ABSTRACT
The phrase ‘outside the worthless commodity’ is actually Schopenhauer’s, a phrase that Theodor Adorno used in his In Search of Wagner. Marx had his own rendering of the critique of the commodity, in fact a revolutionary critique of the commodity which was not ‘outside the worthless commodity’, but in ‘confronting the worthless commodity’, a confrontation that begins with his celebrated Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and then which went to the Grundrisse, the three volumes of Capital, the three parts of Theories of Surplus Value and Notes on Adolf Wagner. Marx discovered a new site that lay beyond the commodity principle which he christened ‘a community of free individuals’. Two hundred years after Marx’s birth we remember him as the seeker of these free individuals. We also remember him as the trenchant critique of all class societies, nationalism and of human alienation in general. However, we also remember him as the one who wrote the dirge of Stalinism well before Stalin was born, the elegy of the myth of ‘socialism in one country’ and mainly the requiem of the horrible myth of the socialist commodity (both which were the core parts of the ideology of Stalin and the Soviet Union, of Mao and Maoist China and which is now the principal myth of China). This essay is about going beyond the worthless commodity and how humanity needs to understand the transcendence of this worthlessness. Marx’s critique of political economy and his theory of value is a critique of the worthless commodity. And it is in this site of the critique of political economy that his idea of revolutionary philosophy emerges.
