As it unfolds over the beginning chapters of Capital, Volume I, Marx’s critique of the value-form operates at such a high level of abstraction that it can be difficult to see how it might speak to questions of sexed embodiment. Yet the post-1960s developments in critical theory provoked by his analysis — specifically, their attention to the relation between value and human social practices — can help to extend and clarify existing (rather famous) arguments that the materiality of the body is not a self-evident “reality” or substance that can be taken as a given.

Indeed, Marx’s critique of value is useful in part because it helps us to challenge points of logical departure considered self-evident. In Marx’s day, this included the assumption by liberal political economists, including the discipline’s “best representatives,” Adam Smith and David Ricardo, that value is a “nature-imposed necessity” borne by the commodity and expressed in money. But in demonstrating how the value-form possesses an objectivity that cannot be grasped by the senses, Marx’s critique also challenges neoclassical economics and its basis in marginal utility theory, which understands commodity prices in relation to the motives and subjective assessments of individual commodity owners as they calculate the ratios of increased utility brought to the consumer by additional quantities of a particular good. As Simon Clarke has argued, the “marginalist revolution” of neoclassical economic and social theory based on consumption and utility may have done away with the concept of value conceived in terms of labor, but it remains rooted in naturalistic, ideological conceptions of the individual agent abstracted from any particular form of society.1 In departing from the level of the rational individual to argue that value moves with a social objectivity that is “suprasensible,” however, Marx’s method offers a way to critique all manner of ideological forms in order to trace their historical roots.2 As I want to suggest here, this includes the naturalized concept of sex defended by the neofascist, transphobic strains of conservative and liberal thought known as gender critical feminism.

On one level, Marx’s critique of value as a social relationship rather than a natural substance helps to demonstrate what gender theorists have been arguing for a long time: that sex is not transhistorical nor embodied in any essential way, but formed and brought into existence by particular social arrangements. As such, it offers a historical analytic — a “science,” even — that goes some way to demonstrating why sociosexual mores, ideologies, and research agendas advance or recede at particular historical moments by linking these cultural shifts to value production and patterns of accumulation. But not only this: as I argue below, since the object of value critique is not only the value-form but the liberal modes of humanist, empiricist thought to which it gives rise, post-1960s Marxian value theory can help to construct a conceptual account of sex as a capitalist social form and a mediating technology, a contradictory and dynamic “form of appearance,” to use Marx’s term — one that’s reproduced in mutually constitutive relation to gender.

This insight initially requires some reflection on the difference between the abstract logic at the heart of the capital-labor relation — “self-expanding value in motion,” as Kevin Floyd puts it — and on the other hand, the world of concrete social forms. Marx explains the distinction, of course, by pointing to the fetish-character of the commodity, in which the capital-labor relation appears in its social form as value, a supposedly natural property of the commodity itself.3 But in Capital, Volume III, Marx also describes three social classes — the capitalist class, the landowning class, and the working class — as social forms of appearance tied by property relations to capital, land, and labor. These latter three categories, we might recall, comprise the Trinity Formula presented by Smith as the three sources of revenue. Yet as Beverley Best has recently underlined, for Marx, capital, land, and labor are merely the “outward faces” of capital, and they serve to mystify the fact that the only source of value is unpaid surplus labor: “As appearances go, the source of profit is capital, the source of ground-rent is land, and the source of wages is labour.”4 What’s more, these supposed sources of value appear disconnected from each other, which further reinforces the notion that value is to be found in their qualitative, empirical properties and not in their social relations to each other.

