Between 1991 and 2012 the International Symposium on Marxian Theory held 22 annual meetings. Eleven books were published resulting from the ISMT conferences, with contributions from the USA, Australia, Brazil, England, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Thailand, and the Netherlands. Geert Reuten (1946–2025) was a core contributor to the ISMT project for throughout its lifespan. Fred Moseley, Martha Campbell, Riccardo Bellofiore, Chris Arthur, Patrick Murrary and Tony Smith were also members of the group over the entire period. 29 July was the first anniversary of Geert’s passing. It seems appropriate to mark the date with some reflections on the intellectual legacy of our much-missed comrade.
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A Remembrance
Fred Moseley
In 1991, I was planning a small “working conference” of 8 participants (4 economists and 4 philosophers) on the subject of Marx and Hegel and the logic of Capital, and Geert Reuten was the first person I invited because of his path-breaking book Value-Form and the State: The Tendencies of Accumulation and the Determination of Economic Policy in Capitalist Society. And his quick acceptance helped to recruit other participants. This conference evolved into the International Symposium on Marxian Theory which met annually for the next 20 years, and Geert made many valuable contributions (excellent papers, commentaries on other papers) because of his expertise in both Marx’s theory and Hegel’s logic. He also hosted two meetings of the ISMT at the University of Amsterdam, and he co-edited two of the ISMT volumes: The Circulation of Capital: Essays on Volume II of Marx’s Capital (with Chris Arthur) and The Culmination of Capital: Essays on Volume III of Marx’s Capital (with Martha Campbell). He will be missed by Marxian scholars around the world, but his legacy will live on because of his prodigious and influential scholarship.
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Geert Reuten on Money as the One and Only Measure of Value
Martha Campbell
Geert’s work belongs to the social form interpretation of Marx. A social form of production, in the broad sense of a mode of production, is the complete set of social relations that constitute a given mode; in capitalism, these relations create and exist in the fetish, value. The social form interpretation of Capital holds that Marx’s theory entails a fundamental break – or paradigm shift – from classical political economy’s naturalistic conception of economic activity. While always an advocate for Marx’s new paradigm, in the early years of ISMT, Geert questioned whether Marx had entirely succeeded in rooting out classical naturalism; his essays of that period refine our understanding of Marx’s concepts, strengthening the paradigm. Geert later came to think that there were fewer remnants of naturalism than he had previously supposed. His essays on value and money in this later period mark this turning point.[1] In these, Geert argues that Marx’s break with Ricardian labour-embodied notions of value is decisively established with Marx’s presentation of money as measure in Capital, Chapter 3. Relative to previous interpretations, the new point this makes is that the exposition of Marx’s concept of value in simple circulation is completed only with all of Capital, Part I.
As the opening paragraphs of Capital, Chapter 3 indicate, money as measure builds on and so incorporates the four characteristics that monetary exchange must have to express value (identified in Chapter 1, Section 3, exchange must be a polar relation between the relative and equivalent value-forms, this relation must include all commodities, and have a single equivalent that is socially recognised). The idea that exchange must have these characteristics is utterly foreign to classical theory. They are required for the exchange of products to mediate indirectly social production. They make possible the coexistence of the mutually exclusive conditions that indirectly social production entails, that production is both private and independent and social; stated differently, they enable private and independent to be a social form of production. Eliminating the social part, as the classicals do, leaves no contradiction to mediate (the same is true for the neoclassicals). That value, as Marx conceives it, must be expressed in a monetary relation with the characteristics just listed establishes his distance from the classicals; further, it identifies his conception of production as social versus classical naturalism as the source of their difference.
What money as measure adds to the concept of the commodity’s monetary relation is the transformation of commodity values into prices. Thereby, Geert argues, as measure, money establishes that commodities are actually homogeneous – that they share a common property –,and, so, are commensurable (Geert maintains that “when Marx says ‘money measures value’ he means that it establishes the commensuration (i.e., homogenization)).”[2] A contrast Geert offers to measuring length clarifies this point. Physical objects possess their length and are immediately commensurable in terms of it just as they are; by contrast, the value substance of commodities – abstract labour — does not exist independently of money; to be commensurable in terms of it, commodities must undergo a transformation into prices. The reason why value’s substance does not exist independently of money is considered shortly. On the assumption, for the moment, that it does not, because value’s substance does not exist independently of value’s expression in money, the transformation accomplished by money as measure amounts to more than making value visible in price (the result of Chapter 1, Section 3); as Geert puts this “measurement by money…’transubstantiates’ commodities into form-determined entities” – into their social being as values.[3] Money as measure accomplishes this transformation simply by announcing commodity values, in a price tag, for example, or even in a firm’s list of its assets, before commodities are actually exchanged.
The second, more ordinary part of measure is the specification of a unit of measurement, a standard of price (like specifying metres or yards for measuring length). Clearly, establishing the commensurability of commodities (by their ‘transubstantiation’) is the precondition for specifying the unit in terms of which amounts of their common property is assessed (Geert calls this assessment “taking measure”).[4] In turn, the specification of a unit is the precondition for actual exchange, since exchange is carried out in separately existing units of real money. It should be obvious also that the unit could be either a definite weight of precious metal (as in Marx’s account, because of his simplifying assumption that money is gold) or units of a national currency, such as euros or dollars, that have no connection to precious metal; the difference between precious metal and credit money is irrelevant to Marx’s “general account of money” that is Geert’s concern).[5]
As an interpretation of Marx, Geert’s case that money’s measurement “establishes the commensuration” seems to contradict Marx’s claim that commodities are “in themselves commensurable”, moreover, that it is because of their inner commensurability that their values can be measured in money.[6] In an evident reference back to Chapter 1, Marx says that the commensurability of commodities as values consists in their all being objectified labour; under conditions where products are generally commodities, the objectified labour that counts as value is abstract labour. But abstract labour, Geert argues, does not yield a measure of value that is independent of money. The straightforward case for this is that, although Marx lists the conditions for labour to have created value – i.e., the conditions for it to be socially necessary – the only way to know that these conditions are met is by the commodity’s sale. With the commodity’s sale, however, value is measured in money, not in labour time, the dimension of abstract labour. Evidently, this means that value is invisible in labour time. The deeper point is that, since it is only the sale that establishes the social necessity of labour, which labour must be to be abstract, it is only the sale that establishes that labour is abstract. Hence the character of labour as abstract – that is, as value’s substance – as well as the quantity of that substance is established only with the commodity’s conversion into money. The necessary first step in this conversion is made by the announcement of commodity prices. As measure, then, money establishes the substance of value as well as making that substance visible. In Geert’s words: “money in the market measures ‘abstract labour’ and so determines ‘abstract labour’”; by itself, “abstract labour has no determinate existence”.[7]
This is the basis for Geert’s case that the homogeneity, and so commensurability, of commodities is established only with money as measure: that the commodity’s conversion into money, which is first just its measurement as price, establishes it as a value entity (the idea that value entities exist independently of the measure, he says, is false).[8] The concept, abstract labour, Geert argues, foreshadows money or is a ‘placeholder’ for money.[9] By this he means that the concept of abstract labour is derived from the monetary expression of commodity values in prices (he says that “Marx presupposes the money measure” in presenting the commodity in Chapter 1); that concept, therefore, is inseparable from money.[10] Geert argues also that abstract labour is a simpler concept than money, simpler because it considers one moment of value by itself, taking no account of the equally constitutive moment that value must be expressed in money (as Marx says he is doing in Capital, Chapter 1, Section 1).[11] Marx begins Chapter 3 with it because he must rely on the concept of value that he has developed up to that point. But, Geert argues, abstract labour is left behind when Marx proceeds to the more concrete concept that does include that moment; this is money as measure in Chapter 3.[12] To be clear, Geert does not at all mean that labour disappears. Rather, he maintains that, after Chapter 3, labour figures as concrete labour; “the notion ‘abstract labour’ is superseded and should not be used anymore” he says.[13] Reference to abstract labour after Chapter 3 would mean going backwards in Marx’s argument from more developed or concrete concepts to simpler, more abstract ones. I am sceptical of this last point for reasons I will not elaborate on here. My reservations do not diminish the accomplishments of Geert’s argument.
Marx’s argument on money as measure seems to involve so little – just the statement of commodity values in prices – that it is hard to know what to make of it. In an interpretation that is entirely new, Geert explains what money’s measurement is about: it transforms commodities into value entities so that their homogeneity is made actual. This establishes that measure is a moment – or constitutive – of Marx’s concept of value and locates measure’s place in the development of that concept: in money as measure, the concept of the value-form “is concretised into its monetary expression” Geert says.[14] That commodities are not homogeneous in labour (so that their value is not measurable in labour time) independently of money prices undermines Ricardian readings of Marx. This advances the case that Marx does not belong to the classical tradition but accomplishes “the crucial break from the naturalism” of the classicals.[15]
References
Marx, Karl 1867, Capital, Vol. 1 (translated by B. Fowkes), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
Reuten, Geert 2003, ‘Karl Marx: His work and Major Changes in Its Interpretation’, in The
Blackwell Companion to the History of Economic Thought, edited by Warren Samuels, Jeff Biddle and John Davis, Oxford: Blackwell.
