital. Negatively put, only money as capital can fertilize itself with interest 
(interest-bearing capital), while other types of (productive) functioning capital 
amount to a residual part of gross profit. Marx precisely disentangles the con-
cealment taking place during the real process of thing-ly reproduction against 
the backdrop of money-capital being an “a-conceptual form”, interest-bearing 
profit divorced from profit of enterprise. A type of concealment, where no rela-
tion between capital and labour is presented, only interest-relation among two 
capitalists. “In interest-bearing capital, therefore, this automatic fetish is elab-
orated into pure form, self-valorizing value, money breeding money, and in this 
form it no longer bears any marks of origin.”
28
 The irrationality of form becomes 
ultimate in the form of interest – via the vanishing of the relation that inscribes 
it onto a particular place. How can a relation vanish? How can capital pose as 
a mere thing? The fact of it being a thing transcribes it as a commodity, thrown 
into the circulation process like any other, one that is at the same time also mon-
ey-capital, money-object indulging automatic yields in the shape of interest. 
We must embark further, towards the inner determinations of money, i.e. its 
functionalities. One of the key questions arising for Marx is the gateway from 
money-object to money-capital, a representation of a credit (debt) and interest 
relation. If anything, then academic economic acribia succeeded in grounding 
intertemporal analysis as a baseline for economic theorizing. It had inaugurated 
its object of cognition by separating present actions of economic agents from 
future expectations and outcomes. Individuals are deemed to follow the ration-
ality principle and plan their future decisions and choices; this is how the usual 
story of neoclassical synthesis goes. The planning of aggregates on the macro-
economic level is naturally tied with the Keynesian equation I = S; equating in-
27
 Rancière, “The Concept of ‘Critique’ and the ‘Critique of Political Economy’”, p. 158. 
28
 Marx, Capital: Volume III, p. 516.
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vestment activity with savings immediately implies different time periods. Marx 
sought to show and explain the problem of credit and macroeconomic cycle of 
investment/saving by expanding the categorical structure in the circuit of money 
capital and interest-bearing capital. Marx’s line of analysis includes unfolding 
commodity to money, then money to the notion of capital, from capital he comes 
to the money-capital circuit and from the circuit he arrives at credit (and interest 
bearing). We have discussed money as an extra-commodity internally excluded 
from the world of commodities and content-wise posited in the development of 
value form. As far as quantitative determination goes, it is expressed in price-de-
termination of commodities and is posited as a multiplicity, a quantum of capital 
form – money-capital. Its abstraction is sublated once debt/credit arises, shap-
ing money’s functionality (store of value) unified automata of use and exchange 
value into a form of interest-bearing (profit and interest rates)
29
. Interest-bearing 
capital functioning as money has a double determination in exchange: 1. un-
derstood as money travelling through formula M – C – M’, it achieves its surplus 
(ΔM) by lending its use value to a demanded productive capital investment (oc-
curring at the t
0 
time period) and 2. as interest-bearer carrying a definite expected 
yield (at the t
+1 
period). The abstract categorical outfit of money is stripped of 
once it has its role in the circuit of capital; in circulating capital as commodity, 
money becomes the most simplified form of this movement. This “new” process 
of money and capital defines a new concrete motion – money as functioning cap-
ital, yielding a profit rate in a particular period of time.
We will examine this process further. First we must make some small interpre-
tative adjustment of categories: use value of money should be understood sim-
ply as profit, realized after a period of t
+1
. Value of money-capital is redoubled 
into profit and exchange value (price, manifested in the form of interest) which 
now entails the following contradictive determination: on one hand, it is deter-
mined, quantitatively, with price (interest at maturity date t
+1
) and qualitatively 
29
 Let us bear upon a moment at the contemporary rise of financial and capital markets, this 
»automatic« subject of market valorization occurring at the last economic expansion of 
1986–2007. In times of diminished key interest rates for longer periods of time we experi-
ence T-bills (treasury bills) of de facto becoming interchangable against money. Especially 
on the account of historically low transaction costs of money transfer because of informa-
tion technology, and now even more with the prospects of cryptocurrency’s blockchain 
technology. Cf. Stiglitz and Greenwald, Towards a New Paradigm in Monetary Economics, 
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (MA) 2003, p. 12–16.  
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69
the absent cause and marx's value form
as the present value (discounted at t
0
). Such double determination and expres-
sion of money becomes an empirical and material presupposition for unfolding 
the category of capital. Historical development of its forms (securities as market 
commodities; treasury bills, municipal bonds, stocks, options, derivatives, etc.) 
has led to the current state of developed financial capitalism – a system of ex-
pected (intertemporal) yields – i.e. the capitalist institutional framework. Put 
differently, we have to slightly modify the expanded formula of interest-bearing 
capital circulation:
M – M  … C … M’ – M’ is transformed into M – M .(t
0
).. C ..(t
+1
). M’ – M’
In the fourth chapter of Capital, Marx describes the path from commodity to cap-
ital form, and by doing so articulates the capitalist mode of production; using 
dialectical sublation from the initial simple circulation C – M – C to money-cap-
ital M – C – M and all the way to its most developed form of interest-bearing 
capital. Here money is subverted from “ex-timate” standing as subject-value of 
simple exchange to a subject of developing credit, the last stage of capital. The 
automaticity should be understood as a separation from its genus (value as a 
representation of human labour, expenditure of human labour power in labour 
time), where value becomes an attribute of different money-forms circulation. 
