Let me try some stream of consciousness with Mr. Marx. For this week readings, I was to read the first chapter of Capital (“The Commodity”), the Appendix (“Results of the Immediate Process of Production, and the “fragment on machines” in the Grundrisse. In a sense, at this time I am too deep into Marx to step back and elaborate general insights on the underlying methodologies at play in the works—the role of a dialectal method, etc. However, this may arise from what follows.
“Go on your way,” Marx says, “and let people talk”. So, let us talk, in a way that Marx would perhaps not “welcome”.
The selected pieces definitely flow together. The general flow is towards a scientific explanation of the capitalist mode of production, a specific form/mode/stage, in the “economic formation of society”—as “a process of natural history”. For this science, Marx uses the power of abstraction to break down the material units of capitalism, to examine the “minutiae”, to uncover the mysteries of capital. All of these writings by Marx are revealings; what appears to be is critiqued in order to demonstrate what actually is.
Our understanding of the capitalist mode of production begins with the things that are produced, commodities. We learn what the commodity means in the varying modes of production (always with an eye towards the capitalist mode), we learn about its component value forms (use-value and exchange-value), we learn that labour is what gives the commodity the value with which it will be exchanged, and thus becomes defined in relation to money and finally towards capital.
Towards and within the capitalist mode of production, in the process of human labour becoming a commodity, society “appears” to be oriented around capital, whereas Marx would like us to believe labour (power) is at the center of it all. And labour as the productive-definitive component of capital is a mutated, objectified reflection of itself. The extraction of surplus-value from labour power is ultimately the process that re-presents labour to the person who exchanges it (as a commodity) in an alienated form. Capitalist production is moreover, the reflection of social relations transformed by capital. Marx gives evidence of these components and their accompanying transformations of meaning/function through abstracted examples of concrete (interrelated) things such as linen/coat, the worker/capitalist, the factory, machinery, and so on.
It is definitely a challenge to read Marx. Especially when lacking the strong economic knowledge that is necessary to critique the economic systems Marx describes in comparison to other perspectives.
In the process of production labour becomes objectified labour, i.e. capital in opposition to living labour-power, and, in the second place, by absorbing labour into production, by thus appropriating it, the original value becomes value in process and hence value that create surplus value different from itself. It is only because labour is changed into capital in the course of production that we can say that the original quantum of value valorizes itself, that what was at first potentially capital has become capital in actual fact. (Capital 1016)
Since the production of surplus-value is the means by which the money invested becomes capital, the origins of capital, like the process of capitalist production itself, are based on two factors in the first instance:
First, the purchase and sale of labour-power…viewed in the context of capitalist production as a whole, is not merely an aspect of it and its precondition, but also its continuous result. (the objective conditions of labour—i.e. the means of subsistence and the means of production (also its materials and instruments)—are separated form the living labour-power itself, so that the latter comes the sole property at the disposal of the worker and the sole commodity which he has to sell.)
The second factor then is the actual process of production i.e. the actual consumption of the labour-power purchased by the owner of money or commodities. (1017)
Thus the entire process is a traffic between objectified and living labour in which living labour is transformed into objectified labour and in which at the same time objectified labour is transformed into capital…Hence the process is one which produces surplus-value and hence capital, as well as actual produce…Hence we may say that the means of production appear not just as the means for accomplishing work, but as the means for exploiting the labour of others. (1018-9)