____ 2005, ‘Money as Constituent of Value’, in Marx’s Theory of Money: Modern Appraisals, edited by Fred Moseley, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
____ 2014, Final author’s version, ‘How Money Constitutes Value: From ‘Abstract Labour’ to Money’, in Returns of Marxism: Marxist Theory in a Time of Crisis, edited by Sara Farris, Amsterdam and Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016, downloaded from http://reuten.eu
____ 2019, The Unity of the Capitalist Economy and the State, Chicago: Haymarket
Books.
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Reuten’s Systematic Dialectic
Chris Arthur
The most significant new movement in Marxist theory in recent years has been that of ‘systematic dialectic’. Geert Reuten was an indefatigable pathbreaker in expounding this method, by way of a reconstruction of Marx’s Capital.[16] This truly original intervention was informed by a thorough knowledge of Marx’s Capital; but, also, by close study of Hegel’s logic.[17] It is worth mentioning that Tony Smith’s version of systematic dialectic, set out in his Logic of Marx’s ‘Capital’,[18] appeared almost simultaneously with the Reuten and Williams book. This meant that neither work influenced the other. Reuten’s final word was presented thirty years later in his magnum opus: The Unity of the Capitalist Economy and State (Reuten 2019). In an Appendix to this is ‘An Outline of Systematic Dialectics’.
It was Reuten’s systematic-dialectical method (SDM) that most impressed me about his work, although my own reconstruction of Capital in this vein is very different to his.[19] Hence, I devote this special note to it.
Reuten’s method[20] dispenses with reliance on axioms. Anything that is presupposed has eventually be ‘grounded’ in the course of the exposition of the whole system.[21] To the extent that this grounding requires some new concept to be introduced, it, in turn, must be grounded in its ‘conditions of existence’ at a more concrete level. Thus, the exposition is a conceptual development that derives all the ‘necessary’ conditions of existence of the more abstract concepts at the most concrete level.[22] Then theory comprehends the existent in its ‘actuality’, and shows it is concrete self-reproducing, or endogenously determined, existence.[23]
The ‘object-totality’ is ‘the bourgeois epoch’.[24] This is to be comprehended in its systematicity. Thus, Reuten distinguishes his approach from those that present it within the framework of ‘the historical emergence of institutions’.[25]
When theory tries to comprehend a totality through a systematic exposition a problem which immediately arises is that of the starting point of such a linear development. Reuten says the starting point must provide ‘an all-encompassing conceptualisation’ of the object-totality.[26] In the bourgeois epoch, this is the dissociation of households and privately owned enterprises.[27] This is resolved by ‘trade’.[28] The theory concretises the abstract starting point through uncovering every ‘condition of its existence’, or ‘proximate grounding moment’.[29] It is important that the dialectical exposition is driven forward by the ‘insufficiency’ of a given posited moment to fully comprehend the whole.[30] Thus, the exposition is not complete before determining the internal reproduction of the starting point. The ultimate test of a starting point is whether it succeeds in accomplishing this.[31]
Because the exposition is driven conceptually the question of idealism is raised. In Reuten and Williams 1989 it is said that the theory is a ‘transcendental idealism’ (although not an ‘ontological’ one) in the manner of Hegel.[32] However, the final version drops this affiliation; but it still retains the notion of ‘trans-abstraction in practice’.[33]
This important notion is central to Reuten’s value theory. The ‘outward’ dissociation of enterprises and households leads to the ‘inward’ dissociation of the physical shape of commodities and their value.[34] Thus the value-form has its own substantive logic. In trade, it links heterogeneous entities through commensurating them in terms of something ‘that is no part whatsoever’ of their concrete bodily shape.[35] Nonetheless, the ‘alien dimension’ of ‘value’ is vested in the entity. Thus, Reuten concludes that the abstraction performed in the market is, in fact, ‘supersensuous, or transcendental – whence I adopt the term trans-abstraction’.[36] As he rightly observes, this value dimension is very different from ‘mass’, which is a physical aspect of weighty things.
In 1989 Reuten had no hesitation in stating that his work critically appropriates ‘value-form analysis and the abstract-labour theory of value’. So, it provides ‘a value-form theoretic reconstruction of the abstract-labour theory of value’.[37] However, in 2019, both these watchwords are qualified. He now thinks that ‘value-form’ is better termed as ‘monetary-value dimension’.[38] As for ‘abstract labour’, he now treats it as a ‘placeholder’ for the virtual unity of the system, but argues it must be replaced in the dialectical development by money, which is the real ground of such unity.[39] (He believes he is in line with Marx on this point, for, in Capital, ‘abstract labour’ disappears from the text as soon as money is introduced.)
A couple of other interesting features of Reuten’s SDM are i) that he discusses ‘research prior to the systematic dialectical exposition’;[40] ii) that he addresses the problem of ‘contingency’, which necessarily comes into the analysis at its more concrete levels.[41]
In conclusion, on a personal note, I found Geert Reuten to be an invaluable fellow-thinker in the course of my own development of value-form analysis and systematic dialectic. He will be sorely missed.
References
Arthur, C.J. 2022, The Spectre of Capital, Leiden: Brill: 2022.
Arthur, C.J. forthcoming, ‘Replies to Critics’ in Symposium on The Spectre of Capital, Hegel Bulletin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reuten, G. and M. Williams 1989, Value-Form and the State, London: Routledge: 1989.
Reuten, G. 2019, The Unity of the Capitalist Economy and State, Leiden: Brill: 2019.
Smith, T. 1990, The Logic of Marx’s ‘Capital’, Albany: SUNY Press: 1990.
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Geert Reuten: Money as Constituent of Value and the Systematic-Dialectical Critique of Capitalism
Riccardo Bellofiore
The death of Geert Reuten marks the loss of one of the most rigorous and uncompromising systematic thinkers in contemporary Marxian political economy. Reuten belonged to a rare tradition: one that refused both the fragmentation of economic analysis into partial models and the reduction of Marx’s critique of political economy to a theory of relative prices or equilibrium tendencies. His work was animated by a single, persistent question: what are the conditions of existence of the capitalist system? And his answer was equally persistent: these conditions are neither natural nor technical, but social, monetary, and institutional.
In an academic landscape increasingly dominated by citation struggles, theoretical branding, and premature syntheses, Reuten consistently chose a different path. He was a Marxian rather than a Marxist. He worked slowly, systematically, and with an utmost attention to the internal consistency of categories. His major book, The Unity of the Capitalist Economy and State (2019), is the culmination of decades of engagement with Marx’s critique of political economy, Hegel’s Science of Logic, and the tradition of systematic dialectics. It is not a book to be consumed quickly, nor one that yields easy conclusions. It is a work that demands time, patience, and intellectual honesty.
What follows is not an exercise in intellectual hagiography. Reuten’s work deserves something better: a critical appreciation that situates it within ongoing debates on value, money, accumulation, and crisis. I attempt a sketch of a critical appreciation of Reuten’s contribution, written in the spirit of an enduring dialogue. An effort to clarify what Reuten achieved, where tensions remain, and why his project continues to matter.
- Capitalism as a Systematic Unity
Reuten’s work is best understood as a sustained attempt to move beyond the unresolved status of Marx’s critique of political economy as a “fragment of a system” (to borrow an expression from Backhaus). He did not approach Marx primarily as an object of interpretation, but as the starting point for a reconstruction. Where much Marxian scholarship oscillates between textual fidelity and selective innovation, Reuten chose a different path.
At the core of Reuten’s project lies a strong and uncompromising thesis: capitalism must be grasped as a systemic unity, whose institutions and processes cannot be understood piecemeal. This unity is not empirical but conceptual; it is not a description of observable regularities but a reconstruction of the necessary conditions of existence of capitalist society. This style of thought placed him at some distance both from Marx-Hegelian traditions that seek a structural homology between Capital and Hegel’s Logic, and from approaches that dissolve Marx’s critique into empirical social science. For Reuten, systematic dialectics was not an ontological claim about reality, but an epistemological commitment: the conviction that capitalist society can be grasped only through the ordered presentation of its necessary forms.
From early contributions such as “Value as Social Form” (1988) to his monumental The Unity of the Capitalist Economy and State (2019), Reuten pursued a systematic-dialectical reconstruction of capitalism as a monetary economy of production, irreducibly intertwined with the capitalist state. In doing so, he offered one of the most coherent alternatives to both mainstream economics and to large strands of Marxism that, paradoxically, continue to treat money as secondary and value as a quasi-physical substance.
