Episode 3 A - Chapter 1.3 (until the Fetish Character) [p. 24-46]

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Visualizations

A couple visualizations this week!

First, we’ve got the Unit Problem, illustrating Marx’s argument that equating (or comparing) two non-identical things always is about equating them with respect to something. Marx’s argument is that societies in which the predominant mode of production is capitalist, make things for the purpose of exchange. Exchange inherently implies a quantitative equation (xA exchanges for yB), and hence generalized commodity production makes every product comparable/commensurable with every other product. As if by definition then, the generalized commensurabilization abstracts away from all particular use values and the concrete aspects of the labor that produced them. Generalized commodity production thus gives rise to a category of labor as such – abstract labor, and the socially necessary labor time of that abstract labor is unit of comparison.

(Of course, the marginal utility response would presumably be that what remains is simply “utility in the abstract”, a purely quantitative-relational sense of utility. Worth pondering what may or may not be wrong with that, but not the place for me to explore this further.)

What kind of category is value, then? It is one that presupposes relationality (because abstract labor does not exist per se, but is the result of a real social abstraction that generalized commodity production performs).

Finally, the genesis of the money form.