Essence and appearance - still a problem for marxian theory today?

LOLZ!!

The outburst of struggles in 1968 was because of some middle class art students bandying around some recurgitated Lukacs, or perhaps you meant the situationists aresome sort of time lords and the actual year of 1968 would have been lost without such an overegged one dimensional analysis as 'The Spectacle'? I don't know which one is less materialist or embarrassing.

p.s. any chance of reply to my response to your post claiming the working class was shrinking etc?

Even your "caustic" posts read like castrated situationism.

seriously, what are you on about? i fucking hate wage labour, but i don't have much choice about participating in it and i'm materialist enough to realise you can't abolish it simply by declaring farewell to the working class (which as revol points out, even in the crudest othodox male factory worker terms you seem to favour is empirically false/eurocentric with the massive proletarianisation in china/india etc far offsetting the deindustrialisation in the west). and to claim the struggles of '68, which were part of a global wave were caused by the situs is to repeat their worst hubris with the added bonus of jettisoning materialist analysis (again).

i mean seriously, raging against a strawman orthodoxy that hasn't existed in decades may make you feel hip and outsider, but no-one here is pro-work, and to equate class struggle with being a pro-work productivist is pretty idiotic, not to mention ignorant of what is strongest in debord, i.e. that the social relation mediated by images that so excites students of cultural studies is simply capital accumulated to a sufficient extent - that is a class relation of dispossession in which our alienated activity confronts us as 'other', dead labour standing over living, and yet ultimately dependent on it, and thus ultimately vulnerable to our collective refusal.

This is just crude idealism.

Lets not give it undue praise, it's just retarded bullshit posted by a pretentious arthouse liberal.

I agree, it looks likes many "pro-situs" or whatever simply forget that for Debord the spectacle is a social relation and the late developpement of capital, and to forget that is to disfigure situasionism to make it a hip idealist literature, and completely irrelevant to emancipation struggles.

where do you find that quotation? need to have the context to see exactly where does it goes...

from memory that quote's from towards the end of chapter 1 of capital (penguin edition/translation) when fetishism is first introduced.

that's it, thanks.

Minor stuff i guess, but on that specific question of why Marx starts with the commodity (and therefore value/conceptual stuff) and ends with primitive accumulation and the raw historical stuff.. I don't get the impression that this was because of some idealist causal relationship or fundamental determining primacy of the commodity-form, but that it just made sense because that was a good way of explaining it. I also don't see all the stuff that Harry Cleaver sees in it.. I always thought he started with the commodity (and value) because that is simply 'how capitalism presents itself'.. that is, its not really that simple or the whole story about capitalism. At the surface, capitalism is this system that creates all these things that we like and need and that is the big advantage to it that everyone celebrates, having all this wealth and shiny commodities readily available.. but actually, its surplus value, management of labour time, unpredictable and irrational effects from fetishization, and finally the familiar bloodbath of primitive accumulation, etc. David Harvey argues this also (for whatever thats worth), Marx starts with the commodity because its the one thing that we are all most familiar with and obviously in our face.

Doesn't he explain that it is just a pedagogical approach in this first line??

Anyway.. just curious to what value-form types would say to that specific argument and that specific quote, maybe i'm wrong.. and no i haven't read Postone, etc.

Despite all PD's complaints that people who persist in seeing the working class as the revolutionary class are old hat ortho-marxists locked in some 1917 time-warp, the idea of ditching the proletariat as a revolutionary subject is hardly new itself. Almost as soon as the working class reappeared on the scene at the end of the 60s you had people like Camatte (despite some useful work of retrieving lost revolutionary traditions earlier on) retreating into theorisations about the class being a 'class for capital' and needing to negate right here and now. Of course the proletariat has ultimately to negate itself but only after first affirming itself though class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and on this point nothing has changed since Marx first put this forward in the 1840s, as Revol has pointed out in several posts. Furthermore Marx himself never abandoned this way of looking at the proletariat during or after his later critiques of political economy.

The starting point of Marx is class because he looks at value from the standpoint of the exploited, not as an ideologue of the exploiters, which is what prevented all the political economists from grasping the 'secret of surplus value' and the transient nature of the capitalist mode of production.

