Bob Jessop grounds his understanding of labor’s status as a fictitious commodity in Marx’s distinction between the “contingent, historically specific” character of “social relations” and the “fallacious belief, strongly criticized by Marx, that economic value arises from the immanent, eternal qualities of things” (2003:13).
If Jessop means only to reaffirm the labor theory of value, which Marx evidently shared with other classical economic theorists, most notably Adam Smith, then it is odd that this should lead him to conclude that labor’s status as a commodity is fictitious, rather than leading him to conclude, say, that, among other things, human action too becomes a commodity within the capitalist social formation. Such a conclusion would acknowledge the contingent, historically specific character of social relations under capitalism while at the same time avoiding the implicit transhistoricization and ontologization entailed by drawing a circle around a small handful of items—labor, land, money and knowledge—which, unlike other things, enjoy a special, transhistorical status.
So, what gives? The answer lies, I believe, in Jessop’s grounding of capitalism itself not, as in the case of K Marx and M Postone, in the production of commodities itself, but in the state’s regulation of markets. This is significant because, if capitalism preceded the commodification of labor, then labor as the producer of use and exchange value is not what makes labor unique under capitalism. What makes labor unique under capitalism, in this case, is that the exchange value it produces is regulated by the state and appropriated by the capitalist. It is at this moment of regulation and appropriation that labor becomes a commodity. This also means that once exchange value is no longer regulated by the state and appropriated by capital—once, in other words, the value alienated from labor returns to labor—at that moment labor sheds its status as a fictitious commodity. Labor then becomes what it has always been: the producer of all value, albeit under a variety of different social conditions, under a variety of different regimes of regulation.
Yet, once we compare Jessop’s analysis to the one we find at the beginning of Capital, volume one, we will notice that what Jessop treats as a preexisting social formation to which labor is then subjected, Marx treats as the creation of a specific form of labor: labor as the producer of all value. That is to say, what Jessop treats as universal and transhistorical—the labor theory of value—Marx treats as a “contingent, historically specific” quality of “social relations” under capitalism; and, what Jessop treats as “contingent” and “historically specific” to capitalism, the expropriation of value from human beings through a state-imposed regulatory form, Marx treats as a condition of all societies beyond the wandering, semi-nomadic social formations that have escaped the clutches of empire. Here, specifically, is what Jessop says:
What most distinguishes capitalism from other forms of producing goods and services for sale is the generalization of the commodity form to labour-power [italics added]. This entails the historical development and subsequent reproduction and expansion of a labour market in which workers offer their labour-power for sale to capitalists in a formally free and equal commercial transaction (12).
In other words, commodities existed prior to their production by commodified labor. Commodities are not the product of a process wherein human action is objectified as exchange value in the products of such action. Rather, commodities and capitalism exist prior to this commodification of as-yet uncommodified labor. And it is this uncommodified labor that would then be non-fictitious.
But, what has Jessop achieved by this analysis? A partial clue may be seen in his observation that the “generalization of the commodity form to labour-power . . . entails the historical development and subsequent reproduction and expansion of a labour market” [italics added]. This clue highlights the importance granted the state in F Braudel’s, Karl Polanyi’s, and now Bob Jessop’s interpretation of the rise of capitalism. Here, as we shall see in greater detail when we read G Arrighi’s Long Twentieth Century, the most important factor in the rise of capitalism is played not by measuring value in terms of abstract labor time expended—Marx’s and Postone’s interpretation—but by capital accumulation, which, in turn, empowers state actors to regulate, among other things, land, labor, money, and (Jessop adds) knowledge. This means, incidentally, that the process that Marx seeks to explain on the basis of labor-determined value—the compulsive, self-dominating, directionally-dynamic character of capitalism—Jessop treats as the cause explaining why labor assumes this peculiar form.
The solution, then, presumably to this commodification of labor would be for labor to reappropriate the value appropriated from it by capital: labor would then return to itself.
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