Abstract

The idea of “two discoveries” in Marx is essentially known through the presentations of Engels and Stalin, which had lasting influences in the constitution of “Marxism”. They essentially insisted on a correlation of “theories” or “disciplines” hierarchically articulated . But it had another, earlier and more specific, formulation offered by Marx himself, when trying to emphasize the novelty of his theory in Capital, Volume One. Marx singled out, on the one side, the “double character of labour” expressed in the value-form, on the other side the articulation of “surplus labour” and “surplus value”. In this essay, we attempt a thought experiment which considers the “two discoveries” claimed by Marx not as successive moments of a single demonstration, also not as falling apart in an “epistemological break”, but as terms of a “disjunctive synthesis”. It would subject the critique of capitalism to a permanent tension, with, on one side, the logic of universal commodification arising from the institution of the General Equivalent, and on the other, the comparative study of modes of exploitation and domination in different “class structures”. The resulting ambiguities in the formulation of the “communist hypothesis” in Marx are perhaps of no little import in today’s renewed interest for the Marxian critique