I agree with Dave C's post about alienation being a key element in both the early and the later work of Marx, even if the concept evolves and itself becomes more historical. We have looked at this question in our book on communism, specifically this chapter: http://en.internationalism.org/ir/075_commy_07.html. I think that I Rubin in his book on Marx's theory of value is making essentially this point when he says that you can't understand Marx's concept of value without the notion of commodity fetishism. In other words value relations by definition express the tendency for man's productive activity to escape him and confront him as an alien power.

jonnylocks: I think the reason why Marx starts with the analysis of commodity is more complicated and that this choice was not just "pedagogic". In fact, purely "pedagogically" it was a terrible choice -- Marx himself notes in the preface that the first chapter is the most difficult and most abstract of all. Engels in his letters to Marx complained several times about the structure of the presentation and insisted on making it more textbook-like. A historical starting (primitive accumulation) would have been much easier on the readers and many study guides to Capital suggest starting with the more historical stuff and then going back to the first chapter (including Harry Cleaver's study guide which is on his webpage, and I think Althusser & Balibar make a remark to that effect in Reading Capital).

As to the "obviousness" of commodities -- we may all be familiar with commodities, but I don't think we're that familiar with the twofold character of labor (which was a discovery unknown to political economy) or exchanges like "a quarter of wheat = x blacking". In fact, exchanges such as this (not involving money) occur only very rarely in a fully developed capitalist economy (to which Marx refers in the first sentence). The so-called "simple commmodity production" is an abstraction that has very little in common with our everyday experience. But for Marx, it was a necessary abstraction, because he didn't want to presuppose some categories (e.g. money) as given -- that was what political economy had been doing, and he set off to write a critique of political economy.

The choice to present Capital in this particular order was made, as far as I know, after most of the material was written. The problem Marx had to solve was how to present the material in a systematic way -- starting with the most "elementary" categories (elementary not in the sense of "easy to understand") and relationships/contradictions, so that the later parts (including the historical ones) can rely on these categories in the explanation. This way, Capital forms a "logical whole", with each part resting on the previous ones and showing how the most elementary categories and their relationships recur in different forms.

maybe a good way of seeing it is to see proletarian struggle as affirmation against capital, the working class affirming itself as antagonistic to capital. that way proletarian classe struggle relates to capital and to the class situation of the workers, but at the same time negates it, is posed as tending towards the negation of capital and the class situation of the workers. this way we see the working class as a class which is at the same time in capital and beyond capital by its stuggle to negate it and to affirmate itself as human being with human needs and not as a class with needs related to capital, living as a part of capitalists relations.

Maybe "logical" is not the best word, as it may imply "one big deduction" as in formal logic, but I think it's quite clear what it means when used as an opposite to "historical".

I don't think Marx introduces any of the categories (you agree that they are categories, no?) simply "by fiat". Capital, for example, is first introduced after money (in chapter four) because "the first form of appearance of capital is money" and Marx's first provisional thesis is that capital is money with a different "form of circulation". Therefore, I think that the fact that the chapter on money precedes capital (and commodities precede money, for that matter) is not a matter of coincidence or Marx's stylistic taste. I would say that there are certain relationships between the categories that Marx discovered while reading classical political economy and all the empirical material. These he wanted to present in the most "transparent" way, even if it involved a lot of abstraction (and patience from the reader).

Really? i thought the first chapter was really easy, may try reading capital again in that case, sort of abandoned it somewhere in chapter 3.

I'v always viewed money as having value only in terms of what you can buy with it, but I know not everyone sees it that way.

but to think in term of "what you can buy with it" relates to exchange value, not to use value. you mean I think that you relate money to the use value of the thing you want to buy,but it still illustrate the twofold character of labor, producing things (products) with use value, but things that are commodities, with exchange value.

I'm not sure if I understand what you mean, but the notion that "money has value and it is something you buy stuff with" is quite common in the "everyday consciousness" and you don't need the critique of political economy to tell you that. In the analysis of the "money-form" ("D.", sec. 3, ch. 1) Marx is trying to find out why there is money, how exactly it is related to commodities, and how it came about (again, not historically -- Marx wants to show that the seed of money and the corresponding relationships is already contained within a simpler "form", e.g. "a qt. of wheat = x blacking".)