We encounter such mediation only as the fruits of the capital form as (expected) 
profits (discounted yields at time t
0
) and future interest (t
+1
). The whole structure 
of simple commodity production is confronted with the dominating effects of 
interest-bearing capital through segmentation or discontinuity among differ-
ent time periods based on the capital form’s maturities. Interest-bearing capital 
or simply a security issued at present day immediately connects some future 
point of time. The time of capital is the time of its subjective bearer distributed 
at times t
0 
and t
+1
. This is what John Maynard Keynes meant when he underlined 
the character of money (and consequently capital): “For the importance of mon-
ey essentially flows from its being a link between the present and the future.”
30
, 
which connects directly with Postone’s analysis of two forms of time and his cor-
ollary, “[…] then, value is an expression of time as the present.”
31
. Value resides 
in the abstract time framework where it remains constant magnitude of value 
30
 John Maynard Keynes, The general theory of employment, interest, and money, Prometheus 
Books (Great Minds Series), New York 1997, p. 293.
31
 Cf. Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, p. 296. 
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throughout different levels of historical capitalist productivity and uses money 
as a ledger for temporal inscriptions of events for the latter (i.e. movement of 
capital). When unified with its contrary, historical time
32
, it becomes a build-
ing-block of institutional framework, designating names and places; they are 
determined only positively as a complete and whole social body. Indeed, what 
is missing is the articulation of an element or event, whose part has no place 
in this body, one that amounts to driving force of subjectivity. Money (capital) 
and its temporal dimensions of circulation become retroactive unveilers of these 
“parts” and are a function of cuts presented by unfolding of historical time. 
If we recapitulate what has been said so far: we started out our initial structural 
proposition from Althusser’s (Rancière) structuralist approach with the imma-
nence of cause on its effects and further elaborated the New reading of Marx’s 
logical underpinnings of value form and money in a capitalist mode of produc-
tion, referring to the process of exchange. Rado Riha puts it like this: “As op-
posed to pure abstract value-determination, money is something material, but 
the significance of this materiality is strictly linked to the value-determination’s 
moment of internal exclusion, in as much that it adheres to value as an inner 
condition of its universality, and on the other hand as something that is always 
excluded from it.”
33
 The strict separation of essence and appearance on the one 
hand means a redoubling, and at the same time a distance, difference, over-
shadowed with a unified representation of the pair. Commodity and the money 
form drive the pair use and exchange value to a final separation inside their uni-
ty; we are left with use value of a commodity, exchanged on the market, and on 
the other side money-commodity, pure exchange value, devoid of any content 
and as such a vanishing moment. 
Money is the result of the dialectic unfolding of inner contradiction in the value 
of a commodity; it is the agent of subjecitivization and at the same time, its ma-
terial appearance, constantly dis-jointed out from the world of commodities –  
i.e. is excluded from exchange structure. It is made of nominalist appearances, 
as they are omnipresent in classical and neoclassical monetary theories, rely-
ing on quantitative determinations of exchange circuits, and also on objective 
32
 Ibid., p. 294.
33
 Rado Riha, »Problemi teorije fetišizma”, in: R. Riha and S. Žižek, Problemi teorije fetišizma, 
Univerzum, Ljubljana 1985, p. 46.
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the absent cause and marx's value form
magnitudes in the concepts of real and monetary economics (e.g. quantitative 
theory of money). In terms of places in a structure: that the notion of money falls 
directly in place where it belongs and not-belongs at the same time means an 
overlapping of inner contradiction – objectified opposition of use and exchange 
value. This opposition represents the content of money’s function as a unit of 
value (price), the means of circulation (exchange); and this opposition sublates 
both moments, leading to a third, a subjectivization of money as money (inver-
sion of circulation C – M – C to M – C – M), i.e. a mover of “totality of concrete 
commodities”, universally self-excluded from it.  
Marx says: “The circuit of capital is thus a unified process of circulation and 
production, it includes both.”
34
 We have followed this lead with two series: first, 
that of production of commodities and social relations of production (unity of 
concrete and abstract labour) as its absent cause and second, the circulation 
of commodities, a world incomplete by its internal exclusion of money-object. 
Interest bearing capital as the most developed and mediated “mother of all cra-
zy/displaced forms” is the most advanced development of economic objectivity. 
Value form introduces a particular logical analysis of socio-economic “construc-
tion” of objectivity; in a configuration where capital and credit take simultane-
ous side-by-side placement, a place where difference is materialized (irrational 
form) i.e. the inversion of aforementioned circulation occurs. The content of the 
most developed capitalist form is produced thereafter, by endorsing a historical 
overview in becoming of “capitalist spontaneous arising”. Capital as a general 
category “seems to appear” in all kinds of money-forms, resembling the fact 
that capital is historically always already present in money and obfuscating its 
“true” content. Money capital just does not become capital in general overnight, 
on the contrary, accumulation of capital in terms of time elapsed is needed for 
its expansion. Indeed, one conformed to credit-debt relationship cycles. Then, a 
retroaction from the future sutures the content of the form (money-capital) stem-
ming from concrete interest-bearing capital which envelops a particular time 
horizon as a capital circuit moment. This oscillation between abstract universal-
ity in commodity’ appearances and singular moment of interest-bearing capital 
conjoins, what appears as incommensurable, functions of money. Therein lays 
the asymmetric relation immanent to the class character of value form.  
34
 Karl Marx, Capital: a critique of political economy, Volume II, Penguin Books, London 1992, 
p. 139. 
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