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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]

The aim of the text is to clarify why machines are economically productive only in capitalism and therefore in our society are capitalistic machines. They are capitalist not only because they increase the productive power of the capitalist valorisation, but this valorisation first of all is producing these machines, or at least it produces their productivity and hence 'the machinic' of machines. To understand this production of the machinic, we must understand them, as, for example, Heidegger, Simondon or Deleuze and Guattari have shown, from their context: from their non-technical essence, from their connection with other machines and from the social essence of the machinic. But in this context, first of all and in the last instance, we have to understand with Marx their entanglement with the capitalist valorisation. This can be shown for three different types of machines: the physical machine, the calculation machine and the social machine: money. What all three have in common and almost defines them as machines is that all three naturalise relations by quantifying them. The classical physical machine quantifies the relation of nature, the calculation machine quantifies information and meaning, and the money machine quantifies the relations of our society. I will concentrate on the physical and the money machine only. The technique to quantify is for both the same: measurement. This quantification and naturalisation by measurement is why both are – although or especially because they are opposed types of machines – interfaces to the capitalist valorisation process, and in this functioning as interfaces, we have to search their non-technical essence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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