Marx’s critique of the Trinity Formula is also a key part of his analysis of the contradictions, inversions, mystifications, and autonomizations that constitute what Best calls capital’s “perceptual physics.” This part of his attack on the common-sense empiricism at the heart of liberal political economy is also important because it ties capital’s ostensible sources of revenue to what we might think of as the three “base” social classes — classes embodied and reproduced by actual people who are either capitalists, landowners, or proletarians. Best calls these classes distributional categories, and reminds us that since they’re not the only social categories through which individuals make their appearances, we never encounter them in their pure forms:

In the “actual world,” the world of capitalist forms, the distributional categories are always already amalgams of other social relations / distributional categories — gender, race, sexuality, citizenship, caste, age, ability, merit — to form complex technologies at work in the sphere of competition for power and resources. In this sphere, for example, the category/technology of race is inherently “political economic,” in the way that the social relation of modern property is inherently racialized, gendered, imperialized, with or without citizenship, franchise, and so on.5

It’s easy to see how the “base” distributional classes are fundamentally defined by property relations, but it’s also possible to imagine how a complex array of legal processes, border regimes, healthcare systems, housing arrangements, and other types of stratifications produce a range of other distributions that are also economic in character and very often appear in the form of identity categories. It’s particularly difficult to point to the economic character of sexual difference, however — partly because, like race, sex is so often understood simply as a biological and physically embodied trait, but also because sex forms one pole of a gender-sex binary in which gender, not sex, is understood to be cultural and economically determined. Is sex inherently “political economic”? Is it another “distributional category”? I would insist that it is indeed, and propose that a Marxist analysis asking how so is not altogether incompatible with Judith Butler’s famous critique of sex, particularly where they link assumptions about sexual difference to normative ideas of human freedom.

In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Butler famously critiques what they call the “metaphysics of substance,” by which they mean the discursive appearance of sex as a substance that constitutes the ontological reality of a person; the fiction of a self-identical being that is sustained, for Butler, by “a performative twist of language.”6 Butler borrows this phrase from Michael Haar’s Nietzchian critique of the supposed truth of grammatical categories which underpin the fictitious unity of the self, and they cite Haar’s observation that “it was grammar (the structure of subject and predicate) that inspired Descartes’ certainty that ‘I’ is the subject of ‘think,’ whereas,” argues Haar, “it is rather the thoughts that come to ‘me’.” Butler frames the belief in “a prior ontological reality of substance and attribute” as a normative form of humanism, an “artificial philosophical means by which simplicity, order, and identity are effectively instituted.” Even Monique Wittig reproduces this form of humanism in her argument for the destruction of sex:

Where it seems that Wittig has subscribed to a radical project of lesbian emancipation and enforced a distinction between “lesbian” and “woman,” she does this through the defense of the pregendered “person,” characterised as freedom. This move not only confirms the [supposedly] presocial status of human freedom, but subscribes to that metaphysics of substance that is responsible for the production and naturalization of the category of sex itself.7

Indeed, sex provides the ground for a “substantializing view of gender,” as if sex is simply something one is — just like philosophical ontologies reliant on “Being” and “Substance” can assume that one simply “is” a person, a self, an identity.8 Yet, as Butler famously argued in Gender Trouble, “there is no recourse to a body that has not always already been interpreted by cultural meanings; hence, sex could not qualify as a prediscursive anatomical facticity. Indeed sex, by definition, will be shown to have been gender all along.”9

Critics have challenged this apparent conflation of gender and sex, but despite their distinct critical orders — one a poststructuralist dismantling of existentialism and mind-body dualisms, the other a systematic account of capital accumulation and its forms of appearance — the resemblance between Butler’s critique of sex as a metaphysics of substance on the one hand and the Marxian critique of “substantialist” notions of value on the other is striking.10 Consider the value theorist Michael Heinrich’s note that:

The “substance of value” as a figure of speech has frequently been understood in a quasi-physical, “substantialist” manner: the worker has expended a specific quantity of abstract labor and this quantity exists within the individual commodity and turns the isolated article into an object of value.11

The problem here, as Marx notes when he comments on how any account of capitalism must begin post festum, is that the political economist seeks not to understand the historical character of the forms which stamp products as commodities, “for in his eyes they are immutable,” but rather, in his backward way, to account for how prices and money determine the character and magnitude of value. But of course:

It is however precisely this finished form of the world of commodities — the money form — which conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly.12

Given how Butler and Marx both problematize the concept of substance by reference to the concealing social forms of money and gender, it can be tempting to draw some parallels between money and value on the one hand, and gender and sex on the other: in both cases, one form of appearance substantializes the other, making sex or value appear empirical, natural, transhistorical, rather than “revealing them plainly” as social forms. It’s Marx’s project, in Capital, to show that value is not an empirical, qualitative thing to be found in sources of revenue or as a substance within the commodity, but a historical function of real abstraction, and in a not dissimilar gesture, Gender Trouble seeks to show how sex depends on the false premises of normative humanisms: a grammatical formulation of subject and predicate that assumes some “prior ontological reality of substance and attribute.”13 Thus, in liberal societies, sex, like humanity, is presumed to be an inherent property of a person — even a pre-gendered person — while classical political economy, Marx notes, “makes the mistake of treating [value] as the eternal natural form of social production,” and overlooking the historical specificity of the value-form. Value is perceived to be naturally “in there” in commodities while sex is supposedly “in here” in the individual.

But while liberal and normative ideas of value and sex present comparable problems, these things are obviously not analogous, and in one particularly important way because, of course, unlike value, sex has no objective facticity.14 Marx shows how, as value moves through the world acquiring and shedding various forms — labor, commodities, money, for example — the value-form is not any particular thing but an expression of a relationbetween things: an abstract but objectively existing process that shapes our social world in ways that are impossible to out-think. Indeed, while Marx characterizes what he calls the “sensuous-actual” as a form of hypostasis, the “determinate form of realization” of a generalized universal, concrete forms are never simply reflections or instances of the logic of capital itself. Therefore, while we might align with the politics informing Lisa Rofel’s observation that “the value-form lies not just in material objects but in bodies deemed differentially worthy of a valuable life,” it is also politically salient to note that this framing, now common in contemporary theory, is misleading: the value-form is not containedin bodies or “life,” rather, it is the dominant social modality that organizes the way bodies are sorted, categorized, recognized, and disciplined in capitalism.15 Sex is not a real abstraction since, as Alfred Sohn-Rethel points out, real abstraction allows only for “quantitative differentiation (differentiation in abstract, non-dimensional quantity).”16 As money, commodities, capital, and profit, for example, we apprehend the value-form through a rather limited range of expressions, in fact, even while we sense its shaping force everywhere.

But more to the point: sex is not a real abstraction like value, because sex can change. Thus, it cannot adequately be explained by analogy to commodity exchange, since, while the sex-gender binary operates categorially — through forms of social fixity that produce hierarchies, differentiation, and modes of recognition — sex and gender are also mediations ultimately rooted in (which is to say, dominated and driven by) the always-shifting boundary between waged and unwaged labor.17 Queer and feminist Marxisms can account for this movement in increasingly precise terms today. Earlier interventions, such as Martha Giménez’s Althusserian concept of the “mode of reproduction,” and Gayle Rubin’s argument that sex must be understood — like “food, clothing, automobiles and transistor radios” — in terms of the relations of production, insightfully suggest that sex and gender are mediated by labor formations.18 Recent work, however, has sought to theorize them in value terms. The Endnotes Collective’s 2013 essay “The Logic of Gender,” and Best’s erudite evaluation of this work along with other influential Marxist-feminist arguments in her essay “Wages for Housework Redux,” are two signal examples: both insist on the necessity of understanding the concept of value as a social modality if we are to understand the specific ways gender is mediated directly and indirectly by the market.19 To this end, Best returns to Ellen Meiksins Wood’s oft-maligned theory of “indifferent capitalism” to argue that even as capital empties out all particular content in its drive to abstract the world, the dynamic threshold between waged and unwaged labor produces the sex-gender binary as a result of its own moving contradiction.20 What is in fact capital’s utopian drive to socialize allactivities — and thus make them value-productive — is impeded when it meets its own limitations in the marketplace, where inter-capitalist competition and the need to minimize costs of production actually prevent unfettered growth and the full socialization of labor.21 Again, we are reminded of the distinction between capital’s internal logic and the contradictory social forms through which it cannot but take shape: “capital does not move in the world as capital, per se, but in the social form of individual, competing capitals, represented in the sphere of competition by their bearers: individual, competing capitalists.”22