Against empiricist Marxism and against methodological individualism alike, Reuten insists that capitalist reality is structured by forms that are not reducible to agents’ intentions or behaviours. Value, money, capital, the state, and finance are not “spheres” interacting from the outside; they are internally related moments of a single social totality. This is where Reuten’s work stands firmly within the tradition of systematic dialectics, while giving it a distinctive inflection. Unlike approaches that privilege either labour-process analysis or market coordination, Reuten reconstructs capitalism as a monetary system from the outset. Value is not a substance hidden behind prices, nor a mere accounting convention. It is a social form whose existence presupposes money as its necessary mode of presentation and validation.
- Value as Social Form and Monetary Necessity
Reuten’s point of departure is decisive: value is not a natural property of commodities, nor the embodiment of a pre-social labour substance. Value is a social form, and, specifically, a monetary social form. In capitalism, production is not production of use-values for direct social needs, but production for monetary validation. Commodities count socially only insofar as they are sold for money; labour counts socially only insofar as its product is validated on the market.
One of Reuten’s major achievements lies in this uncompromising rejection of any pre-monetary or naturalistic conception of value. Value, for him, is not labour embedded in commodities, nor a quantity that exists independently of its social validation. It is a monetary-value dimension: a one-dimensional social form imposed upon heterogeneous products and labours through capitalist exchange.
This position places Reuten firmly within, yet also beyond, the tradition of value-form theory and the Neue Marx-Lektüre. Like Rubin, Backhaus, Reichelt, Heinrich, he insists that value cannot be understood independently of its exhibition. Unlike many value-form theorists, however, and like Rubin, Reuten refuses to stop at circulation or at the logical analysis of exchange in his conceptualisation of abstract labour. From the outset, his concern is the systemic reproduction of capitalism, including accumulation, finance, crisis, and the state.
Crucially, money is not introduced as a mere numéraire or technical facilitator. It is the necessary form of ‘being-there’ of value. Production itself is permeated by the monetary dimension: enterprises produce monetary value, not simply goods but commodities; accumulation is the expansion of money capital, not material reproduction. In this sense, Reuten decisively breaks with any labour-embodiment reading of Marx, and with all attempts to measure value independently of money.
Reuten’s approach implies both a radical reinterpretation and reconstruction of Marx (with a fine distinction between the two moments). On my side, I agree that we need to go beyond interpretation towards reconstruction, but I also think that abstract labour and value are not merely the outcome of circulation: they exist, in a latent and ideal form, within production, and find their phenomenal expression when they come into being in commodity circulation. That is, I fear that Reuten’s emphasis on ex post socialisation risks collapsing value into exchange-value: the distinction between value and its form of manifestation becomes fragile.
This is not a trivial issue. What is at stake is whether capitalist production already presupposes a specific social form of labour, or whether sociality emerges only retroactively. Reuten’s answer is coherent within his system, but it leaves open a tension that remains central to Marx’s critique. My own approach is largely convergent to Reuten’s. Marx’s critique of political economy is intelligible only as a monetary theory of value: but, for me, it is a monetary labour theory of value, since abstract labour is the compound of latent abstract labour in production and actualised abstract labour in commodity circulation.
In other words, Reuten tends to theorise labour in production mainly in its concrete dimension, since the abstraction of labour is fully accomplished with money as universal equivalent. The point for me is not where abstraction is completed (final commodity circulation), but whether it is already operative as a potential determination of labour in production. Abstract labour is a processual notion, and monetary imprinting in the capital-labour relation (buying and selling of labour power, exploitation of workers in production) is emphasised relative to ex post validation.
- Money, Circuit, and Validation
Reuten is among the very few Marxian theorists to recognise fully Marx’s monetary analysis and to integrate it with a credit theory of money. Reuten decisively breaks with real-exchange models still haunting large parts of Marxist economics. Money is not introduced to facilitate exchange after the fact, nor it is just (as the formula goes) a necessary form of appearance of value; it is constitutive of value itself. Without prior monetary validation—without credit—capitalist production cannot even begin.
One of Reuten’s most enduring contributions lies in his insistence on the monetary pre-validation of capitalist production. Capitalist production does not begin with labour and end with money; it is conceived as a monetary sequence of interrelated stages, opening with the creation of bank credit. In other words, production must be financed ex ante, before any commodity is sold and before surplus-value is realised. Finance is first of all finance to production. The latter is not limited to investment in new capacity; it is a condition of existence of capitalist production as such, including simple reproduction (a point which is not always clear in Reuten). Investment precedes saving and banks create money endogenously. Final validation in exchange then determines whether this anticipation is confirmed or denied.
This is a powerful and general conception. It captures the dependence of capitalism on endogenous money creation and avoids the illusion of a pre-monetary “real economy”. It also places Reuten close to the monetary circuit tradition and to Keynesian and Kaleckian insights on effective demand. His insistence that finance is not an external “distortion” of capitalism but one of its conditions of existence resonates strongly with the view that capitalism is, from the macro-point of view, a monetary theory of production.
In Reuten’s exposition, however, labour appears primarily as a systemic vulnerability: accumulation requires labour-capacity, unemployment, and wage regulation, but labour tends to remain only a functional moment within the reproduction of capital. Exploitation is present in his outlook, but it is not thematised as the core antagonistic relation shaping the circuit itself. A difference from my picture of the monetary circuit emerges precisely at this point, because Reuten’s conception of finance is deliberately (too) general.
As said, banks create money ex ante to finance production as a whole: credit enables enterprises to operate prior to sales, covering wages, circulating capital, and ongoing expenditures. Finance appears here as a systemic condition of reproduction. I agree. But, in my own reconstruction of Marx, the monetary circuit is inseparable from the real subsumption of workers to capital in the connected moments of the buying and selling of labour-power and of the capitalist labour process (well before money as universal equivalent). Money is not only the form of validation; it is also the form through which capital commands labour, disciplines workers, and extracts surplus-labour. Credit anticipates not only production, but production as exploitation of workers as living labour-power. The monetary circuit is a class circuit, structured by conflict and asymmetry.
From a monetary circuit perspective, the question is unavoidable: what exactly does finance finance? In Graziani’s framework, the answer is precise and restrictive. Ex ante banks finance the wage bill, and only the wage bill. Money is created ex ante in order to purchase labour-power (attached to workers); profits arise only ex post, through the realisation of surplus-labour in money form. Finance is thus intrinsically class-specific: it establishes monetary command over workers as bearers of living labour.
Reuten’s finance is broader. It finances production in general, not the buying and selling of labour-power in particular. This move is consistent with his level of abstraction, but it has theoretical consequences. By financing production as such rather than labour-power as a very special commodity, finance risks appearing only as a systemic function rather than as a moment of class domination.
Discussing with Geert, however, very often I had the impression that ours was a difference in emphasis rather than a theoretical contrast.
- State, Law, Crises, and the Non-Neutrality of Institutions
A distinctive feature of The Unity of the Capitalist Economy and State is the integration of the state into the core of capitalist reproduction. The state is not an external regulator correcting market failures, nor a mere instrument of class rule. It is a necessary institutional form without which capitalist relations could not stabilise themselves.
Property rights, contract law, monetary sovereignty, and fiscal capacity are not superstructural add-ons. They are constitutive conditions of value relations. In this respect, Reuten avoids both economism and functionalism. The state is neither autonomous nor reducible to capital; it is internally related to it. The unity of economy and state is not a historical accident, but a structural necessity. In this respect, Reuten offers one of the most systematic and convincing reconstructions of the state-derivation problematic available today. This treatment of the state exemplifies Reuten’s intellectual temperament: careful, non-reductive, and resistant to slogans. He neither romanticises the state nor demonises it. He reconstructs its necessity within capitalist social relations.
My agreement with his perspective is substantial. Capitalism cannot be understood without integrating state, money, and finance into its core logic. Accumulation is inherently unstable, crisis-prone, and dependent on state intervention. The idea of a self-regulating capitalist economy is a fiction — and a dangerous one. Where I would push further is in linking these dynamics to the transformation of class relations under contemporary capitalism, particularly to the real subsumption of households to finance, which corresponds to Minsky’s money-manager capitalism. Reuten’s framework is quite compatible with such developments but does not often explicitly thematise them.
In his approach, crises emerge from problems of validation, overaccumulation, and the increasing complexity of institutional regulation. One of the most convincing aspects of Reuten’s work is his integration of effective demand into the theory of value and accumulation. Drawing on Luxemburg, Kalecki, and Keynes, it is possible to show that autonomous demand drives the production and validation of surplus-value at the macro level. Saving is not a behavioural decision but the monetary counterpart of investment.
