From: Howard Engelskirchen (howarde@TWCNY.RR.COM)
Date: Fri Sep 15 2006 - 01:24:26 EDT
If money and commodities are essential to capitalism, do they constitute part of the essence of capitalism? I think Marx's answer, pretty clearly, is no. Marx insists on looking for the differentia specifica of a thing and is always castigating economists who engage in forms of abstraction that ignore specific differences in favor of common features characteristic also of other forms of production. In the chapter, the Results of the Immediate Process of Production, for example, he castigates those who make the double blunder of confusing capital as such with its elementary forms -- money and the commodity -- on the one hand, and those who confuse capital with its mode of existence as use value, ie means of production, on the other. Is it possible for something to be essential to a thing but not part of its essence? This happens all the time. It occurs with any species that belongs to a genus. All air breathing vertebrates, of which mammals are one group, have lungs. Those things which constitute the nature of the genus are essential to all species that belong to that genus. But they do not constitute the essence of the species because they do not specifically differentiate it from other species in the genus. Thus, money and commodities are essential to capitalism, and you cannot have capitalism without them. But they do not as such characterize its essence. Labor power as a commodity, on the other hand, is one feature of the differentia specifica of capital. All this of course is one of the fundamental theoretical questions of Marxism just now. Many think that value does not exist except as part of capitalist production. It is therefore essential to capitalism. But for those who take this position, not just that: whether it be explained from the perspective of the essentialist or anti-essentialist, value is a defining characteristic of capitalism. On this view our understanding of commodities and money in terms of value is strictly limited to capitalist production; in the ancient world, for example, money was a means of exchange but did not represent value. I may have this wrong, though, because I don't understand the argument. Howard
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