Neither “The Logic of Gender” nor Best’s argument focus on the question of sexual difference, but the importance of the critical concept of mediation to their accounts of feminized social reproduction returns us to how what I have called the substantializing functions of money or gender — as they produce and naturalize the concepts of value and sex — are usefully comparable and importantly not the same. Money, as Marx demonstrates at length, is the necessary form of appearance, the universal equivalent, that allows value to circulate and exchange to take place. Yet, as money miraculously becomes more money, what it enables is capital’s automatic movement — M-C-M' — self-expanding value in motion; a product of human action but not one of thought; a product of historical circumstance that sets limits, installs coercions, encourages tendencies, necessitates mediations (not least the mediation called money), but achieves all of this “behind the backs of the producers,” as Marx has it.23 Socially sanctioned forms of sexual difference have no such internal capacity for expanding themselves, however, even if they are reproduced, like exchange-relations, through repetition and social custom.24 What gender “enables,” rather, is the idealist appearance of cis-sexual difference, which might well be characterized as the ideological straitjacket of a biological reality that is infinitely variable. This contradiction is always and readily apparent, of course, because sexual difference unfolds behind our backs and in front — it is absolutely grasped by the senses!

What does this allow us to say about the relation between sex and value? The poststructuralist insight that the sex-gender binary is perpetually installed through difference and repetition — via “the stylized repetition of acts through time,” acts which posit “the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style” — can help us to avoid the error of thinking that gender and sex have a causal relation to value.25 Rather, both are moments within a social totality rooted in the self-expanding movement of value; a modality that developed over centuries through social custom, envelopes the whole world, and does so in part by producing “outsides” recognizable as social differentials and surplus populations.26

Indeed, grasping the distinction between these different types of substantialisms can help to explain the durability of the sex-gender binary in capitalism, as it forms part of what Sianne Ngai calls “the unity of unity and difference in capitalist social life.”27 It gets us nearer to an account of how that binary is mediated by patterns of value accumulation, and more to the point, given conditions of global economic downturn since 1973, by crises in value production — crises that are impossible to understand without a critical concept of value, and even more so when value appears to be generated in a multitude of locations, from financial derivatives to AI programs to animal flesh.28

But if, as the introduction to this dossier suggests, “sex” enters crisis when value production is in crisis, two recent arguments suggest helpful methodological coordinates for a dialectical account of that interconnection. One is about concepts: Kevin Floyd’s corrective to biopolitical accounts of reproductive technologies describes how, in their work on the global surrogacy industry, Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby collapse the Marxian categories of capital and labor and “attribute value-producing agency to sheer biological substance.”29 Floyd identifies this move as part of a wider theoretical tendency which, inspired by autonomist Marxism, posits biological materiality (both embodied and technological) as a site of autonomous value production. In doing so, he argues, such theories imagine an expansion of value production in place of a reality of global conditions of secular stagnation; conditions in which the “debt-driven export of social reproduction” is one result of mass proletarianization accompanied by a shrinking pool of available wage-labor in the global South.30 We cannot understand this tendency to devalue labor-power, to externalize surplus populations, and to draw on them as sites for the extraction of biological raw material, Floyd argues, without retaining the distinct analytic meanings of Marxian categories. The discrete concepts of constant and variable capital; capital and labor; and of course, value itself, enable us to grasp both where value comes from and how it mediates embodied forms of social difference through the capital-labor relation.31

