The real circulation of commodities through time and space is not accomplished by money.

I think this amounts to saying that circulation is more than a sequence of barter like trades, or direct exchanges.

Money only realizes their price and thereby transfers the title to the commodity into the hands of the buyer, to him who has proffered means of exchange.

Money, instead, works as a standard of entitlement to a commodity. Thou shalt pay me at least $3.50 to obtain the sandwich. Whether you pay $3.50 for the sandwich or not still needs more than the price.

What money circulates is not commodities but their titles of ownership; and what is realized in the opposite direction in this circulation, whether by purchase or sale, is again not the commodities, but their prices.

Money's direction of circulation: M-C..., A person uses an amount of money M1 to buy a commodity C1 which transfers M1 to the previous owner of C1 (still first step). That takes C1, which was owned by a shop or something, and transfers its ownership rights to the purchaser.

Commodities direction of circulation: C-M......, a person has a commodity C1 which has a given value, that value is realised in an act of exchange of money amount M1 for commodity C1. This simultaneously uses a valuation of C1 and realises it as a price M1.

The quantity of money which is, then, required for circulation is determined initially by the level of the prices of the commodities thrown into circulation. The sum total of these prices, however, is determined firstly: by the prices of the individual commodities; secondly: by the quantity of commodities at given prices which enter into circulation.

Every link in the circulation ...-C-M-C-M-... thus needs a given amount of money to allow the transaction. That money is also tradable - as gold. The money must be realised in the transaction for it really to have taken place. That means for an economy (totality!?)'s circulation to be ongoing, it posits enough money existing at a given time point to enable every exchange. Marx gives an example:

“For example, in order to circulate a quarter of wheat at 60s., twice as many s. are required as would be to circulate it at 30s. And if 5,000 of these quarters at 60s. are to be circulated, then 300,000 s. are required, while in order to circulate 200 such quarters only 12,000s. are needed. Thus, the amount of money required is dependent on the level of commodity prices and on the quantity of commodities at specified prices.

“Thirdly, however, the quantity of money required for circulation depends not only on the sum total of prices to be realized, but on the rapidity with which money circulates, completes the task of this realization. If 1 thaler in one hour makes 10 purchases at 1 thaler each, if it is exchanged 10 times, then it performs quite the same task that 10 thalers would do if they made only 1 purchase per hour. Velocity is the negative moment; it substitutes for quantity; by its means, a single coin is multiplied.”

“Still, as already mentioned, the circulation of money does not begin from a single centre, nor does it return to a single centre from all points of the periphery (as with the banks of issue and partly with state issues); but from an infinite number of points, and returns to an infinite number (this return itself, and the time required to achieve it, a matter of chance). The velocity of the circulating medium can therefore substitute for the quantity of the circulating medium only up to a certain point. (Manufacturers and farmers pay, for example, the worker; he pays the grocer, etc.; from there the money returns to the manufacturers and farmers.) The same quantity of money can effectuate a series ”
“of payments only successively, regardless of the speed. But a certain mass of payments must be made simultaneously. Circulation takes its point of departure at one and the same time from many points. A definite quantity of money is therefore necessary for circulation, a sum which will always be engaged in circulation, and which is determined by the sum total which starts from the simultaneous points of departure in circulation, and by the velocity with which it runs its course (returns). ”

Holding the number of simultaneous exchanges fixed, if there are 5 simultaneous exchanges per second of a quarter of wheat, each at 60s, you'd need 300s per second to facilitate this. If instead there were 2 simultaneous exchanges. You'd need only 120s. Furthermore, if the price of a quarter was 30s, you'd need 150s and 60s respectively.

Putting this in explicitly mathsy terms: circulation of a commodity priced at M1 at a number of exchange per unit time N1 requires M1*N1 total money per unit time to facilitate the trade of that commodity. Thus the total amount of money required to circulate N1 simultaneous trades of M1, called T1, would be: T1=M1*N1.

This holds when we have N1 exchanges of M1 for C1 at the same time. This is N1 multiples of the M1 for C1 step. Like C-M, C-M, C-M .