I probable shouldn't have said that, all I wanted to say was that I was surprised that some one would find the first part of capital hard, because it seemed easy to me, I was expecting it to get harder as it went along

The thing about money that I was saying was that the value comes from the things that you can exchange it for, and that when you exchange it for some thing, the value that the money comes from the value of the other things the money can be exchanged for by the recipient of the money, so indirectly from you they receive another thing.
So not "money has value and it is something you buy stuff with" but things have value and money is the unit of exchanged so its value is what things it can be exchanged for, that is the value is not a property of the money, it has no value it except to be exchanged but the things it can be exchanged for do.
For example inflation can result from an increase in the quantity of money where as if money had its own value the price would not change.

yes I get that, what I want to say was I thought it was a simple idea, I don't really see why someone wouldn't get it.

I don't think what I am writing is really going anywhere, I wanted to explain what I meant but it seems to have got worse.

Any way I'v been meaning to finish reading capital for ages, I really need to get a book, are there different version and should I get a particular one? I'd rather not print out the whole thing.

FWIW, I really don't care for the "official" MECW translation, which is the one available at marxists.org

I've heard good things about the Fowkes translation issued by Penguin/Vintage.

But of course, the best solution is to learn German and get the MEW "blue volumes"!

Thanks I'll have a look for that, I was using the one of marxists.org because it was free, but you can't read a book that big on a computer screen.
I did GCSE German, do you think that will be enough?

Actually Marx himself states in his famous letter to Kugelmann that he didn't need to put the chapter on value in the book at all! ("Even if there were no chapter on ‘value’ at all in my book, the analysis I give of the real relations would contain the proof and demonstration of the real value relation.") So yes, it does seem to have been a pedagogical choice, even if it wasn't the easiest chapter. And progression from the easiest to most difficult sections isn't the only way to pedagogically structure a book. There are other criteria that may be used.

There are quite a few problems in this paragraph. First of all, you refer to "so-called 'simple commodity production' ", yet Marx never used the phrase in relation to the first chapters of his book. (I don't think he ever used the term, although I may be incorrect about that.) The idea that Marx started off Capital with the hypothetical creation of a "simple commodity producing" society is a myth which is backed by no evidence from Marx himself.

Secondly, Marx does not refer to exchanges at all, let alone moneyless exchanges, in the section on the form of value, which I assume is the section you're referring to. He refers to the equality of commodities, but this strictly speaking does not mean any exchange has taken place. (Think of a price list, for example.)

Thirdly, Marx did presuppose a developed commodity production (which itself presupposes money) before the section on the form of value. (He explicitly brings in capitalist production, which has both of those. And he explicitly mentions the equality of various commodities.) And why not? Developed commodity production existed (and still exists), and that's that. The same goes for money. He didn't have to develop it out of some previous category in a Hegelian fashion.

Fourthly, even though you don't think that the analysis that progresses from the simple form of value (a quarter of wheat = x blacking) to the money-form of value (any commodity = x money) is a historical one, you still seem to think it's supposed to be some transition from a bartering process (although an imaginary one rather than a historical one) to a money exchange process. This really doesn't make sense given the context. As I noted above, right before the section on the form of value, Marx has already presupposed developed commodity exchange (which supposes money). And even more importantly, in Chapter 2 of Capital, which does describe (to some extent) the historical process out of which money developed, there is nothing in Marx's exposition which says that value is latent in barter. Rather the exchanges in a bartering society are totally capricious and irregular. ("The proportions in which [goods] are exchangeable are at first quite a matter of chance.") There is no regulator of the exchanges between commodities. Whereas, if Marx saw the simple form of value as a description of bartering (even a "logical" bartering), you would imagine that Marx's claim that it represented a value-relation between commodities would apply equally to historical bartering.

This might make you wonder what I think it exactly is that Marx attempts to do in his analysis of the form of value. What Marx does is show how even the simplest expressions of a commodity's value, like, for example, saying that a quarter of wheat is equal in value to a certain amount of blacking, presupposes money.

Again I think this sort of thinking (which is very common amongst Marxist academics these days) lies on a residual Hegelianism in which there is some idea of a "presuppositionless" science, in which nothing is presupposed but nevertheless you get a development of categories. Yet the idea of a presuppositionless science was explicitly criticized by Marx in The German Ideology! (He sarcastically remarks: "... we are dealing with Germans, who are devoid of premises".)

And also, as I mentioned in an earlier post, in order to understand the commodity you have to understand the process of capitalist accumulation in which it plays its role. This supposes value and surplus-value. Which themselves rest on commodity production. As Marx was at pains to stress, it is a system that reproduces itself, which produces its own requirements. So no matter what piece of the capitalist accumulation process you start off from, you are going to have to come back to it and see how it itself is produced. There is no single starting point which everything else in the accumulation process is based off of.

