Kommentar zu Hegel und Marx, Chapter 24
The Position: Form without Substance
This makes it possible to say what should be taken from Marx. The analysis of form in its full sharpness: that behind what presents itself as a property of things stands a social relation; that the movement from money to more money has its own logic and is indifferent to content; that appropriation passes through the legal form and not against it; that the whole operates as a system of mutual presuppositions, in which a disturbance propagates itself.
What is not to be taken is the substance of which value is supposed to consist. What takes its place is no weakening. It is the determination of value as a legally constituted form — and this determination explains what the substance-conception could never explain: services, intellectual property, land rent, brand economics, prices in an economy whose scarcities are manufactured.
This is sublation in the precise sense. What is preserved is that social wealth arises through active human beings, and that human labor holds within it a distinct position. What is overcome is the conception in which value is lodged as a quantity within products. What is raised to a higher stage is the whole, through the legal constitution that contains the old conception as a special case.