However, if the exchanges are instead seen as sequential and simultaneous - a series of M1 -> C1 -> M1 -> C2 -> M1.... a number of sequential trades P1 occurring per second t1 of a definite fixed value M1, then you'd need only T1=M1/P1 money to execute all of those exchanges. eg 10 purchases of value 1 thaler, considered as the above sequence, would only need 1 thaler each. This would also hold in the aggregate, over all commodities.

Putting both ideas together you end up with T1 = M1*N1/P1 money required per unit time (t1). M1*N1 seems to be called the "mass of commodity prices" and M1*N1/P1 is called the "velocity of money".

Marx then takes this quantity and says that it behaves as a constraint for the total quantity of money required, rather than an iron law at any given time. Approximately correct unless something's gone very wrong. Hypothetically if there was no money, there'd be no trades. If there was 1 thaler per unit time and the total volume of trade required 100 thaler per unit time, there'd be no trades. And there being a lot more money in circulation than M1*N1/T1 for trades involving C1 only makes sense if M1 was somehow greater than M1 (for a fixed time point), or if there was an overabundance of money allocated for circulation at one time point, which was then carried forward to the next.

That look about right to you @Moliere?

“A developed determination of prices presupposes that the individual does not directly produce his means of subsistence, but that his direct product is an exchange value, and hence must first be mediated by a social process, in order to become the means of life for the individual.”

A good reminder that the process by which prices are assigned to commodities piggybacks off extant social processes. In that regard price assignment isn't generative of the value of products, instead the production of products for exchange/production being production of value is generative of price assignments - in totality and in amount.

Money thus circulates in the opposite direction from commodities. It appears as the middleman in commodity exchange, as the medium of exchange. It is the wheel of circulation, the instrument of circulation for the turnover of commodities; but, as such, it also has a circulation of its own – monetary turnover, monetary circulation. The price of the commodity is realized only when it is exchanged for real money, or in its real exchange for money.

... M-C-M-C-M ...
Is the transfer of money ( M ) to commodity ( C ) to money to commodity of exchange. If you start off with a commodity - like labour power or an egg - your path "forwards" is C-M-C-M... If you start off with money, your path "forwards" is M-C-M-C... which is the same as reversing the direction of the transition of commodities. Just like {1,2,3,4} and {4,3,2,1} are reversed sequences.

so I was glad he gave us one to think through rather than just the pure text as it is — Moliere

Me too.

Posit/presuppose from Harvey -- that was nice to hear. I'd never thought of "posit" as "you have to add something else" — Moliere

This was also a great highlight. I'm going to try and read it with the analogy: presupposition as "part of the foundation", positing as "the next bit of how it's being built". Need the first to get going, need the second to keep going.

"remember it's an alienated labor and an alienated capital, right throughout for next time" — Moliere

I was going to write this down here too.

Page 284... just shy of the mark. Luckily, looking ahead, March 7th is Spring Break/Book Release, so there's a lull for us to catch up in just around the corner. — Moliere

Will be good to catch up on it. Found these readings a real slog. How'd you find them?

The behaviour of money is ultimately the behaviour of exchange value.

Money is in the first instance that which expresses the relation of equality between all exchange values: in money, they all have the same name.)

It's a material expression of exchange value. How exchange values behave dictates how money behaves; but money may disobey.

“Exchange value, posited in the character of money, is price. Exchange value is expressed in price as a specific quantity of money. Money as price shows first of all the identity of all exchange values; secondly, it shows the unit of which they all contain a given number, so that the equation with money expresses the quantitative specificity of exchange values, their quantitative relation to one another. Money is here posited, thus, as the measure of exchange values; and prices as exchange values measured in money. ”

I read "money as price shows first of all the identity of all exchange values" as that exchange values are totally commensurated by amounts of money representing definite values. How much one thing is worth is qualitatively identical to how much something else is worth scaled up. If 2 goats is worth 1 egg, 4 goats is worth 2 eggs. We've got different total values in trade, but the same set of value ratios which the money represents as a price. Similarly, if 2 goats or 1 egg are worth 1 gold. Then 4 goats or 2 eggs are worth 2 gold.