Most people like the Penguin version, translated by Ben Fowkes, better than the MECW version (translated by Moore and Aveling), although that isn't universally the case. I've only read parts of the MECW version and I mostly liked the Penguin version better. I would recommend getting the Penguin edition, and then looking at difficult or ambiguous passages in the online MECW. Sometimes it helps to see two different translations of the same passage. It can clear up ambiguities.

Thank you for the reply.

I realize this -- I used the term in quotes exactly because of these problems. I didn't mean to say that Marx is talking about a (even if hypothetical) "society" other than capitalism. What I meant to say is that Marx, in order to analyze capitalism, is using an abstraction which at the first sight seems to have little in common with commodity-capitalist-society as we live it (and therefore I think that the "obviousness" of the 1st chapter is dubious) -- in fact, this is what probably led some of the interpreters of Capital to think of some parts of the 1st chapter as being historical. I don't think Marx ever used the term SCP either.

The same applies, I think, for your remarks on barter. I agree Marx is not talking about value being latent in barter. I mentioned money-less exchanges (even though I do know that the elementary form of value has nothing to do with barter) because relationships such as "one qt. of wheat = x blacking" seem quite uncommon to someone living in a capitalist society (even thought Marx is talking about the society we live in). What I mean is that Marx is not starting with the most "obvious" and easiest things as someone mentioned on this thread. I think the first chapter (including the part on the fetish-character of commodities) says a lot of things that are completely alien to "everyday consciousness".

How can he be not talking about exchange if the equality of commodities becomes visible only when they are brought in a relationship with each other, in exchange? (The section itself is titled "The form of value or exchange-value"). (But I do know he is not talking about "physical" exchanges of 1 qt. of wheat being exchanged for x blacking.)

I agree with this -- see below.

I think it is a conceptual "transition" -- but not from barter to money, but simply from a less developed form of value to a more developed one. At first, it may seem to the reader that Marx is not talking about a capitalist society at all (which led to all the historical interpretations). I mentioned this only for the reasons noted above (the supposed "obviousness" of the first chapter).

I confess I might be influenced by the Western academic thinking about Capital.

But I am not talking about a science "devoid of premises", but about the mode of presentation of the science. Marx did not want to throw all the material and the corresponding categories at the reader all at once (even though, as you note, all of the categories "go together" and one can dissect their connections only by the "force of abstraction" mentioned in the preface). Therefore, in my opinion, he chose a starting point that required a minimum of presuppositions, and a high level of abstraction (compared to some of the other chapters of Capital). Marx himself notes in one of the footnotes in Ch1 that "wages is a category that ... has no existence at the present stage of our investigation" -- so there is some conceptual development taking place in Capital, and this path was probably chosen by Marx for a reason. He could have as well started, for example, with an analysis of profit, move to surplus-value and then to value, but the resulting Capital would, I think, be even more difficult to read than it is, going back and forth to categories which had to be presupposed. I also don't think that one can start reading Capital from whichever chapter seems to be the easiest (as some of the study guides suggest), precisely because of the conceptual development.

(BTW - I have not read Volumes 2 & 3. What I'm trying to do here is to make sense of some of the interpretations of Volume 1 I've read and of my own reading of the first volume. Anything I write, at this point, are just provisional thoughts.)

Thanks, I have decided to buy the first volume from amazon with some other books so I get free delivery.
I was looking at volumes 2 & 3 and they are translated by someone called David Fernbach, is this version good? (I'm not buying them all at once just wanted to ask what you thought while I remember)
And what does MECW stand for?

Marx-Engels Collected Works. The "official" English version of the Marx ouevre that was sponsored by the Soviet Union and its english-language satellites.

It's my understanding that the MECW in terms of breadth is actually a bit more comprehensive than the German-language MEW (Marx-Engels Werke, the longstanding "official" version available from the East German SED and now from Dietz Verlag in Berlin), since the MECW also incorporates some material from the MEGA or MEGA2 (Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, Marx-Engels *Complete* Works), which are fucking expensive as hell, available from Akademieverlag in Berlin and curated by the International Marx-Engels Foundation in Holland.

A lot of contemporary Marx research, especially by the "value-form" people, is based upon MEGA research.

How does one pronounce "Moishe Postone". I've been wondering this for a long time.

moy-shuh po-stone (as in "rock")

Can you say a little more about this please