66
“In
contrast to the analysis in chapter one, Marx’s account of the
dominating properties of the money form accounts for the agents who
exchange commodities.”
For such a significant claim, this sort of dangles
out there under-justified. Not that it isn’t correct, but it needs some
validation and fleshing out. At least a footnote.
66-7
I am always struck by the failure, IMO, to grasp that the worker is the owner of a commodity at this point in
Capital’s development.
67
This is interesting as s summation:
“I argued earlier that Marx’s account of the fetish
grows more complex as his analysis progresses, and one can see from the
above that the fetish-character of money possesses more pronounced
characteristics than the fetish-character of
commodities. On the one hand, money is socially constituted as the
general equivalent by the logic of the relations of commodities, which
grants it the autonomous and personified properties of the universal
incarnation of human labour. On the other hand,
the means by which these autonomous properties invert and dominate
individual action is concretised in the determinate form of the legal
contract and the determination of the actions of commodity owners.”
69
I don’t think I can actually overemphasize the
degree to which talk of “capitalists do this” and “capitalists do that”
sounds so very 19th century. It has been a long time since individual capitalists played the key role in
representing capital. Capital needs representation in particular capitals more than in individual capitalists.
The legal recognition of the corporation as a legal
person by the United States Supreme Court is both horrific and
rational. Rational because corporations have been the particular
capitals for a long time, but horrific because capital
has survived to this point in its development wherein personification
entails recognition of these homunculi of capital as persons.
“The domination exerted by the capitalists results
from their actions, but the latter are in turn shaped by their role as
personifications of capital; as individuals determined by the
fetish-characteristic forms of value that are external
to them, and which compel them to dominate and exploit the proletariat.
Thus, because capitalists - as capital personified - are ‘fanatically
intent on the valorization of value’ they ‘ruthlessly compel the human
race to produce for production’s sake.’”
Seriously, domination is not exerted by capitalists in the 21st
century in all but marginal cases. Individual capitalists don’t
ruthlessly compel the human race. If only!!! Then we could point to
“the capitalist class”
as a bunch of robber barons, but no one outside of the Left sees the
matter this way anymore. It is anachronistic at best.
As I complained with Werner Bonefeld’s new book,
there is still this residue of a need to show the domination of
“society” or “the working class” by the capitalist class, this class of
individuals, when we have surpassed that point long
ago. Capital has shown very little need for these antediluvian
phenomenal forms.
Check the quote from Marx on function and
personification (Ehrbar translation, 989). I wonder if Mar refers to
the function of the proletariat in production, versus the function of
the capitalists. Function is a funny word with all sorts
of overtones to people raised in a world after Parsonian sociology and
functionalist explanations.
70
“As a result the worker ‘exists to satisfy the need
of the existing value for valorisation, as opposed to the inverse
situation, in which objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s
own need for development’205”
So one could argue that if the worker exists to
satisfy the need of the existing value for valorization, then
valorization has to be at least posited in production, not in exchange
or simply in the transformation of a commodity into money.
Doesn’t Marx’s theory of value also account for the
centrality of labor and “relations of production” to the determinate
social relations? Or is that the same as 2?
70
Someone really ought to print The Trinity Formula
in English in the correct order. Or, you know, Volume 3 of Capital in a
correct form.
71
I really like the way O’Kane follows through the
thread of fetish-character and fetishism through to the end. This is
really an exciting way to read the book productively that is not another
Marxist Political Economy reading.
The point about the collapse of
fetish-characteristic form/fetishism/mystification into one mess is
reasonable, as is the explanation of it being from an earlier period.
This point could be amplified by the changes Marx makes between the
first and second German editions of Vol. 1 and the French edition. A
lot of the changes and work go into the fetish-characteristic section,
so that was clearly something he was still working out as late as the
mid-1870’s!
75
Para 2
“In this context ‘the mystifying character ’
mirrors his usage of fetish-characterisation which transforms ‘social
relations’ into the ‘properties’ of things themselves (commodities),
still more explicitly transforming the relation of production
itself into a thing(money).”
This clarification is nice. Not sure if it was
used earlier in the book, but it is very concise. Could further add
that capital is the transformation of the total cycle into an
autonomous, self-producing Subject which is Substance. This
may be the third usage of mystification.
I would add that is works very well with Nicole
Pepperell’s reading of the first chapter as a phenomenology: the fetish
characteristic of commodities explains how the various notions of value
up until that point, while having a certain
validity, are similar to empiricism, rationalism, and absolute idealism
(which would cover the range of sense certainty, perception, and the
understanding in Hegel.)
81
RE: esoteric/exoteric or money theory and
neo-Ricardian, that Pepperell’s reading shows that this is a failure to
read the text phenomenologically. Taken so, Marx’s comments about labor
as physical as opposed to his clear treatment in
the “Theories of Surplus-Value” where even a clown, employed in the
social form as wage-labor, can produce value, are comprehensible.
I think one has to work with Marx as one would with any opponent: take the strongest way of reading their argument.
Pepperell’s is not only reasonable, it is coherent and the strongest form of the argument.
RE: ideal average, Marx was not attempting a theory of society, a sociology. One could further make the argument,
pace Cyril Smith, that Marx’s critique of political economy is not a critique of
capitalism, and as such is not concerned with empirical minutiae
or historical representation except insofar as it is subordinated to the
critique of political economy. The critique of capitalism is a
practical criticism, a question of struggle and
overcoming. Marx’s work is aimed at an ideological impediment, the ideology, to that struggle. His is a work of clarification, and of bildung, a part of the self-education of the class.
In other words, I think this criticism of Marx
mistakes the intent and purpose of the work, in the same way one might
criticize Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit for not being a rigorous
criticism of philosophy or specific philosophers, though
it certainly does that. It is not a pedantic work, but a working
through of forms of consciousness.
82
I like this point and no doubt Adorno, Lukacs and
Lefebvre respond to the “gaps” in Marx’s work, but also to maybe what
they see as gaps that are not gaps at all.
Moving to Section 2 Next.
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