In that regard, exchange value is a (scarequotes) a "flat medium", a single undifferentiated dimension that holds all equal to a given amount of gold. I'm imagining it as a number line. Every fraction of gold is worth a given fraction of every commodity.

__1 gold piece___1.5 gold pieces_____2 gold pieces
{here lay 2 goats} {here lay 2 eggs}

The "flat medium" facilitates the ascription of exchange value to a product to quantify its value. That makes it function as a price. It can be used to quantify how much anything trades for.

“The fact that money is the measure of prices, and hence that exchange values are compared with one another on this standard, is an aspect of the situation which is self-evident. But what is more important for the analysis is that in price, exchange value is compared with money. After money has been posited as independent exchange value, separated from commodities, then the individual commodity, the particular exchange value, is again equated to money, i.e. it is posited as equal to a given quantity of money, expressed as money, translated into money. By being equated to money, they again become related to one another as they were, conceptually, as exchange values: they balance and equate themselves with one another in given proportions.”

I found this passage confusing and profound in equal measure. What I'm getting from it is that there are two separate acts which establish the equation of money and exchange value. The first act is money being used as something like a shop label, and the process which sets the number on it. That takes an exchange value (how much value is in this thing?) and assigns it a number (constrained by supply, demand and other things, how much do we charge for it). But simultaneously the act of assigning a number to an exchange value through a money takes the money and assigns it to a given value. The commensuration relationship money has is posited, necessitated, and thus reproduced in every such act. This occurs in shops, but also in the mind. It's simultaneously a social and an ideal commensuration. The commodity is now exchangeable for an abstraction, by means of exchanging that abstraction's material representative (real money).

“Alongside real money, there now exists the commodity as ideally posited money.”

This ideality of money, alongside it being a "flat medium" for the expression of value quantities, facilitates is second function as a unit of account.

“Real money intervenes only in order to realize payments and to balance (liquidate) the accounts. If I must pay 24 livres 12 sous, then accounting money presents 24 units of one sort and 12 of another, while in reality I shall pay in the form of two material pieces: a gold coin worth 24 livres and a silver coin worth 12 sous.”

“Accounting money is an ideal measure, which has no limits other than those of the imagination. ”

Money on the books isn't the same thing as money out in the wild. I can calculate that I owe @Moliere 5 goats. I don't thereby conjure up 5 goats which I may give them. We'd be square if I gave them 5 goats. Not 5 inexistent goats. The same holds for currency tokens and material repositories of value.

Except, there's a tension between a unit of account and money needing a material representative. I can say I am in Moliere's debt, needing to pay him 5 goats. But if Scotland was in debt to Moliere's nation to the tune of 56 million goats... We wouldn't have enough goats, even in principle, to pay. Thus units of account, being notional, can be regulated differently than material repositories of value like gold.

I'm not going to be able to write more notes this late in the day. But shall try to finish them. Turns out cramming before class never gets old.

For next week, just fyi, the final reading for online is on this page on the following paragraph:

An interest of 24 on a capital of 40 is too much; but 24 = 3/5 of 40 (3 × 8 = 24); i.e. in addition to the capital, only 2/5 of the capital grew by 100%; the whole capital therefore by only 2/5, i.e. 16%. [67] The interest computation on 40 is 24% too high (by 100% on 3/5 of the capital); 24 on 24 is 100% on 3 × 8 (3/5 of 40). But on the whole amount of 140, it is 60% instead of 40; i.e. 24 too much out of 40, 24 out of 40 = 60%. Thus we figured 60% too much on a capital of 40 (60 = 3/5 of 100). But we figured 24 too high on 140 (and this is the difference between 220 and 196); this is first 1/5 of 100 then 1/12 of 100 too much; 1/5 of 100 = 20%; 1/12 of 100 = 8 4/12% or 8 1/3%; thus altogether 28 1/3% too high. Thus on the whole not 60%, as on 40, but only 28 1/3% too much; which makes a difference of 31 2/3, depending on whether we figure 24 too many on the 40 [or on] the capital of 140. Similarly in the other example.

