Discussion Questions
1. What is the power of abstraction? What work is Marx's 'cell-form' metaphor doing?
2. Why begin with the commodity as the matter of concern?
3. Breakdown of Marx's critique of Hegel's dialectical method? (M/E, pp. 301-302)
4. What is the relationship between scarcity and labor time? E.g., the diamond example (C1, p. 130)
5. What is the relationship between utility, value, and labor? (C1, p. 131)
6. Does Marx distinguish between use-values and usefulness (useful things)? (C1, p. 126)
(Concerning #1) Well, this metaphor is helpful for thinking about what he means by 'laws.' He uses a lot of organic metaphors: society as an organism. Perhaps his conception of economic laws (i.e., laws of capitalist production) are akin to biological laws. The commodity is a cell, not an atom.
Marx's seems to also rely on an appearance/reality distinction. We need to uncover or disclose something and not limit ourselves to the analysis of surface practices and institutions.
What is the cell relative to the body? What is this metaphor tracking? Well, atomistic metaphor implies something like bundles, whereas organic biological metaphors elicit a sense of systematicity, circularity, etc. More plasticity.
Marx also uses physical metaphors to talk about constructing an ideal model of capitalist laws. England as the model of capitalism which other countries are approaching.
(Concerning #2) I was thinking of Foucault's archaeological method of stripping away everything we hold constant in history. So, for Marx, why does he start with the commodity? If we follow the phenomenological reading, the commodity is the first 'appearance' of capitalism. But this seems analogous to Heidegger's starting point of Being/beings?
Well, the commodity seems like the universal category of the capitalist mode of production; it's present in any capitalist society. Well, I took the commodity as criterial for capitalism, so it's not so much a 'starting point,' and more as an analytic observation. Not just the commodity, but the 'immense' collection of commodities is criterial.
What does Marx mean by 'appearance' for Marx mean? Kantian? Hegelian? Proto-Heideggerian?
(Concerning #5). Use-values are a necessary condition for the commodities. What does Marx mean by use-values presuppose 'definite quantities.' Maybe in the sense of the amount of useful things you want or possess?
It's interesting that Marx treats use-value as both a potentiality and an actuality. Use-values are, in some sense, transhistorical because as humans we always appropriate nature for our own uses. For Marx, labor in the abstract sense is a nature-imposed necessity, independent of all social forms (see p. 133). Marx has two senses of labor: abstract labor (capitalism) vs. concrete labor (human nature).
Exchange-value is the commensurable value between two use-values. Two exchange-values are made equal by virtue of a 'third thing'? The socially average necessary labor-time it takes to produce a commodity assuming all things hold equal.
(Concerning #4). Something that is useless cannot be commodity, but we can derive usefulness from things that are not commodity. Scarcity would be factored in the sense that it typically takes more socially average labor time to extract rare minerals like diamonds, whereas the same amount of time can extract more common minerals, like coal.
