Reading Capital, continued (thread #2)...

[blindpig]

Kid of the Black Hole
10-02-2009, 11:43 AM

and trying to find some material and you know who is really, really full of shit? Autonomists. Toni Negri-flavor especially.

All of their "critiques" (to be generous) are not only completely ignorant of what is really being hammered out, but it also misses the sublime irony that all of the "problems' they expound on at length are not only understood but expressly addressed by Marx.

If "matter" is used as merely a figure of speech to replace "idea" than nothing has changed in philosophy they tell us matter-of-factly (and as is their wont, at great length). Crudely applied "dialectical" reasoning is just an exercise in the repetition of truisms? One cannot derive "significance", historical or otherwise, solely from proximate causation?

Well, gee, no fucking shit..

I'd say round up a few more trash bags to stuff all this French Filosofee in so we can bury it at the landfill, but this time its Italian and (modern) Greek. Split the difference and lets toss it off a bridge.

EDIT: and, to be fair, much of this crap mirrors Sartre so it is not exactly French-free

[blindpig]

Kid of the Black Hole
10-02-2009, 11:51 AM

I've batted the cuckoo clock metaphor around quite a bit..even thought about appropriating it, decided I didn't have the chops for it

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Tinoire
10-02-2009, 05:56 PM

Thanks

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Kid of the Black Hole
10-02-2009, 06:48 PM

http://www.progressiveindependent.com/d ... 100854#148

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Tinoire
10-02-2009, 09:30 PM

I'm looking forward to it.

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blindpig
10-03-2009, 05:14 AM

]
"Ahh... a footstool, you say? Well, I know what that is."

Reading my mind or somethin'?

But that's how it seems to work. It's the abstraction which gives me trouble, just got to remember that it is a tool for understanding and not anything resembling metaphysics or subatomic physics, both of which seem to proceed from the supposition. ( I think my brain works funny. Too much blunt trauma?)

[blindpig]

Dhalgren
10-04-2009, 11:00 AM

experiences I have had, to date. Thanks for making this possible...

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Kid of the Black Hole
10-04-2009, 02:26 PM

this is a bit of a side question so if you don't care to address it thats OK

But one thing the Reading Capital series has done for me is bring into focus exactly how significant the discoveries Marx made that are presented in Chapter 1 are to everything that follows

However, as has been commonly noted, Engels rarely discusses any of these things in his subsequent writings. There are probably 100 different crackpot takes on why this is so but I was wondering if you had a take on the issue

[blindpig]

meganmonkey
10-04-2009, 04:29 PM

And I'm getting caught up. I've been reading this thread in bits and pieces all week, and I just now read through the whole thing...

Some good shit, man

I'll read it over a few more times and ask questions if I need to but the way the conversation has gone I think everything is answering itself...

[blindpig]

anaxarchos
10-04-2009, 08:03 PM

Section 3A - Elementary or Accidental Form Of Value
Part 2. The Relative Form of value
(a.) The nature and import of this form
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1...

Marx now digs even deeper into his logical proposition, "20 Yards of linen are worth 1 coat". A series of observations about the first half of our equation follow. It may be thought that we are belaboring the meaning of this most elementary of propositions, which mirrors the most primitive form of actual exchange, historically. Yet, many of the observations to follow come back to haunt the commodity as capital:

1. "...the elementary expression of the value of a commodity lies hidden in the value relation of two commodities... It is apt to be forgotten that the magnitudes of different things can be compared quantitatively, only when those magnitudes are expressed in terms of the same unit. It is only as expressions of such a unit that they are of the same denomination, and therefore commensurable."

2. "If we say that, as values, commodities are mere congelations of human labour, we reduce them by our analysis, it is true, to the abstraction, value; but we ascribe to this value no form apart from their bodily form. It is otherwise in the value relation of one commodity to another. Here, the one stands forth in its character of value by reason of its relation to the other."