In the first 80 which produce 120, 50 + 10 was simply replaced, but 20 reproduced itself threefold: 60 (20 reproduction, 40 surplus).

Hours of labour
If 20 posit 60, making up triple the value, then
60 180. — Moliere

Ambassador you are spoiling me.

More chapter 2

The remainder of chapter two splits into two themes.

The first theme is the behaviour of money. We've already looked at how money works as a value, and how that value is represented; at least notionally; by amounts of precious metals. A given amount of gold is used as the value of a given amount of any other commodity. That represents its value.

In Dungeons and Dragons terms, the blacksmith has taken three hours of their time to make a dagger for you. That's the modal amount of labour for forging a dagger. Three hours of that amount of labour has the going rate of one gold. Thus the value of the dagger is one gold. Though perhaps there is a young dragon nearby, and you really need a dagger, so you may pay a lot more than one gold for it. Would you pay 100 gold? 100 times the value? Maybe, but very unlikely. That it can be considered a "very unlikely" price to pay, societally, is an instance of value constraining price without being numerically identical with it.

That facilitates looking at money *as a value* - which is something that can be abstract, imagined, conceptual, legally constrained and so on. And also as a product; precious metals serve as the material repositories of value and thus the glue of exchange relations. These dual functions are in tension with each other, and this tension is required for money to play the role it does in circulation.

The second theme is analysing circulation itself.

Or maybe we don't understand one another at all. — frank

Likely. I will generally interpret someone telling me my perspective is "cold and brutal", without invitation or further comment, negatively. Perhaps if you used more words, I would have understood you.

Oh, I should have said: dishwasher? We didn’t even have dishes. — Jamal

Hot gravel?

Have always wondered about your origin story! Thanks for sharing!

That appears to me to be on topic, but I agree we should leave it. :grimace: — frank

Just out of curiosity - is this some kind of accusation that I'm "cold and uncaring" because I "don't believe in minds" and "don't care how individuals are treated"?

I’m completely confused by this one! The fault could very likely be mine alone. — Mikie

Minds working like bizarre machines that don't connect to the body's movements. Rather than distrusting bodies, which did things, I distrusted stories about bodies, which came from minds. Since it seemed like the body did things consistently and minds had no idea what was going on, minds seemed a lot less trustworthy. As a social thing. And as a concept.

Edit: Rereading some SEP, this is a "folk psychology radically misrepresents mind workings and none of the concepts in it work like they're intended" thesis rather than a "minds don't exist in any sense" thesis. AFAIK the former still counts as eliminativism.

You needed to think philosophically to survive in a relatively unstable environment— does that sum it up? — Mikie

Yeah! I grew up with a lot of outright weird shit. Fringe religious polycule. It tried hard not to behave like one, but would usually fail to do so.

Interesting, but I can’t say I fully see the connection. Was it that being mocked made you more aware of your class position? — Mikie

Social status being tied to family wealth. I can remember wondering why can some people afford dish washers and others can't. And wondering why it would be a cause for mockery. I felt ashamed, and realised that there was a shame in my family being poor. That had to have come from somewhere.

So fear of the unknown was a big factor, especially when the stories of a fundamentalist Christian uncle became less convincing and additional questions were asked. But where did the fear come from? It wasn’t only the thought of hell — after all, lots of kids get told that and aren’t particularly afraid of it — and certainly most don’t develop a love of philosophy. — Mikie

I find this instructive. It seems like there'll never be a sufficient explanation for how we all ended up loving this bizarre hobby.

how strong our stomachs — Mikie

Also instructive. I feel there's a connection between philosophy and a willingness to look analytically at things which hurt the eyes. Do you?

I don't think so. But that's off topic. So I'll leave it.

It does sound that way to me. I take it you don't experience it that way. — frank

Why does it sound that way to you?

Nah.

Good thread @Mikie. My "self narrative" on where my philosophical beliefs came from.

