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Sohn-Rethel's great idea was to 'socialise' Kant's transcendental subject by combining it with Marx's commodity-form. In so doing, he took on three challenges simultaneously: a) the timeless validity of modern natural science; b) the social genesis of empirically pure forms of cognition; and c) socialisation occurring through a purely social synthesis. However, Sohn-Rethel construed Marx's value-form analysis as an empirical exchange of commodities and held that such exchange performs a real abstraction – in this way, he laboured under the very semblance that money engenders at the surface of society by virtue of its function qua means of exchange. This semblance can be rendered transparent by, on the one hand, explaining value in terms of capitalist valorisation rather than as a product of abstraction, and, on the other, developing money as the measure and form of this valorisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Neue Marx-Lektüre has its roots in the new interpretations of Marx as well as in the re-readings of the Capital that arose in the milieu of the student movements of the mid-1960s in the Federal Republic of Germany. Following, on the one hand, Hegel’s dialectic and, on the other, the results of Marx-scholarship, the aim was to redeem what among the intellectuals of the first generation of the Critical Theory had remained rather an intuition and a mere postulate: the structural identity of Hegelian Spirit and Marx’s capital. Accordingly, a new reading – either called “logical-categorial” or “form-analytical” – arose, mostly directed at the value-theoretical analyses of the Capital. Classical Marxism read out of Marx’s Capital a rejection of the objective labour theory of value, whereas the Neue Marx-Lektüre sees itself either as a critique of “pre-monetary conceptions of value” (Backhaus, Reichelt) or as a “monetary theory of value” (Heinrich). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]