The Constitution of Non-Monetary Surplus Values
| Date | 01 August 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663920952531 |
| Published date | 01 August 2021 |
| Author | Gunther Teubner |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
The Constitution of Non-
Monetary Surplus Values
Gunther Teubner
Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
Abstract
The article rebuts the primacy of economic profit in advanced capitalist societies, and
submits that the imperative to extract surplus value governs also the law and other social
domains and is not merely a product of economic forces. Not only the economy but also
the law and other function systems force each of their operations to generate a specific
surplus value – but now explicitly non-monetary – beyond its immediate production of
meaning. The object of the surplus orientation is the system’s own communication
medium – power, truth/reputation, money, and juridical authority. The success of sur-
plus pressures is responsible for the immensely productive forces unleashed in capital-
ism. However, they demonstrate an excessive ambivalence: immense productivity and its
destructive dark side. Similar to the monetary profit pressure in the economy, (auto- and
hetero-) destructive tendencies of non-monetary surplus pressures have multiplied in
the law and in other areas of life. Political-legal counterstrategies combating the negative
side of diverse societal surplus productions could be inspired from Karl Polanyi’s famous
concept of false commodities and their replacement by non-market institutions.
Keywords
Communication medium, juridification, Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi, non-market institutions,
Niklas Luhmann, profit, surplus value, systems theory
Generalization and Respecification
A whole series of Karl Marx’ receptions have sought analogy to the capitalist logic of the
economy in law and in other areas of society. Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca and Max
Corresponding author:
Gunther Teubner, Law Faculty, Goethe University Frankfurt, Telemannstrasse 5, Frankfurt am Main 60323,
Germany.
Email: G.Teubner@jur.uni-frankfurt.de
Social & Legal Studies
2021, Vol. 30(4) 501–521
ªThe Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663920952531
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Weber had already attempted to identify equivalents to Marx’ radical autonomy of the
economy in the sphere of politics and thus to manoeuvre the political system out of its
superstructure position and into a co-original base position with respect to the economy.
With his influential metaphor of a new polytheism, Max Weber demonstrated success-
fully that modernity owes its characteristics not only to the formal rationality of capit-
alism but equally to a whole variety of analogously constructed formal rationalities,
including the formal rationality of law (Weber, 1978 [1921]: 61). Otto Kirchheimer
picked up on this and described an analogous autonomization of the ‘machinery of law’
along with, at the same time, his construct of juridification detailing its problematic
society-wide expansion dynamics parallel to the economization of the world (Kirchhei-
mer 1976 [1928]: 36ff). Niklas Luhmann generalized the expansion of the economy even
more and identified processes of – simultaneous – politicization, juridification, scienti-
fication and medicalization of society (Luhmann, 2013: 95). Evgeny Pashukanis con-
ceived the legal form in analogy to Marx’ commodity form with all its alienation
phenomena (Buckel, 2007: 94ff; Pashukanis, 2001 [1924]). With the construct of social
capital, Pierre Bourdieu generalized Marx’ concept of capital in order to apply it analo-
gously as a resource of the actors competing for power in various social fields, albeit only
metaphorically and without a sufficient theoretical elaboration (Bourdieu, 1986a ).
1
Rudolf Wietho¨lter pushes these analogies further. He claims that the fundamental real
contradiction (Realwiderspruch) of law is between productive forces and relations of
production, not of the economy but of the law itself (Wietho¨ lter, 2015: 30).
My proposal follows these lines of thought but goes in a different direction. In order to
identify equivalents to the driving force of capitalism in other areas of society, I suggest
the analogy of avaritia, the worst of all deadly sins (Aquinas, 1485: Question 84) –
equivalent to the economic profit principle itself.
Non-Monetary Surplus Values?
The critique of capitalist society is therefore no longer solely directed at surplus value
compulsion within the economy. Nor is it only challenging the increasing economization
of social worlds, i.e. the expansion, pushed by neo-liberal fanatics, of the economic profit
principle into non-economic areas of society, which threatens all social activities, to
produce monetary profit or else be done away with completely. Rather, a more profound
critique would have to deal with a different kind of society-wide expansion of the
capitalist logic. My thesis is that not only the economy but also other function systems
force each of their operations to extract a specific surplus value – but now explicitly non-
monetary – out of their immediate production of meaning.
In politics, non-monetary surplus value means that each policy-decision n eeds to
generate simultaneously a surplus of political power for future use. In science, successful
research in the various subject areas, which is officially oriented towards the production
of knowledge, is unofficially but effectively oriented towards maximizing reputation. In
education, besides the specifi c skills of the person to be educated, a surp lus of the
medium of education, i.e. the success in educational selection, needs always to be
produced in the form of institutionalized proofs of qualification. In law, the courts are
under pressure to extract a normative surplus value, i.e. a specific persuasive authority
502 Social & Legal Studies 30(4)
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