In a more historical register, M.E. O’Brien’s recent work on family abolition not only traces the development of sexual subcultures and gender transgression within under-employed sections of the nineteenth-century proletariat in Europe, as well as the variegated romantic codes of newly emancipated Black proletarians in the American south in the same period, but also analyses the repression of sexual deviance and variety by worker’s movements which sought to consolidate the heteronormative family form. Because it considers shifts in sexual and familial relations in the context of workforce participation, union activity, and patterns of accumulation, this framing offers a way to grasp punctual events and gradual shifts in the development of sex and gender in relation to histories of expanding and declining value production. O’Brien moves from industrial expansion and capitalist boom beginning in the nineteenth century to focus, later, on the rapidly increasing feminization of labor that took hold in advanced capitalist countries in the postwar period and which intensified in the context of declining profit margins and wage stagnation beginning in the early 1970s. Indeed, O’Brien argues that it was capitalist crisis, and not the gay liberation and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, that undid the traditional family form:

It was not queers or feminists that ultimately brought [the] family form into crisis. The male-breadwinner family form is no longer characteristic of any sector of society, and has lost its social hegemony due to the convergence of several simultaneous trends.… Unlike the birth of the workers’ movement, when worker organization played an instrumental role in creating the conditions for the ascendancy of the working-class housewife, her demise largely depended on a set of structural forces.32

Interventions and histories like this can also help to ground our sense of how sex may be mediated by value relations but nevertheless remains a form and product of human activity. They allow us to replace a liberal humanism with a negative and abolitionist one that attempts to think “in and through” the objective character of capitalist society, as Werner Bonefeld underlines, using a critical reason that is objective rather than subjective insofar as “it asks about the social constitution of the relations of economic objectivity” and recognizes that “the economic quantities move as if by their own volition beyond human control; and yet, their movement manifests the practices of the social individuals in the form of the economic object.”33

Thinking carefully about the relation of capital’s function of abstraction to the appearance of sex as social form — asking why sexual difference is represented by primary physical characteristics apparent at birth, to paraphrase Marx’s question about whylabor takes the form of the value of its product — is a young theoretical endeavor. But I think it could, with development, offer a Marxist clarification of Butler’s discursive critique of humanism, and one that emphasizes a politics of action over ethical injunctions. This is where queer theory’s negative understanding of sexuality coincides with Marx’s critique of value too, as Floyd emphasizes when he suggests that re-posing the Marxist question of totality must mean “thinking what Fred Moten calls ‘the general field of sociality-in-differentiation’ from a point of view which is queer precisely in its refusal of the identitarian vocabularies with which sexuality has been normatively understood.”34 Queer theory’s longstanding critique of identity has involved a type of disarticulating work to reveal how the “richest junctures” in sexual and kinship relations aren’t the ones where “everything means the same thing,” as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick put it.35 And this queer negativity also informs Emma Heaney’s Marxist critique of the ideology of cisgender, which works brilliantly by way of simple description:

We’re used to thinking of cisness as an identity. One is cis if one is not trans, one has a cis body if one doesn’t have a trans body. But … cisness is more accurately understood as the ideology that sorts us into these two categories. Cisness is the belief that, for almost everyone, one or another set of qualities adhere to our bodies at birth based on the appearance of our genitals (either at or before birth with imaging technology).36

Heaney’s own refusal of the identitarian vocabulary of cisness brings us back to the idea of sex and gender as distributional categories, and sex as a mediating technology. We might say that the social classes of capitalist, landowner, and proletarian are helpful analytical concepts here because they represent what Marx might call the “thinnest” social identities: we can tie each of them, respectively, to three corresponding forms of appearance — the supposed revenue sources of capital, land, and labor. Sex and gender differentials, on the other hand, arise from a more complex array of social arrangements, laws, and customs. And I think framing them in this way in order to make the argument that, pace Butler, gender substantializes sanctioned forms of sexual identities, could allow us to theorize sex as a mediating technology that has a definite and systematic relation to accumulation, insofar as sex in capitalism is in fact perpetually constituted by processes that involve the taxonomizing, medicalization, and disciplining of bodies — processes that depend on the very same political order of empiricisms or “substantialisms” that undergird both liberal political economy and “gender critical” feminism. Sex is both a technology and a distributional category itself, but rather than collapsing sex into gender, we begin to see its specific function within the sex-gender binary — a binary considered here as a capitalist social form.

