ABSTRACT
This paper offers alternatives to orthodox interpretations of Marx in several areas. Mainstream Marxist theory reads concepts such as value, and socially necessary labour time, largely in a technical sense. But all such categories should be explicated within an account of the specifically capitalist social form of production and exchange. I will show that, in the capital-relation, labour and value are not to be positively identified with each other, but rather are dialectically interpenetrating opposites; the capital-relation is constituted as a contradiction in essence. This theoretical diagnosis of the contradictions of capitalism leads ineluctably to the objective necessity for its overthrow.
