Wort & Wertform

Synthesis and Value

The aim of this blog and series is to continue –or instigate– a dialogue initiated by authors such as Jehu (The Real Movement), among others. I intend to convey that this is not a refutation of such work, but a continuation: I intend to follow Jehu in his return to Marx’s original writings and his disavowal of much of the (proclaimed) communist political theory that followed them. That is to say, it seeks to continue the programme of a critique of political economy in its strictest sense: to examine systematically the (pre)conditions and limits under which economic social processes (capitalism) appear and operate.

The central theme developed here is a Marxist theory of value and time conceived as a process of continual synthesis.

In the beginning was the Word (Logos), 
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 
(John 1:1)

Preface: Differences?

A preliminary point, particularly in relation to authors like Jehu, is that this continuation of method is not without divergence. While I hold that adhering to Marx’s method is the correct approach, the interpretive results yielded here differ. Jehu –or for that matter, anyone– is welcomed to disagree. What I think is retained is an orthodox fidelity to Marx, but with an emphasis on methodology over doctrinal inheritance. That is, orthodoxy is located not in the repetition of Marx’s political economic conclusions, but in fidelity to his method of critique.

Practically, this entails privileging the influence of Hegel’s Science of Logic, Grundrisse, and Volume III of Capital as foundational to understanding the relation between capital, money and value, rather than say Volume II. This background shapes a reading that may depart from more conventional Marxological accounts. A further and significant divergence lies in the treatment of Keynes and the post-1929 (and post-1973) monetary order: here, the conclusive part of the analysis departs markedly from Jehu’s framework.

As will become clear in later posts, this has the most significant implications for understanding money, gold, and –more broadly– capital itself. It should be stressed that this difference does not stem from a plain, or even substantiative disagreement with Jehu’s analysis as laid out in writings from The Real Movement. Rather, accepting much of it raises new questions. What follows is an attempt to pursue those questions more fully.

The problem

I would like to posit that the central unresolved issue in most contemporary Marxist analyses is how to conceptualise the value-form and its relation to the emergence of its measure (conventionally, money). The culprit is that most major works either only make meaningful contributions in terms of cultural analysis or in some moral sense, but virtually never in an economic sense. This is a strange problem, as Marx was primarily concerned with writings from actual political economy. It also carries a graver problem: a lack of innovative or good, but infeasible political programmes. Voluntarist theories are useless (e.g., ethical consumption, raising class-consciousness, participatory democracy, discursive re-framing, reformism, micro-politics, and most accelerationist positions).

Moreover, even when theories attempt some form of critique of political economy, it fails. Take for example Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (2023). Many of the points made, although well-constructed, result in somewhat boilerplate conclusions: Mau is correct in the sense that material dependencies –not political imaginaries– form the (compulsory) power of capital. But the programmatic implication which follows it does not really amount to much: ‘de-commodification’ as the core political horizon, evaluating every political measure to the criterion of whether it reduces or reproduces market dependence. The results are some aims towards welfare, public housing, universal services, access to goods and services without price mediation, etcetera. Though he never explicates it, Mau is a Trotskyist in almost every domain.

Lastly, I do not know enough about anarchism to make meaningful points about it. As for abolishment thinking, I find that it is so stupid I will not even discuss it in-depth here. Advocating for a politics of flat ontology as a solution to problems amounts to quite literally nothing. Those who propose to ‘abolish’ commodities, money, or property are just as reactionary and conservative as Latour [See: Concepts and Objects by Ray Brassier].

The gist

In response, I propose four core theses:

i) Use-value, as it emerges socially, involves a process of appropriation, which necessitates a form of property. But appropriation is always temporal and dynamic. The resulting form of property can be seen as a transfiguration – a turning of noumenal entropy into objects that must be conceptually grasped. Phenomena are negentropic. The emergence of value is, in this view, inherently negentropic: the formation of a store of potential utility prior to instrumentalisation. In capitalism, this instrumentalisation is commodification.

ii) Since Marx, the production of value has undergone transformations of foundational importance. Three developments stand out:

a. The advent of electricity, which reorganised the structure of productive time and space.

b. The emergence of labour producing non-tangible value, and with it, incommunicable forms within the production process (e.g. the exploitation of cognitive faculties).