A similar perspective allows Reuten to overcome sterile oppositions between “real” and “monetary” theories of crisis. Validation is neither automatic nor guaranteed. Capitalist production is inherently exposed to failure, and crisis is an immanent possibility rather than an external shock. Here, Reuten’s analysis is both theoretically robust and politically relevant. It shows why capitalism requires continuous institutional and state intervention, and why such intervention can never fully stabilise the system. A finance-centred class analysis would add that crises are also rooted in the contradictions of monetary command over labour, debt, and exploitation.
- Reuten, Heinrich, and the Ethics of Theory
It is worth stressing how close—and how different—Reuten’s attitude is to that of Michael Heinrich. In different ways, both sought to protect Marx’s critique from its reduction to orthodox Marxism, whether in its traditional or contemporary forms. Both insist on careful textual work, conceptual clarity, and the refusal of shortcuts. Both reject any naturalistic or substantialist conception of value. Both insist on the historically specific forms of capitalist social relations. Both pursue a patient, textually grounded reconstruction rather than a polemical reassertion of orthodoxy. Yet their emphases diverge.
Heinrich’s strength lies in questioning inherited certainties and reopening debates often considered closed. Reuten’s strength lies in construction: patiently rebuilding the logic of the capitalist system as a coherent conceptual whole. Where Heinrich has focused primarily on the critique of value theory and the reconstruction of Marx’s categories, Reuten extended the systematic ambition to encompass money, finance, accumulation, crisis, and the state within a single theoretical architecture.
If Heinrich reminds us that Marxian theory must remain open and self-critical, Reuten reminds us that critique without reconstruction risks becoming sterile. The two approaches are complementary rather than opposed – and Reuten’s work shows that one can pursue systematic theory without falling into scholasticism.
- Essence, Concept, and Absolute Value
Reuten’s systematic dialectics is firmly rooted in the Logic of Essence. Capitalist categories are reconstructed as necessary forms of manifestation, grounded in relations that reproduce themselves through contradiction and mediation. Contradictions are not resolved at the level of necessity; they are temporarily managed through contingent institutional forms. My own work on absolute value pushes further towards the Logic of the Concept. Capital appears not only as a system of mediations but as an automatic subject, a self-reproducing totality that posits its own presuppositions.
This difference should not be overstated. Reuten’s Essence-oriented reconstruction provides the indispensable groundwork for any Concept-level analysis. Without a disciplined reconstruction of capitalist necessity, appeals to the “automatic subject” risk sliding into metaphor. At the same time, the Concept-level perspective helps to radicalise Reuten’s insights, showing how capitalist forms acquire a quasi-subjective autonomy that confronts individuals as an alien power. If there is a tension here, it is a productive one and it is already within Marx.
- With Marx Beyond Marx
Beyond specific theses, what remains most striking about Geert Reuten is his intellectual style. He never reduced theory to a battlefield of quotations. He never confused polemic with critique. He treated Marx, Hegel, and contemporary debates with equal seriousness, without reverence and without arrogance.
In a time when theoretical work is often rushed, Reuten insisted on slowness. In a time of theoretical polarisation, he insisted on mediation. His work teaches that rigour is not rigidity, and that openness does not require eclecticism. Reuten did not seek to win arguments; he sought to make concepts work and he showed that systematic thought can be critical without being doctrinaire.
Geert Reuten was a systematic thinker in the strong sense: someone who believed that capitalism could be grasped only through a reconstruction of its inner necessity, and that Marx’s critique of political economy still provided the most demanding framework for such a task. His writings are difficult not because of obscurity, but because of his refusal of shortcuts. For Marxists accustomed to polemics conducted through selective quotation or exegetical skirmishes, this stance could be disconcerting. Yet maybe it is precisely this intellectual discipline that constitutes his lasting legacy.
Reuten’s systematic-dialectical project displaces the terrain on which debates are conducted. The question is no longer whether values are transformed correctly into prices, or whether temporal or simultaneist procedures are more faithful to Marx’s texts, or the like. The question is how capitalist society reproduces itself as a monetary system of production in which labour, money, and the state are mutually constitutive. Seen from this angle, many contemporary disputes appear as attempts to stabilise Marx’s critique rather than to radicalise it: and radicalising Marx means questioning him, and therefore going with Marx beyond Marx. It is precisely this openness that makes his contribution so valuable today.
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Turning to Hegel and Marx: In Remembrance of Geert Reuten (1946 – 2025)
Patrick Murray
Geert Reuten entered the intellectual scene at a time when positivism and narrowly empiricist philosophies of science were being questioned and probed, as alternatives were being explored. Geert found the most promising alternative in Hegel and Marx, who were largely ignored or scorned as enemies of the “open society” (Karl Popper). In 1961, a leading scholar, Robert Tucker, could write: “Capital, the product of twenty years of hard labour to which, as he said, he sacrificed his health, his happiness in life and his family, is an intellectual museum-piece for us now.”[42] The idea of turning to Hegel and Marx for a more scientific way of thinking and a deeper understanding of the present world seemed wrongheaded, if not ridiculous. Given the promise that he found there, Geert was appalled at the indifference or hostility toward Hegel’s thinking, especially his critique of empiricism and his development of systematic dialectics. Things were changing in the 1970s and 1980s, though, and Geert learned from many authors who were reinterpreting or reconstructing Hegel and Marx. Geert recognised Marx as one of the only thinkers to have grasped the scientific potential of Hegel and made something of it.[43] Despite his criticisms of Hegel, Marx declared himself to be Hegel’s student. Geert was a passionate and careful student of Hegel and Marx, always with a view to what their ways of thinking could reveal about the world that Geert was determined to understand and change.
In Hegel and Marx, Geert discovered thinkers who paid close attention to matters of form, particularly social form. Marx’s subtitle for Capital is “A Critique of Political Economy”, and Geert identifies Marx fundamental criticism as the neglect of social form: “In neglecting the social form that useful objects take – namely the form of value or money – it [neoclassical economics] studies the economy from a transhistorical standpoint and thus fails to grasp the specificities of capitalist society.”[44] By contrast, Marx’s Capital begins by identifying the commodity as the social form of the wealth produced in capitalist societies, and Capital is, in large part, a systematic dialectical exposition of the social forms constitutive of capitalism. Geert insisted on the inseparability of method and content characteristic of systematic dialectics: “Hegel’s logic … cannot be ‘applied’ to social science because that would be alien to its unity of method and content.”[45] Geert was one of the pioneers and leading lights of social theory attentive to capital’s constitutive social forms. As such, he explored what a successor discipline to economics could be.
Geert and I disagreed on some matters and conducted an exchange in Historical Materialism.[46] The main issues concerned Marx’s relation to his two great interlocuters, Ricardo and Hegel. (1) To what extent, if any, did Marx’s theory of value retain remnants of the asocial, ahistorical theory of value best represented by David Ricardo? (2) To what extent, if any, did Marx’s method differ from Hegel’s? Is there a distinctively Marxian method of systematic dialectics? On the first issue, we agreed that Marx understands value as a specific social form of wealth whose necessary form of appearance is money. Marx’s theory of value makes a revolutionary break with Ricardo and the tradition of classical political economy. It is exasperating how little, over decades, this break has registered with mainstream scholarship. Marx is still mistaken for a Ricardian value-theorist – and discarded. Geert took the plausible view that, in making such a radical break, remnants of Ricardian thinking would haunt Marx.
Reconsidering, in his 2005 essay “Money as Constituent of Value”, Geert wrote, “A restudy of a number of German texts of Capital (together with insights from Hegel’s work) makes me conclude that there are far fewer such remnants than I thought before.”[47] In this essay Geert wrote:
In Marx’s view money is one constituent of value (he does not use exactly this formulation). The immanent or introversive constituent of value is undifferentiated ‘abstract labor’ (chapter 1), its extroversive (ausser) constituent is money (chapter 3); but these two inseparably belong together. Money is the necessary form of expression of value (Aussdruck). That is, value has no existence without money.[48]
Because they fail to recognise the inseparability of value and money, neither a Ricardian labour theory of value nor a utility-based neoclassical theory of value can get off the ground. Geert writes, “value is fully constituted only when we have money; money in the market measures ‘abstract labour’ and so determines ‘abstract labour’ so to speak.”[49] Geert’s phrase “fully constituted only when” reminds us that capital’s valorisation process is just that, a process. The determination of value and the quantity of “abstract labour” is completed when commodities are measured by money by being sold in the market. But, as Geert’s prescient attention to pre-commensuration and pre-validation reveals, the risky constitution of value runs through the circuit of capital, reaching its full actualisation and final quantitative determination – if it does – in the sale of the commodity. We might put Geert’s point this way: “value stands the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle on its head: only by being measured in the act of exchange does value become fully determinate!”[50] This perplexing path of actualisation is unavoidable when we recognise with Marx that money is the necessary form of appearance of value.
