Alien Powers? Use-Value and Surplus-Profit in the Movement of Value

In revealing yet overlooked reflections, Marx considers ‘alien powers’: the commodity’s power to lure buyers, monopoly’s to resist productive compulsion. This article addresses their intersection at market, where sellers manipulate demand to increase profits. Here, issues of use-value and surplus-profit enmesh: use-values’ presentation permits chance to procure surplus-profits; the pursuit of surplus-profits determines the qualities commodified use-values display. The resulting dynamic proves consequential. Actors eager to surmount competition’s limits can divert greater energy and investment to surplus-value’s unproductive capture than its productive extraction. If the proportion of such unproductively garnered surplus-profits – ‘rents’ – increases, so too will production’s profitability diminish, distorting capital’s inherent tendencies. Turning to use-value and surplus-profit reveals the determinativeness of exchange and distribution, illuminating today’s financial use-values and managed appearances. So understood, Marx’s ‘alien powers’ are not alien to capital: rent-seeking and its attendant contradictions derive from the commodity form.