<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN"> <html><head><style type="text/css"></style><title>Re: Literacy, Intellectuals, and the Left</title></head><body> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <blockquote type="cite" cite>Rakesh wrote:</blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite><br> "Of course no act of labor (save one) immediately counts as socially<br> necessary labor time in this society; it is only through the exchange<br> of its product that an act of labor proves itself to have been<br> socially necessary, to have had a place in social labor. For that to<br> be accomplished, each commodity then has to request an exchange with<br> the money commodity which always already incarnates value. Marx tries<br> to explain this polarization between commodities and money in a<br> dizzying, dialectical exposition."<br> </blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite>...or sometimes in pregnant, crystalline poetic form: "Money is the pimp between man and the object of his desire."</blockquote> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div>Dear Prof Joanna</div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div>Marx's analysis of money fetishism is basically anthropological in character; his interest in what evans pritchard would later calls theories of primitive religion dates back to 1842, and his understanding of the social validity of money as a  a kind of social metaphysics, a sort of objective idealism can be traced all the way back to his dissertation.</div> <div><br></div> <div>For Marx, money is simply the god of  the practical religion of everyday life.</div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div><font color="#000000">For Marx, the puzzle of money already manifests itself in the simple equivalent value form, for as Aristotle already recognized to express the value of five beds by the physical quantity of one house is no different than having it expressed as a physical quantity of so much gold. Marx attempts to 'derive' how one commodity (gold as it turned out) comes to take a monopolistic position of direct exchangeability with all other commodities or, to put it another way, why all other commodities have to express their value by in effect requesting an exchange with the money commodity. Money then has the peculiar property that it can be immediately converted into any form of social labor-it is liquid: its use value comes to be its exchange value. The products of all other concrete labor activities have to be ex-changed into money before they can be converted into any other form of social labor. In a private exchange economy, other than the money commodity, products of the various concrete acts of labor do not count immediately as abstract, social labor time or value. The three-fold peculiarity of money then is that it is the<i> immediate</i> incarnation of value; the<i> concrete</i> labor expended in the production thereof becomes the form of appearance of<i> abstract</i> human labor; and private labor has turned here into its opposite, to labor in immediately<i> social</i> form. Marx's analysis of money seems shrouded in the rococo of dialectics, but upon closer inspection it seems to be his claim that monetary exchange relations implicate their participants in logically absurd beliefs and practices. </font></div> <div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div> <div><font color="#000000">The central problem here seems again to be a category mistake. As if the confounded visitor who asks to be finally shown the university after having already been taken to the philosophy, physics, biology, etc. buildings could actually find what he is looking for in a visit to, say, the mining department alone; abstract labor which seems merely to be a general heading comes in fact to be incarnated in a single commodity (gold).  In supposing that abstract labor can be such a thing, we seem to have been led to a mistaken ontological commitment. It is indeed as if the generalization fruit existed not merely in the mental act of abstracting from bananas, papayas, coconuts, etc. but was rather incarnated in, say, mangoes.</font></div> <div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div> <div><font color="#000000"> Consider then a tropical island economy in which, by law, only fruit can be traded and fruit is indeed produced for exchange alone.  On this island the essence of fruit is thought to have taken the form of mangoes as a result of some special property thereof so if one wants coconuts for his papayas, the papayas first have to prove themselves to in fact possess the fruity property by being ex-changed into mangoes, which alone is always already fruit by its very nature and can thus uniquely be immediately converted into any concrete form of fruit.  Routinely accepted as a means of payment, mangoes<i> are</i> money; however, what appears to happen is, not that the mango has become money in consequence of all other commodities expressing their values in it, but, on the contrary, all other fruits express their values in mango, because it is money.</font></div> <div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div> <div><font color="#000000">So neither papayas nor coconuts can be immediately traded because they do not yet count as fruit which has thus bewilderingly taken on an existence independent of its members; moreover, as a real hypostatization of fruit, mangoes paradoxically lose for all practical purposes the sensuous, concrete attributes of their fruitiness, for their use value has become exchange value, pure and simple, since mangoes serve as the embodiment of fruit as such in the circulation of commodities. Mangoes just as they come off the tree seem to be forthwith the visible incarnation, the social chrysalis state, of all fruit. The abstract-universal of fruit, which ought to be a predicate-i.e. a property of concrete or the sensate-, has become in mangoes the subject, a self-subsisting entity. The concrete sensate of the mango moreover now counts merely as the phenomenal form of the abstract universal-i.e., as the predicate of its own substantialized predicate.  The sense qualities of mangoes have been reduced to the attributes or, to use Marx's Hegelian terminology, forms of appearance of fruit in the abstract.  As Marx puts it:</font></div> <div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div> <div><font color="#000000">This<i> inversion</i> (<u>Verkehrung</u>) by which the sensibly-concrete counts only as the form of appearance of the abstractly general and, not on the contrary, the abstractly general as property of the concrete, characterizes the expression of value. At the same time, it makes understanding it difficult. If I say: Roman Law and German Law are both laws, that is obvious. But if I say Law (<u><i>Das</i> Recht),</u> this abstraction (<u>Abstraktum</u>)<i> realises itself</i> in Roman Law or in German Law, in these concrete laws, the interconnection becomes mystical.</font></div> <div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div> <div><font color="#000000">While there are category mistakes at work here, Marx audaciously argues that these logical inversions by which one commodity is<i> transubstantiated</i> into value itself are not non-sense to those immersed in everyday monetary exchanges. Religious experience provides an analogue to what can be called a practical non-logic. Here the three signs of God as Father<i> and</i> Son<i> and</i> Spirit are brought into metonymic relation and thought to be not only true but also simultaneously true; while this conflicts with the logical rules of physical experience by implying that God is son and father to himself, such mytho-logical statements nonetheless make sense 'in the mind' so long as the speaker and his listener, or the actor and his audience, share the same conventional ideas about the metaphysical object.  For Marx, modern humankind is entangled in mytho-logical beliefs about money in its commercial life. In his remarkable expression this ideological and practical world is revealed to be the<i> religion of everyday life</i>. In the painstaking derivation of money in the first part of<i> Das Kapital</i>, Marx has attempted to demonstrate how mangoes (Marx of course used linen rather than mangoes for gold) as money are<i> qualitatively</i> different from fruits (commodities) as fruits (commodities); yet mangoes are born as fruits, as a fruit (commodity) itself, and only under the pressure of the exchange of great quantities of fruit does the mango ascend from earth to the economic heaven to become not merely a measure of value and a standard of price, but in virtue of its functions of universal equivalent and exchange medium, Fruit (Value) Incarnate. </font></div> </body> </html>