Geert showed that you could distinguish between concrete and abstract labour yet have an asocial, ahistorical, Ricardian, embodied, abstract labour theory of value. Geert understates the issue: “The meaning of ‘abstract labour’ is not easy.”[51] Thinking more about “abstract labour” led me to formulate “Rubin’s dilemma” and to change my views, which were caught in the dilemma. The dilemma arises when we employ just the one phrase: “abstract labour”. If we say that (congealed) “abstract labour” is the substance of value and then consider Marx’s judgment that “all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power, in the physiological sense.”[52] shall we conclude that “abstract labour” is “expenditure of human labour-power, in the physiological sense”? “Abstract labour”, in that sense, is not socially or historically specific. But Rubin and Reuten are adamant that value is socially and historically specific. There lies Marx’s great advance over Ricardo. If that is so, then the substance of value must be socially and historically specific. Then, since “abstract labour” is the substance of value, it must be socially and historically specific. “The dilemma occurs when only one phrase – abstract labor – is employed.” Rubin and Reuten correctly view value as socially and historically specific. Hence, we must say that “expenditure of human labor power in the physiological sense” is not “abstract labor”. Yet that seems to be the very definition of abstract labour.
To escape the dilemma, I have proposed that we employ two phrases and distinguish between a general category, “abstract labour,” understood as “expenditure of human labour-power, in the physiological sense” and what I call “practically abstract” labour. “Abstract labour” in this generally applicable sense is not a kind of labour, while “practically abstract” labour is a social kind of labour, the kind that produces value. Whatever its social kind, we can think of human labour in abstraction from its concrete, purposive characteristics. When we do, we are thinking of human labour in the abstract, of labour “in the physiological sense.” But labour can also be socially validated in a way that abstracts away all its concrete and purposive features. As Geert points out in Value-Form and the State, in commodity exchange, the transformation of a commodity into money – the commodity’s “validation as money” – “is an actual abstraction (an abstraction in practice)”.[53] My term “practically abstract” labour echoes Geert’s “abstraction in practice”. “Practically abstract” labour is the social kind of labour that produces value. In commodity circulation, the labour that produces value undergoes “actual abstraction” (or “real abstraction”). Concrete labour is socially validated as “abstract labour”, a form of labour’s social validation unique to the capitalist mode of production. Marx writes: “all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power, in the physiological sense, and it is in this quality of being equal, or abstract, human labour that it forms the value of commodities.”[54] I believe that this exchange with Geert was a fruitful one.
Geert defended a Hegelian conception of systematic dialectics, which prides itself on its presuppositionlessness, where, as Geert wrote:
all axioms are eschewed. Rather, anything that is required to be assumed, or anything that is posited immediately (such as the starting point), must be grounded. But it should not be grounded merely abstractly (i.e., giving arguments in advance), because this always leads to regress. That which is posited must be ultimately grounded in the argument itself, in concretizing it.[55]
Marx’s dialectic, I argue, differs from Hegel’s in integrating anthropological and historical presuppositions into the systematic-dialectical presentation. In Capital, I believe that Marx kept to the position that he and Engels took in the German Ideology, where they wrote against “the Germans, who are devoid of premises”:
The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, but those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.[56]
What I take to be distinctive of Marxian systematic dialectics appears to be incompatible with the Hegelian requirements that Geert affirmed. Perhaps more significant than that difference is our agreement that there is a structure of mutual presupposition in a systematic-dialectical presentation. In the order of the presentation, what comes first is presupposed by what comes later, but what comes later is shown to be presupposed by what comes earlier. Thus, in Capital, Marx shows that surplus-value and the circulation of capital presuppose value and simple commodity circulation, but, in the transition from money to capital, Marx shows that simple commodity circulation presupposes the circulation of capital: no surplus-value, no value.
Already in Value-Form and the State, Geert recognised ways in which capital shapes the social world even where it does not subsume it; indeed, capital shapes it where subsumption would endanger it.[57] In a few pointed remarks about the procreation of future wage-labourers, Geert observed that valorisation depends upon the household not being formally subsumed under capital; the household must not operate as a capitalist firm:
But the key point is that whilst labour power takes on the form of value (the wage), it is not produced within the capitalist sphere of production…. The fact that labour power is created outside the capitalist sphere of production is precisely the reason why labour power actually expended does potentially create value-added.[58]
The argument for this claim is found in Capital 1, Chapter 5, “Contradictions in the General Formula: of Capital”: surplus-value (for the class of capitalists, not individual ones) cannot arise simply through the circulation of commodities. Any gains made by individual capitalists are a matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul. If all labour-power was produced as a capitalist commodity, then all buyers and sellers would be capitalists, and surplus-value would disappear. The conclusion reached in Chapter 5 is that “Capital cannot therefore arise from circulation, and it is equally impossible for it to arise apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and not in circulation.”[59] Its origin “not in circulation” lies in the capitalist’s consumption of the commodity labour-power in the production of commodities. Geert reasons, “Mass production of people under capitalist relations would also pose a contradiction at an abstract level. With the annexation of its source, value-added as an economic category would disappear. This contradiction would seem to be irresolvable within the bourgeois epoch.”[60] If we push this point, we can see crisis possibilities, if not tendencies. The reproduction of the working class, left to the choices of the working class – since human reproduction is not formally subsumed under capital – could slow to an extent that interferes with the accumulation of capital. There are populations trending that way.
Geert appreciated how ephemeral capital is: capital is almost always ideal – not yet actualised. Once money has proven itself to be capital by valorising itself with the sale of the commodity, it immediately becomes mere money again. Marx makes this point with an appeal to the doctrine of the Trinity: “for only by the surplus-value of £10 does the £100 originally advanced become capital, and as soon as this has happened, as soon as the son has been created and, through the son, the father, their difference vanishes again, and both become one, £110.”[61] Once money is valorised, once it actualises itself as capital, it reverts to being mere money. Capital vanishes upon its actualisation. The circulation of capital aims at valorisation and accumulation, but, for all but a moment, capital exists as ideal, as capital-in-process.
Geert reminds us that “because exchange in the market is not accidental but systematic, the abstraction of the equation of a product to some definite amount of money can be anticipated in production”. So, “commodities produced ideally represent an amount of value, ideal money” and “the actual abstraction in the market is anticipated by an ideal abstraction, and the actual commensuration in the market is anticipated by an ideal pre-commensuration”.[62] Geert brings out the consequence that the value-form makes its impression on the entire circuit of capital: “This anticipation crucially determines the bourgeois process of production, in that it becomes itself form determined.”[63] Marx was keen to bring out this point in his account of the three circuits of capital – the circuits of money capital, productive capital, and commodity capital – in Part 1 of Volume 2 of Capital. Geert was right to call attention to the significance of ideal abstraction and precommensuration:
The concepts of ideal abstraction and ideal pre-commensuration are essential to our theory of value, and together with the determination of valorisation in the next paragraph they are the key contribution to our synthesis of value-form analysis and the abstract labour-theory of value.[64]
The form-determination of capitalist production, indeed of the unity of the capitalist economy and state, was never lost on Geert.
There are a few other ideas that I associate with Geert that I will mention briefly. In a paper that he gave at a conference at York University in Canada, Geert argued that there is a systematic tendency in capitalism for a low rate of inflation. This was significant on the face of it and from the standpoint of method. Writing in the 1750s, David Hume called for a low rate of inflation as a hedge against rising wages. Since Geert made his presentation, the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States has formally adopted 2% inflation as a target. In an appendix to a paper of mine, I suggested that a tendency to have a low rate of inflation is a fitting complement to the strategy of relative surplus-value: without inflation, lowering the value of labour-power means lowering the “dollar” value of the wages. But wages can be “sticky.” The methodological point that Geert made is that systematic dialectics is open to experience: new systematic tendencies may arise.
Geert called attention to the difference between a tendency and a trend. A tendency has a theoretical basis but, for any number of reasons – consider Marx’s list of the countervailing factors to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall – the tendency may not appear empirically. A trend does appear. Relatedly, Geert dug into the philological and conceptual questions regarding the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Is this a secular or a cyclical tendency? What did Marx think about it?
A philological issue that Geert called our attention to concerns the translation into English of Marx’s terms Produktivität and Produktivkraft. The trouble is that one can increase productivity by intensifying labour – “speed up” – which is a strategy of absolute surplus-value, while changes in the productive power of labour are pursued by the strategy of relative surplus-value. In the Fowkes translation of Capital 1, “productivity” is used in translating both terms. The Reitter translation translates Produktivkraft as “productive power”.