c. The rise of telematics and, later, informatics, which effected an epistemic shift in critique: political economy is now structured by a functional dichotomy between knowledge and information.

iii) Keynes was right about the nature of money – both in recognising it as a temporal device linking the present to the future, and in dismissing its supposed grounding in gold or any material base as superstition. This recognition renders static theories of value, including naive interpretations of the LTV, inadequate. Any viable theory of value must be a theory of value and time.

iv) The correct definition of capital is to be found in Marx’s Trinity Formula (Volume III), wherein capital is understood not simply as accumulated labour, but as a category mediated by social relations between wage, profit, and interest.

Each of these points will be elaborated. It results in the following position:

If value is treated dynamically as a temporal process linking present coordination to future labour, then synthesis in general –material or immaterial– functions as an emergent substrate of abstract labour through which value and distribution are jointly produced.

A more elaborate formulation:

In contemporary capitalism, where money functions not merely as a medium of circulation but as capital –i.e. as a claim on future labour temporally mediated, in Keynesian terms, between present expectations and future realisation– value can no longer be conceived statically as embodied labour alone; rather, once value and distribution are understood as co-constitutive processes unfolding over time, synthesis itself (whether material, energetic, computational, chemical, or juridical–informational, as in intellectual property) appears as an emergent general substrate of abstract labour, in which heterogeneous productive capacities are continuously integrated, timed, and valorised under conditions of uncertainty.

The challenge

The biggest challenge for this project is to argue that my claim –that synthesis in its general form can be understood as what results in the emergence of value– is, in contrast to the works criticised above, adding anything of theoretical value. One could say: is synthesis not going on all the time? Are you not just finding a synonym for a continuous process? Of course, this can be seen as ‘the central driving productive force’. This is a fair challenge. The aim is to provide a satisfying answer in the following posts, of which the planned structure is set below.

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Preliminary planning:

All of the posts below will lean heavily on work done by others, who of course will receive due credit.

When any post goes online, the link will be added (and description possibly altered).

1. On Marx and Hegel

Marx and Hegel: Value, Form, and the Relational Appearance of Capital

Value is the form in which heterogeneous social labour is synthesised and validated through a socially generated measure over time.

2. On Keynes and Marx – and Jehu

c. Why ‘Work Less’ Is Politics: Withdrawal Against Valorisation
This post defends Jehu’s ‘work less’ orientation as a serious political position. It argues that reducing labour-time is not lifestyle minimalism, but a strategy aimed at the reproduction of the value-form itself. It leans on arguments formed concerning ‘The Parallax View’, by Žižek, among others.

d. Debates to Skip: ‘class conflict’, ‘real value’, and the moralisation of political organisation
A short commentary on various recurring debates about class, proletariat, and political programmes. Mostly, the idea of class-based politics is dismissed, but from a broader view of also dismissing classical Marxist views of productive and unproductive labour. It notes that a tendency to dismiss nontangible production as distinct from general forms of production (e.g. IP vs. traditional commodities) is not fruitful and does not make sense long-term.

3. On Synthesis and Value

a. The Challenge of ‘Synthesis’
This post tackles the main challenge: ‘Is synthesis not a synonym for continuous activity?’ It clarifies what ‘synthesis’ is supposed to explain that ‘process’ does not. The focus is on commensuration, temporal binding, the production of stable forms, and the emergence of measure under uncertainty.

b. Kant After Capital: Synthesis, Validity, and the Conditions of Measure
Here the argument is grounded in a Kantian sense of synthesis, treated as a condition for objects and judgments, not as a Hegelian totalisation. The value-form is approached as something that must be constituted and socially recognised. Measure becomes a problem of validity and form, not merely of size. This post also alludes to prior appropriation and property claims by treating appropriation as an operation that stabilises a manifold into a usable object across time.