A Marxian critique of sex as a constantly re-constituted social form, part of the processual movement of capital’s dynamic categories, does not debar linguistic understandings of sex and its significations, but rather, as Fredric Jameson might say, subsumes them into an analysis capable of grounding them. And it also reminds us that there are many things left unexplained by Marx’s critique of value. One obvious example is the question of how such a critique would be informed by Hortense Spillers’s theory of the ungendering process of the middle passage, which she frames as a “hieroglyphics of the flesh,” in notable propinquity to Marx’s critique of the commodity as a social hieroglyph. Objectified by a comprehensive set of “externally imposed meanings and uses,” Spillers argues, the captive body is a site of subjugation on a variety of (biological, sexual, linguistic, and psychological) levels, and these differences lead Spillers to posit a fundamental distinction between body and flesh as “the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions.” Flesh, Spillers notes, is “that zero degree of social conceptualization.”37 Unlike Wittig’s lesbian defense of the pre-gendered person — which for Butler succumbs to the spurious “metaphysics of substance” — this proposition auspiciously brings us back around to the logic of commodity exchange and its relation to sex, this time through the radical non-identity and mutual exclusivity of commodities and gender in the history of chattel slavery.

1. Simon Clarke, Marx, Marginalism, and Modern Sociology (London: Macmillan, 1982). See especially Clarke’s chapter “The Marginalist Revolution: Economics and Sociology” 126–160.
2. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1991 [1976]) 165.
3. Marx, Capital, vol. 1164–5.
4. Beverley Best, The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s Capital (New York: Verso, 2024) 324.
5. Best, The Automatic Fetish 328.
6. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990) 18–20.
7. Butler, Gender Trouble 20. For a sharp overview of the contemporary influence of Wittig’s work as it inspires both trans exclusionary radical feminisms and queer transfeminisms, especially in France, see Blase A. Provitola, “TERF or Transfeminist Avant La Lettre? Monique Wittig’s Complex Legacy in Trans Studies,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 9:3 (August 2022) 387–406.
8. Butler, Gender Trouble 30–33.
9. Butler, Gender Trouble 12.
10. For a summary of these critiques, and an argument for the oft misunderstood yet central importance of sex and the body in Butler’s early work, see Samuel Chambers, “Reconstructing Judith Butler’s Theory of Sex/Gender,” Body & Society 13:4 (2007) 47–75.
11. Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Marx’s Capital, trans. Alexander Locascio (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012) 49.
12. Marx, Capital, vol. 1168–9. Slightly earlier in the same section, Marx pertinently notes that “the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and with the material [dinglich] relations arising out of this” (165).
13. Butler, Gender Trouble 20.
14. “The categories of bourgeois economics,” Marx notes, “are forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of production.” See Marx, Capital Vol. I 169.
15. Lisa Rofel, “Queer Studies, Materialism, and Crisis: A Roundtable Discussion,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies18: 1 (2012): 129.
16. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1978) 53.
17. I am drawing on Best’s critique of Nancy Fraser’s concept of “boundary struggles” here, especially her note that, “the problem is, the real world of capitalist competition throws up obstacles to meeting this one condition for growth [the production of surplus value by labor-power], obstacles that largely reflect the state of what Fraser calls boundary struggles (i.e., class struggle). Where the boundary between waged and unwaged labor falls expresses a different contradiction, one that is internal to capital, but animated by individual capitalists in their functional antagonism to capital itself.” See Beverley Best, “Wages for Housework Redux: Social Reproduction and the Utopian Dialectic of the Value-Form,” Theory & Event 24:4 (2021): 909.
18. See Martha E. Giménez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2019); and Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex,” Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reita (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975): 157–210.