Geert rejects the neoclassical theory of the marginal productivity of different factors of production and points out that F. W. Taussig criticised J. B. Clark’s neoclassical doctrine of the marginal productivity of capital.[65] Neoclassical marginal productivity theory (like the Trinity Formula of vulgar and classical political economy) gives wings to the sort of factoring philosophy characteristic of what Marx called “the bourgeois horizon” of thought. “The bourgeois horizon” trades in bad abstractions, or “purist splits”, when it treats what is distinguishable but not separable as separable. In the Trinity Formula, wages are thought to be the exact compensation for the value added purely by labour, likewise for the “marginal productivity” of labour in Clark’s neoclassical doctrine. Marx rejects this sort of factoring, writing, ‘the labour’ is a mere spectre … nothing but an abstraction and taken by itself cannot exist at all”.[66] This bad abstraction of “labour” in political economy is matched in modern philosophy by the thinkers who, in a variety of ways, are keen to identify the “marginal productivity” of pure subjectivity.
Geert Reuten was a generous collaborator, a dedicated truth seeker, a sensitive and caring person, and a friend. I miss him and we miss his voice.
References
Marx, Karl 1867, Capital, Vol. 1 (translated by B. Fowkes), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
______ 1981, Capital: Volume Three, translated by David Fernbach, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Marx, Karl, and Friederick Engels (1976), The German Ideology, translated by Clemens Dutt, W. Lough et al., in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 5: Marx and Engels: 1845 – 47, New York: International Publishers.
Murray, Patrick 2000, “Marx’s ‘Truly Social’ Labour Theory of Value: Part I, Abstract Labour in Marxian Value Theory”, Historical Materialism, Number 6, pp. 27-65.
______ 2002, “Reply to Reuten”, Historical Materialism, Volume 10, Issue I, pp. 155-76.
______ 2016, The Mismeasure of Wealth: Essays on Marx and Social Form, Leiden: Brill.
Reuten, Geert 1993, “The Difficult Labor of a Social Theory of Value”, in Marx’s Method in ‘Capital’: A Reexamination, edited by Fred Moseley, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press.
______ 2000, “The Interconnection of Systematic Dialectics and Historical Materialism”, Historical Materialism, Number 7, pp. 137-65.
______ 2005, “Money as Constituent of Value”, in Marx’s theory of money: Modern Appraisals, edited by Fred Moseley, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Reuten, Geert, and Michael Williams 1989, Value-Form and the State: The Tendencies of Accumulation and the Determination of Economic Policy in Capitalist Society, London and New York: Routledge.
Tucker, Robert 1961, Philosophy and Myth in the Thought of Karl Marx, New York: Cambridge University Press.
***
Geert Reuten on Postcapitalist Society: A Critical Appreciation
Tony Smith
Marx wrote, “The work I am presently concerned with is a Critique of Economic Categories or, if you like, a critical exposé of the system of the bourgeois economy. It is at once an exposé and, by the same token, a critique of the system.”[67] In The Unity of the Capitalist Economy and State, Geert Reuten’s project was nothing less to develop a Marxian “critique of the system” for the twenty-first century, going beyond Marx’s work in three important respects. First, he attempted to overcome inconsistencies he discerned in Marx’s own writings,[68] and to fill in places where needed arguments were either missing or not developed adequately by Marx himself.[69] Second, he set out to show that Marxian critical theory is open-ended and evolving, by incorporating theoretical advances since Marx’s day. Third, Geert extended his systematic presentation (and critique) of essential determinations of the capitalist mode of production beyond the point where Marx left off in Capital, examining determinations on the later, more concrete levels of the Books on the State, Foreign Trade, and the World Market that Marx left unwritten.[70]
The astounding ambition of the work is not its most impressive feature. The degree ambition is fulfilled is even more striking. Unity is, I think, one of the great achievements of Marxian theory, a superb example of Marxian systematic dialectics.
What do you do after you have published your masterwork?
Soon after the publication of Unity, Geert began to have very serious health issues. It would have been completely understandable if he decided to slow down. But he decided, instead, to confront an absolutely crucial question that even an updated, comprehensive, and compelling “critical exposé of the system of the bourgeois economy” still left unanswered: is there a superior alternative to capitalism that is truly feasible and not a mere utopian fantasy? Marx simply assumed the answer was yes, leaving it for future agents to work out the details. Most Marxists have done the same. For Geert, this is not good enough. Despite his worsening health, he devoted prodigious time and effort to develop a model of a realisable superior alternative in great detail, culminating in the publication of Design of a Worker Cooperatives Society in 2023.
A relatively brief and inadequate summary must suffice here. But, first, we need to recall some of social pathologies generated by the property and production relations of capitalism. In capitalism, units of production subordinate all other ends to the primary goal of private profits. Private ownership of these units grants owners and their agents the social power to dominate and exploit the wage-labourers they hire. Workers are treated as mere means when their living labour is foreseen to contribute to profits, let go when it is not. The severe inequality of income, wealth and social power separating those who own and control means of production as a class, on the one hand, and wage-labourers and the unemployed, on the other, grants the former profoundly disproportionate influence on the state in even the most formally democratic capitalist regime. The power to determine the level and location of investment in a polity greatly reenforces the tendency for the state policies to privilege capital accumulation over all other social concerns. The increasing concentration and centralisation of capital intensifies all these features of the system. Environmental harms tend to be taken seriously if and only if they threaten profits in the near-to-medium future and otherwise dismissed as externalities. Substantive freedom and equality, substantive democracy, and environmental sanity, all demand a world-historical break from the property and production relations of capitalism.
In the Design advocated by Geert, units of production take the social form of worker cooperatives, understood as legal entities distinct from their members. There is no class of private owners, no markets for shares granting ownership rights, no rights to income from dividends or capital gains. The ownership rights of cooperatives are restricted; there is no right to alienate (sell) them. But its members do have exclusive rights to use their cooperative’s means of production and are the exclusive beneficiaries of any distributable income the cooperative comes to have.
In this arrangement, the inherent antagonisms characterising social relations between capital and wage-labour are eradicated. Authority over the members of the collective is exercised either by those members themselves collectively convened as a workers’ council, or by managers elected (and recallable) by that council. When power is delegated to managers, it is limited to decisions regarding routine day-to-day operations. All decisions crucial to the life of the cooperative are made collectively by the workforce as a whole. As a result, a systematic tendency to class domination and exploitation in labour processes is absent. While income differentials among workers are permitted, the range of inequality is narrower than in any capitalist market society. This allows the wants and needs of social individuals to be addressed without the biases of class societies. And it prevents concentrated economic power from arising and generating forms of social and political domination outside workplaces.
The most profound question that can be asked of a mode of production is the ultimate end it furthers. For political economists, the goal of any economic system is to provide goods and services addressing wants and needs in the relevant community, with capitalism attaining this end to the greatest feasible degree compatible with freedom and equality under the law. The Marxian critique of political economy, however, demolishes this ideological claim, establishing that inherent goal of the capitalist mode of production is valorisation of capital investments. Geert insists that the ultimate purpose of production in a worker-cooperatives’ society is quite different: maintaining employment while increasing “value added” (including the disposable surplus distributed within cooperatives as additional income for members).
In Geert’s view, since cooperatives do not have the valorisation imperative imposed on them an alien force, relationships among worker cooperatives lack the inherent antagonism of inter-capital relations. Three further features of his Design for a Worker-Cooperatives Society are also relevant here: the activities of a single cooperative are limited to a single site; no cooperative can establish a new cooperative, and no cooperative can take over an existing one. Given these rules, he concludes that predatory behaviour among cooperatives would be senseless.
In the absence of loans from for-profit investment banks, venture capital investments, money capital from offerings in equity markets, or markets for corporate debt, some other mechanism for bringing worker cooperatives into existence and enabling them to obtain necessary funding must be established. The responsibility falls on cooperative banks. A cooperative bank is itself structured as a worker cooperative. Ultimate authority rests in a workers’ council made up of its collective workforce; any managers delegated decision-making power over day-to-day operations are elected and subject to recall. When two or more people wish to start a worker cooperative, or an established cooperative desires additional funding, a request for a loan is made to a cooperative bank. When the request is successful (based on an assessment of conditions in the relevant market sector and the foreseeable amount of employment that would result) funds are loaned with interest (with interest received from loans covering the costs of the cooperative bank to operate). Members of a new worker cooperative receive only the minimum wage while their coop builds up a reserve sufficient to continue operating (and repaying borrowings) during temporary slowdowns – one of many aspects of the model protecting against unemployment. When a cooperative bank extends loans to cooperatives engaged in production, money is created ex nihilo (as it is when capitalist banks make loans), simply by writing a number in representing the bank’s liability (credit money owed) to the creditor and recording the loan as the Bank’s corresponding asset.