3. Underlying the above, is this:

"...it is true that the tailoring, which makes the coat, is concrete labour of a different sort from the weaving which makes the linen. But the act of equating it to the weaving, reduces the tailoring to that which is really equal in the two kinds of labour, to their common character of human labour. In this roundabout way, then, the fact is expressed, that weaving also, in so far as it weaves value, has nothing to distinguish it from tailoring, and, consequently, is abstract human labour. It is the expression of equivalence between different sorts of commodities that alone brings into relief the specific character of value-creating labour, and this it does by actually reducing the different varieties of labour embodied in the different kinds of commodities to their common quality of human labour in the abstract.[18]

There is an interesting footnote to this paragraph which cites Benjamin Franklin:


18. The celebrated Franklin, one of the first economists, after Wm. Petty, who saw through the nature of value, says: “Trade in general being nothing else but the exchange of labour for labour, the value of all things is ... most justly measured by labour.” (“The works of B. Franklin, &c.,” edited by Sparks. Boston, 1836, Vol. II., p. 267.) Franklin is unconscious that by estimating the value of everything in labour, he makes abstraction from any difference in the sorts of labour exchanged, and thus reduces them all to equal human labour. But although ignorant of this, yet he says it. He speaks first of “the one labour,” then of “the other labour,” and finally of “labour,” without further qualification, as the substance of the value of everything.

4. "Human labour power in motion, or human labour, creates value, but is not itself value. It becomes value only in its congealed state, when embodied in the form of some object. In order to express the value of the linen as a congelation of human labour, that value must be expressed as having objective existence, as being a something materially different from the linen itself, and yet a something common to the linen and all other commodities. The problem is already solved.

When occupying the position of equivalent in the equation of value, the coat ranks qualitatively as the equal of the linen, as something of the same kind, because it is value. In this position it is a thing in which we see nothing but value, or whose palpable bodily form represents value. Yet the coat itself, the body of the commodity, coat, is a mere use value. A coat as such no more tells us it is value, than does the first piece of linen we take hold of. This shows that when placed in value-relation to the linen, the coat signifies more than when out of that relation, just as many a man strutting about in a gorgeous uniform counts for more than when in mufti."

5. "In the production of the coat, human labour power, in the shape of tailoring, must have been actually expended. Human labour is therefore accumulated in it. In this aspect the coat is a depository of value, but though worn to a thread, it does not let this fact show through. And as equivalent of the linen in the value equation, it exists under this aspect alone, counts therefore as embodied value, as a body that is value...

... in the value equation, in which the coat is the equivalent of the linen, the coat officiates as the form of value. The value of the commodity linen is expressed by the bodily form of the commodity coat, the value of one by the use value of the other. As a use value, the linen is something palpably different from the coat; as value, it is the same as the coat, and now has the appearance of a coat. Thus the linen acquires a value form different from its physical form. The fact that it is value, is made manifest by its equality with the coat..."

6. Finally:

"We see, then, all that our analysis of the value of commodities has already told us, is told us by the linen itself, so soon as it comes into communication with another commodity, the coat. Only it betrays its thoughts in that language with which alone it is familiar, the language of commodities. In order to tell us that its own value is created by labour in its abstract character of human labour, it says that the coat, in so far as it is worth as much as the linen, and therefore is value, consists of the same labour as the linen. In order to inform us that its sublime reality as value is not the same as its buckram body, it says that value has the appearance of a coat, and consequently that so far as the linen is value, it and the coat are as like as two peas...

By means, therefore, of the value-relation expressed in our equation, the bodily form of commodity B becomes the value form of commodity A, or the body of commodity B acts as a mirror to the value of commodity A.[19] By putting itself in relation with commodity B, as value in propriâ personâ, as the matter of which human labour is made up, the commodity A converts the value in use, B, into the substance in which to express its, A’s, own value. The value of A, thus expressed in the use value of B, has taken the form of relative value."

****************

We have two choices with this section: Either we can dig deeply into it, because there is quite a lot going on... OR, we can take it at face value, while remembering where it is and the basic substance of Marx's observations... with the additional assurance that we will be back here at a later time.

I am going to choose the latter option, in order to keep moving. Still, even at face-value, do we understand what Marx is saying?