4. On the Contemporary Economy

a. Knowledge Lost in Information: Metrics as Political Economy
This post introduces the knowledge/information split (discussing Mirowski and Nik-Khah’s The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information and related work) as structural to contemporary capitalism. It argues that modern institutions increasingly treat information as actionable and tradable while hollowing out the conditions for knowledge, judgment, and responsibility. It then shows why this matters for value: the value-form now runs on metrics, dashboards, and quantified governance, hence measurement is no longer merely descriptive but performative. Most importantly, this challenges the Marxist canonical view that value only emerges through social understanding.

b. Overwijk’s Cybernetic Rationalisation
This post brings in Jan Overwijk’s framework as presented in both his dissertation and book Cybernetic Capitalism: A Critical Theory of the Incommunicable. It discusses cybernetic rationalisation as the paradoxical attempt to optimise production by nudging self-reinforcing behaviour rather than issuing direct commands. The focus is on contemporary employee performance management and related metrologies. The central claim is that these tools aim to valorise non-tacit aspects of human agency, such as creativity and autonomy, while lacking the conceptual means to fully specify them. The result is a new kind of rationalisation that depends on exclusion and indirect control.

c. Luhmann and the Closure of Systems: How ‘Unarticulated Outsides’ Get Valorised
This post builds a lot on Overwijk, and is appended with extra examples of a systems-theoretical layer. It explains, in plain terms, why Luhmann’s idea of operational closure helps analyse modern controversies and management systems: social systems process meaning through their own codes, yet still feed on what they cannot fully articulate. The payoff is a bridge to the ‘mystical’ domain, discussed later: capitalism increasingly tries to valorise what it cannot directly represent, which forces new measurement regimes and new forms of abstraction.

5. A Political Position

a. Recursivity and Contingency: Cybernetics as Political Economy
This post uses Yuk Hui to interpret contemporary capitalism as recursive, feedback-driven, and able to absorb contingency. Value is presented as stabilisation across cycles, not a static embedding. This is where the series becomes explicit about the temporal structure of value formation: expectations, deviation, recalculation, and the continuous production of ‘normality’ out of uncertainty.

b. The Reign of Anti-Logos: Performance, Evaluation, and the Ethics of Synthesis
This post turns to the ethical and political consequences of a world governed by measurement. It argues that synthesis increasingly takes the form of performance for evaluation, and that this changes the human relation to work, judgement, and agency. It distils an ethical stance from the framework without lapsing into nostalgia or moralising.

c. Cybertheology: Mediation, Presence, and the Problem of the Word Made Digital
This post is a theological interlude with a purpose. It uses Wiener and Spadaro to think about mediation, presence, community, and governance in the digital condition. The point is conceptual leverage: how logos becomes infrastructure, how networks function as connective bodies, and how technological mediation reshapes collective life.

d. Deng, Draghi, and Fouquet: Strategic Coordination as Real-World Synthesis
The series closes by showing that synthesis is already organised politically, whether one approves of it or not. It compares China’s reform pragmatics, European crisis monetary coordination, and early-modern fiscal engineering as different cases of steering value through time under uncertainty. The aim is not to praise technocracy, but to make a concrete point: if value emerges through coordination and synthesis, then political economy must analyse who coordinates, by what instruments, and with what distributive effects.

Works cited

Brassier, Ray. “Concepts and Objects.” In The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, edited by Levi R. Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. Melbourne: re.press, 2011. Accessed December 29, 2025. https://philpapers.org/rec/BRACAO

Hegel, G. W. F. Science of Logic. Translated by A. V. Miller. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969. Accessed December 29, 2025. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/

Jehu. The Real Movement: Communism is free time and nothing else! Blog. Accessed December 29, 2025.

https://therealmovement.wordpress.com/

Keynes, John Maynard. “Chapter 21: The Theory of Prices.” In The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Accessed December 29, 2025. https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/ch21.htm

Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). Translated by Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1973. Accessed December 29, 2025. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/

———. “Introduction (Notebook M): (1) Production in General.” In Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). Accessed December 29, 2025. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm

———. “Chapter 1: Commodities.” In Capital, Volume I. Accessed December 29, 2025. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm

———. Capital, Volume III: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Edited by Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers, n.d. Accessed December 29, 2025. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/

———. “Chapter 48: The Trinity Formula.” In Capital, Volume III: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Accessed December 29, 2025. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch48.htm

Mau, Søren. Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital. London: Verso, 2023. Accessed December 29, 2025. https://www.versobooks.com/products/2759-mute-compulsion