The power to create money is an immense social power. If the credit money distributed by a bank is to have social force, social agents must be able to use it with confidence. In Geert’s Design, the necessary oversight of cooperative banks is provided by higher-order savings and loan banks. They approve or reject proposals to establish cooperative banks, require them to establish and maintain reserves sufficient to tide them over temporary difficulties, extend loans to cooperative banks enabling them to lend more to worker cooperatives, and shut down cooperative banks that prove incapable over time of making successful loans.
Geert understood that cooperative banks, needing to remain solvent themselves or face being shut down, may be disposed to decline requests for funding from start-up firms. To further the innovative dynamism of a worker-cooperative society, Geert’s Design calls for an investment-credit guarantee fund to be established to provide security guarantees removing some or all of the risks cooperative banks would otherwise face from lending. The fund is also tasked with providing guarantees for cooperative bank loans to worker cooperatives in less prosperous regions, thereby countering any tendency for the sort of severely uneven regional development found in capitalist market societies. Recognising the harm that worker cooperatives might suffer when the cooperative banks supporting them go under, Geert also advocates that a guardian bank be established to provide temporary support until new cooperative banks can be established. Finally, the central bank stands at the apex of the banking system in a worker-cooperative society. It alone lends to the state, maintains the state’s accounts, mandates the reserves that savings and loan banks must hold with it, and oversees the financial system of the worker-cooperatives society as a whole.
Turning next to the state, just as the design of the cooperative economy reflects a deep commitment to substantive freedom and equality, so too does state form described and defended in Geert’s model. The ruling (sovereign) body of the state is a democratically elected parliament, its seats distributed to different political parties in proportion to the voting in elections. The government is led by a prime minister elected by parliament from its ranks. Geert considers in extensive detail the various government agencies – 18 in all – required to fulfil four crucial functions.[71] The judicial system stands apart from this apparatus, with a special process to select independent judges with the requisite expertise.[72]
Notable features of Geert’s presentation are the hard-budget constraints imposed on the state as a whole and individual state agencies. With the exception of education and health care, state budgets are limited to a fixed percentage of GDP and state workforces are limited to a fixed percentage of the total workforce. These measures rule out an ever-expanding state determining more and more of social life from the top down. Geert also adopts a simple but powerful principle Marx stressed in his essay on the Paris Commune: those holding political offices are paid average workers’ wages. Those holding state positions prosper only if workers do, while state policies that harm the material interests of the latter harm the interests of the former as well.
The final part of the book is devoted to an extremely detailed step-by-step account of a possible transition from a capitalist market society to a worker-cooperatives society. While a recession can be expected at the beginning of the transition due to the responses of capitalist investors to the prospect of being displaced, Geert proposes measures designed to ensure that a transition could be made without extensive social disruption. It is worth noting that neither capitalist corporations nor wealthy individuals face immediate expropriation. Instead, the competitive advantages capitalist enterprises have over cooperatives are removed, while they are also forced to restructure to comply with the rules that an enterprise can only operate in one site and cannot possess market power. In addition, the tax system favours worker cooperatives, removing the tax advantages capitalist firms have long enjoyed. Similarly, the steeply progressive taxation of household income and inheritance erodes severe disparities of income and wealth over time. Within a generation, Geert estimates, the transition to a full worker-cooperatives society could be completed.
In the subtitle of his book Geert claims his Design provides “an alternative beyond capitalism and socialism”. Both parts of this claim raise questions.
In Geert’s model, units of production are owned by cooperatives as legal entities distinct from their members at any given moment. This does provide an alternative to a “state socialism” where units of production are owned by the state. But why restrict “socialism” to state socialism? Many market socialists have endorsed market societies with self-owned worker cooperatives, cooperative banks, and regulating and injustice-correcting states. As far as I can tell, there is no good reason to not consider Geert’s worker-cooperatives society a variant of market socialism.
We can also wonder whether Geert’s proposal (or any other version of market socialism, for that matter) provides a true alternative to capitalism. The worker-cooperatives society incorporates generalised commodity production and exchange. If products are successfully sold, the privately undertaken production that produced them can be retroactively affirmed as social production to some degree or other. If products are not sold, the production was wasted from a social point of view. In the former case, the output acquires a special social (“supersensuous”) property of having “value”, that is, the property “produced by private labour retroactively validated as social labour”).
A core claim of Marx’s critique of political economy is that a society under the imperative of producing value, in this sense of the term, is under an imperative to produce surplus-value. Any unit of production that does not make obtaining a monetary value (M’) exceeding the monetary value (M) initially invested in its production process its primary goal will necessarily tend to find itself at a competitive disadvantage with other units of production in the future.
Geert insists that there is a profound qualitative difference between a capitalist society where particular units of production aim at capitalist profits, and a worker-cooperatives society, where production units aim at maintaining employment and maximising value added per worker. He asserts that valorisation is the ultimate goal of one and not the other. But both systems are dominated by the same imperative for particular units of production to privately appropriate a monetary surplus. Both societies select for particular units that are most successful at transforming M into M’; both eliminate those that regularly fail to make the transformation. If “capitalism” is defined as a social order subject to the valorisation imperative, why should not the worker-cooperatives society described by Geert be considered an extremely idealised version of capitalism, a social world of “capital without capitalists” dominated by capital’s alien imperative (“M must become M’!”)?
Geert might respond that that worker self-management eliminates the domination and exploitation of the capital/wage-labour relation essential to capitalism, the constraints on expansion in his Design ensure that units of production are not engaged in the competitive war to the death defining intercapital relations, and the background conditions established and maintained by the state eliminate the other pernicious social pathologies intrinsic to capitalist societies (e.g. severe economic and political inequalities, environmental crises, etc.)
Non-market socialists have many reasons to be unhappy with this response. For them, there are too many social needs that cannot be adequately addressed in the form of commodities, too many collectively shared needs that cannot be adequately addressed when units of production aim sales at separate individuals. Social needs cannot be addressed as effectively as feasible when investments are allocated on the basis of foreseeable profitability by particular units making allocation decisions without coordination, backed by loans from particular banks lending on the basis of foreseeable effects on their own monetary returns.
It is telling that the term “planning” does not appear in the index to the book, although there are numerous places where planning takes place (for example, within units of production and in the state’s long-term investments in infrastructure, in research supporting a circular economy, etc.). The Design does not only rule out comprehensive central planning by unelected elites. Any form of democratic planning rooted in collective participation in deliberation and decision-making (such as the democratic determination of social needs through citizen participation practiced in Porto Alegre) is absent as well.
Suppose we assume, for the sake of the argument, that any and all problems generated by generalised commodity production and exchange are in fact eliminated in a worker-cooperatives society like that described by Geert. A second issue would still remain, which can be termed “the gravedigger problem.”
Market societies necessarily tend to generate ideological effects accompanying their material consequences. Many individuals enjoying market success “naturally” come to believe that their success is deserved in a strong normative sense, due to their superior insight as to what others want and how to best produce it, their greater effort, their courageous willingness to accept risks, or any number of other reasons. Many of those able to appropriate a high income from market activity “naturally” come to regard their pretax earnings as rightfully theirs and resent it being highly taxed. Many of those who would be able to appropriate a higher income if their cooperatives were allowed to expand “naturally” consider restrictions on expansion as arbitrary, unfair, and socially irrational.
It is easy enough to show theoretically that the way things “naturally” appear in market societies is systematically misleading. Nonetheless, no theoretical argument can make the way things “naturally” appear dissipate. Would not the generalised commodity production and exchange of a worker-cooperatives society necessarily tend to generate individuals and groups who are “naturally” prone to reject many of its fundamental features? Is it not possible that disgruntled individuals and groups could become numerous and organised enough to undermine those features? Might that even be likely, given the strength of the systematically misleading appearances? Would it not be better to create a postcapitalist society that does not include a strong tendency to generate its own “gravediggers”?
However, these sorts of questions are answered, Design should be considered a major work, a worthy complement to The Unity of the Capitalist Economy and State (and that is very high praise). Geert provides the most detailed model of market socialism (or something much like it) that has ever been composed. Defenders of market socialism now have a comprehensive picture of what the society they advocate might look like and how it could function. It is difficult to imagine a stronger case being made for either the feasibility of this proposed form of postcapitalism or its attractiveness from a normative point of view.
For those socialists who do not embrace market socialism, the book provides a tremendous challenge. Few theorists have comprehended Marx’s critique of political economy more deeply than Geert Reuten. And, yet, when it came time to propose an alternative to capitalism, he defended a very different sort of postcapitalist society than what Marx had in mind. He did not do so because he idealised market societies. Geert admitted that he “deplores” the fact that that he endorsed a society of generalised commodification and monetarisation.[73] He endorsed it nonetheless, challenging those who disagree with him to confront his reasons for doing so.