19. Endnotes, “The Logic of Gender: On the Separation of Spheres and the Process of Abjection,” Endnotes 3 (2013): 56–91.
20. In short, the argument that capitalism opportunistically adapts and torques pre-existing social hierarchies, including gender and sexual divisions, but that these divisions are not internal to capital’s logic. For an incisive summary of this argument and its place within feminist “systems debates,” see Cinzia Arruzza, “Remarks on Gender,” Viewpoint Magazine, September 2, 2014 https://viewpointmag.com/2014/09/02/remarks-on-gender/.
21. Best, “Wages for Housework Redux” 909–917 especially.
22. Best, “Wages for Housework Redux” 910.
23. Marx, Capital, vol. 1 135.
24. As Marx explains in his account of the emergence of the money-form: “The advance consists only in that the form of direct and universal exchangeability, in other words the universal equivalent form, has now by social custom finally become entwined with the specific natural form of the commodity gold.” See Marx, Capital, vol. 1 162.
25. Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40:4 (1988): 520. It’s even more significant, then, that in their critique of substantialism, Butler’s commitment to anti-foundationalist thought precludes the foundation that is not one: value.
26. For an argument detailing this process, see Endnotes, “Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital,” Endnotes 2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt.
27. Sianne Ngai, “Ambiguous Lever,” PMLA 137:3 (2022): 530. Ngai is building on Fredric Jameson’s argument in The Political Unconscious concerning how hard it can be to “see two things as part of the same process, different branchings of the same unity, without conflating them or assuming that one must be the ‘cause’ or ‘result’ of the other.”
28. As others have done, I suggest 1973 as the year of the first global oil shock, the final collapse of the Bretton Woods Agreement, and the beginning of a protracted period of economic stagnation and contraction in the West. See Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 2010); Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945-2005 (New York: Verso, 2006); Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (New York: Verso, 2019). For arguments that misrecognize flesh, computer programs, and financial transactions as sites of value-production, see for example, Melinda Cooper, Life As Surplus: Biotechnology & Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2008); Arjun Appadurai, Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); and Nicole Shukin’s Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
29. Kevin Floyd, “Automatic Subjects: Gendered Labour and Abstract Life,” Historical Materialism 24:2 (2016): 71.
30. Floyd, “Automatic Subjects” 78.
31. Floyd points to Kalindi Vora’s work on biocapital and forms of biological reproduction outsourced to the global South and Lisa Adkins’s post-autonomist arguments about new modes of value production in postindustrial economies as examples of these claims. Arguing that it is not value production but the production of under- and unemployed surplus populations that is expanding, Floyd contends on the contrary that, “if, in the North, social and biological reproduction performed by women increasingly takes place within the value circuit, this implies … an expanding field of labour both subject to the value-form and dissociated from the valorisation process” (79). Yet again, the problem is that the relationship between value and biological sex is figured in these accounts without a concept of mediation, nor an understanding of the unique character of value as a real abstraction that cannot be located in any one place.
32. M.E. O’Brien, “To Abolish the Family: The Working-Class Family and Gender Liberation in Capitalist Development,” Endnotes (London): 407.
33. Werner Bonefeld, “On (Negative) Humanism and the Critique of Capital,” unpublished paper, 2023.
34. Kevin Floyd, “Queer Studies, Materialism, and Crisis: A Roundtable Discussion,” GLQ 18 (1) (2012): 138.
35. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer and Now,” Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1994) 5.
36. Emma Heaney, “The Trans Allegory and International Studies,” Talk at Queen Mary, University of London, March 21, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nxQAz6iJ3U.
37. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17: 2 (1987): 67.