ABSTRACT
Karl Marx works for a starting point for theoretical exposition which can overcome the critical failings which vitiate the project of political economy. In the critique of political economy, too, the central explanatory role of the value form merely reflects the ontological foundations of human social activity, and, a fortiori, capitalism as a social formation. Marx’s critique of political economy is the obverse of the labour theory of value, such that an exposition of the value form is latent in the critique. For Marx, the value form is pushed centre stage because of its constitution by a particular form of human productive activity. After working through his destructive critique of the canons of classical political economy, Marx needs an Archimedean point from which to move the world. The ‘certain social subject’ refers to what Marx later explicates as the dominant or determinate form of production.