First, Geert believed that the most important things a postcapitalist society needs to achieve can be adequately achieved in a worker-cooperatives society. Put negatively, the most horrific features of capitalism that demand eradication most are eradicated. The collective creative intelligence of the workforce, inadequately mobilised in capitalist workplaces, can be fully mobilised in self-governing cooperatives. The freedom of social agents to determine for themselves their wants and needs, attacked by corporate advertising (the most scientific and technologically sophisticated system of manipulation in human history), can be fully institutionalised (advertising is abolished in the Design). If these and other features of Geert’s model are taken into account, why should it not be endorsed as satisfactory, even if it falls short of our hopes?
Second, the book challenges those of us who have hoped for more to consider seriously that these hopes cannot be fulfilled. Production and exchange in a modern society, Geert insists, is simply too complex and on too vast a scale to be organised in any other way besides markets. More extensive and centralised forms of planning than what a worker-cooperatives society allows are inconsistent with mobilising the collective creative intelligence of workforces and the free determination of social wants and needs by social individuals themselves. If we do not accept these judgements, the burden of proof is on us to outline a more robustly socialist postcapitalist society – a society we would not have to deplore advocating – in as much detail as Geert’s proposal, and we would have to argue convincingly that it is both feasible and better than any form of market society in ways that very much matter from the standpoint of human emancipation.
Design of a Worker Cooperatives Society sets a very high bar for what a defence of a robust socialism needs to accomplish.[74] That is itself an important contribution to critical theory and practice, to be added alongside all Geert’s numerous other contributions.
References
Marx, Karl Marx 1983, Letter to Ferdinand Lassalle, 22 February 1858, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 40, New York: International Publishers.
Reuten, Geert 2019, The Unity of the Capitalist Economy and State; A Systematic-Dialectical Exposition of the Capitalist System, Leiden: Brill. https://brill.com/view/title/38778 (open access).
— 2023, Design of a Worker Cooperatives Society: An Alternative Beyond Capitalism and
Socialism, and the Transition Towards It, Leiden: Brill.
Reuten, Geert and Michael Williams 1989, Value-Form and the State, London: Routledge.
Smith, Tony 2025, A Socialism for The Twenty-First Century: Towards The ‘Full and Free
Development of Every Individual’, Leiden: Brill.
[1] The two essays are Reuten 2005 and 2014; they are very nearly, but not entirely, the same. In his 2003 essay (and before that in other writings), Geert says that Marx shares the fate of other thinkers who make a fundamental break, namely, that they themselves can accomplish the break only in a partial and flawed way; it has to be completed by others later. Geert takes the presence of two lines of reasoning in Marx’s work, a “labour-time theory of value” and a monetary value-form theory as evidence that the break Marx accomplished was partial. In the two essays considered here, Geert abandons the idea that Capital contains a labour-time theory of value.
[2] Reuten 2005, p. 87.
[3] Reuten 2005, p. 88. In fact, as Geert points out, Marx calls this a transformation (see ibid).
[4] Ibid 2005, p. 87. As he points out, without commensurability, standards of price “make no sense” (ibid: p. 89).
[5] Ibid, p. 78.
[6] Marx 1867, p. 188.
[7] Reuten 2005, p. 85.
[8] See Reuten 2014, p. 4.
[9] Geert uses the term ‘foreshadow’ throughout both essays considered here; he switches to placeholder, which is perhaps clearer, in his 2018, p. 51.
[10] Reuten 2005, p. 83.
[11] See Reuten 2014, p. 5.
[12] Moments are distinguishable but inseparable because they are mutually presupposing. Geert offers the example of the relative and equivalent forms of value (2014, p. 2). The presentation of a concept, here value, that has multiple moments – substance, magnitude, mode of expression – cannot avoid considering each moment singly, one at a time. This may obscure the inseparability and interdependence of the different moments. If that is not recognised, it can seem that the complete concept is constituted by one of its moments, here, for example, that value is constituted by its substance, or that that substance can, by itself apart from the other moments, have characteristics that it has only because it presupposes the other moments.
[13] Reuten 2005, p. 83.
[14] Reuten 2014, p. 3; see also 2005, p. 87.
[15] Reuten 2014, p. 1.
[16] See Reuten and Williams 1989 for his first version; Reuten took responsibility for the methodological chapters.
[17] For my debate with Reuten on the precise relevance of Hegel, see a forthcoming Symposium in the Hegel Bulletin.
[18] Smith 1990.
[19] Arthur 2022.
[20] ‘Dialectical systematic theory’, Reuten and Williams 1989, p. 19.
[21] Ibid, p. 4
[22] Ibid, p. 5
[23] Ibid, p. 23.
[24] Ibid, p. 16.
[25] Reuten 2019, p. 610.
[26] Ibid, p. 33.
[27] Ibid, p. 37.
[28] Ibid, p. 40.
[29] Reuten takes ‘condition of existence’ and ‘ground’ to be virtually the same thing (Reutem 2019, p. 604, p. 679). In my work (Arthur 2022, Chapter 4), I treat the former as part of an ‘analytic dialectic’, and the latter as a feature of a ‘synthetic dialectic’.
[30] Ibid, p. 616.
[31] Ibid, p. 614.
[32] Page 26.
[33] Reuten 2019, p. 46, p. 691; cf. Reuten and Williams 1989 p. 62.
[34] Reuten 2019, p. 683.
[35] Ibid, p. 41.
[36] Ibid, p. 46.
[37] Reuten and Willliams 1989, p. 41.
[38] Reuten 2019, p. 51.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Ibid, p. 606.
[41] Ibid, p. 685.
[42] Tucker 1961, p. 235. Tucker withdrew this passage in the second edition.
[43] Reuten and Williams 1989, p. 3. Note in referring to this jointly authored book, an early tribute to Geert as a collaborator, I will speak only of Geert Reuten.
[44] Reuten and Williams 1989, p. 62.
[45] Reuten and Williams 1989, p. 15, n. 11.
[46] Murray 2000, Reuten 2000, and Murray 2002.
[47] Reuten 2005, p. 79, n. 3.
[48] Reuten 2005, p. 80.
[49] Reuten 2005, p. 85.
[50] Murray 2016, p. 216; see also p. 427 and p. 453.
[51] Reuten 2005, p. 83, n. 11.
[52] Marx 1867, p. 137.
[53] Reuten and Williams 1989, p. 62.
[54] Marx 1867, p. 137, my emphasis.
[55] Reuten 1993, p. 92.
[56] Marx and Engels 1976, The German Ideology, translated by Clemens Dutt, W. Lough et al., in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 5: Marx and Engels: 1845 – 47, New York: International Publishers, p. 31.
[57] As Geert explained, the capitalist state is an institution that must not be formally subsumed under capital if it is to play it role in the capitalist social order.
[58] Reuten and Williams 1989, pp. 69-70.
[59] Marx 1867, p. 268.
[60] Reuten and Williams 1989, p. 90.
[61] Marx 1867, p. 256; see also pp. 252, “If the £110 is now spent as money, it ceases to play its part. It is no longer capital.”
[62] Reuten and Williams 1989, p. 66.
[63] Reuten and Williams 1989, p. 67.
[64] Ibid.
[65] Reuten and Williams 1989, p. 72.
[66] Marx 1981, p. 954.
[67] Marx 1983, 268.
[68] Geert thought, for example, that Marx did not fully realise how profound his break from Ricardo was, with the result that residues of Ricardianism can be found in his mature texts.
[69] In his view, for example, Marx’s argument for a tendency for the rate of profit to fall is not compelling if we follow Marx in abstracting from stratification within sectors.
[70] The scope of Value Form and the State, co-written with Mike Williams (1989) is no less ambitious. Unity can be seen as a re-doing of that impressive work, taking into account the three decades of intensive study following its publication.
[71] They are: further the objectives of cooperatives and workers, constrain cooperatives in the interest of other cooperatives, or of workers and households; provide services for which cooperative production does not apply due to free provision; and undertake public sector production due to its monopoly or oligopoly character, or cooperatives’ constraints on scale or risk.
[72] Judges of the supreme court, the courts level just below it, and administrative prosecutors are appointed by a 16-person committee of former judges, lawyers, former ministers, and former parliamentarians (four of each category).
[73] Page 46.
[74] I have attempted to do take up this challenge in Smith 2025. Geert was deeply sceptical of my project and ultimately rejected its results. (He generously mentioned that “Smith’s form of socialist planning is the best I have seen,” but that was not good enough. Design, p. 53). Despite his scepticism, our numerous disagreements, and a relentless energy-sapping illness, he provided very extensive and immensely helpful critical feedback. I shall always be grateful; the book is far better than what it otherwise would have been thanks to his efforts. I know there are many other comrades who could say something similar. He will be missed.