Left politics - being mocked by a school friend's family because my family couldn't afford a dish washing machine.
Something close to eliminative materialism - have suffered from people behaving incongruously with how they describe and motivate their actions. Minds are made for confabulating.
Methodological behaviourism - see above.
Collectivism - seeing people treat others like they were treated, "people are made of other people" kinda thing.

Philosophy in general - who knows. Threat modelling? Making sense of a world which doesn't make sense? Growing up in places where what intuitions are taught/expected to work don't work at all. Needing to think like this to survive.

“It is because the commodity is exchange value that it is exchangeable for money, is posited = to money. The proportion of its equivalence with money, i.e. the specificity of its exchange value, is presupposed before its transposition into money. The proportion in which a particular commodity is exchanged for money, i.e. the quantity of money into which a given quantity of a commodity is transposable, is determined by the amount of labour time objectified in the commodity. The commodity is an exchange value because it is the realization of a specific amount of labour time; money not only measures the amount of labour time which the commodity represents, but also contains its general, conceptually adequate, exchangeable form. ”

This one is also really interesting to me, a point I've really not understood before. The distinction and dependence between value and price, use and exchange etc - these codependent dyads - isn't just a conceptual distinction. It's also seen as internal to the account as an active process. A "real contradiction" Why? I think it's clearest to see with value and price. Price deviates from value through supply, demand and asymmetries in production. The deviation isn't a statement or defect, the deviation is productive and indeed generative of a dynamic in capital - the untethering of money from labour, entailed by and suggestive of the untethering of use from exchange. It isn't just a conceptual bifurcation of dependent opposites, it's two contrary social processes being in tension within one greater movement. The distinction itself is part of the model, an active part, as well as the two differentiated terms.

Value is at the same time the exponent of the relation in which the commodity is exchanged with other commodities, as well as the exponent of the relation in which it has already been exchanged with other commodities (materialized labour time) in production; — Moliere

I read this as exponent in the sense of "person who expresses a view or represents it" - so value represents the relation in which a commodity is exchanged with other commodities (X is worth Y) and also represents the relation in which it has already been exchanged with other commodities (X had SNLT equal to the SNLT of Y).

(SNLT = socially necessary labour time)

In terms of phrasing, I think "exponent" imbues something agential to value - it's kinda personalising and developmental. Rather than static, like a price, or a quantification of labour time. More like the means of quantification of labour, and the articulation of the means of quantification of labour.

The very necessity of first transforming individual products or activities into exchange value, into money, so that they obtain and demonstrate their social power in this objective [sachlichen] form, proves two things: (1) That individuals now produce only for society and in society; (2) that production is not directly social, is not ‘the offspring of association’, which distributes labour internally. Individuals are subsumed under social production; social production exists outside them as their fate; but social production is not subsumed under individuals, manageable by them as their common wealth. There can therefore be nothing more erroneous and absurd than to postulate the control by the united individuals of their total production, on the basis of exchange value, of money, as was done above in the case of the time-chit bank.

I think this is related to what @Number2018 was writing about earlier. That construing the circuit of capital as a collective exercise of agency, of agents coming together and binding their wills to reproduce a system, misses the phenomenon. This is because the social medium in which agents come together is distinct from the social mediums by which agents assemble to produce institutions. In essence, the institutions of capital are an entire separate social sphere, an entire separate social process, which acts parasitically upon the collective agency of its agents. Parasitically and constrainingly. This goes hand in hand with labourers producing, principally, exchange value detailed in the previous passage.

I think there's a lot of value (lol) in Chapter 2, it's providing very condensed and quite pithy statements of arguments which are more laboriously made elsewhere.

Another thing which interests me is that this chapter provides a good example of Marx's method. We started off with money, Now we've seen a lot of concepts unfold from its analysis - social and productive preconditions and interdependencies. With exchange. With production. With value. Marx also located criticisms of other economists within this unravelling of fundamental assumptions. This allows him to contextualise the work of others within his own "working out" of the behaviour of capital. And thus reveal whatever misapprehensions (bad inferences, bad starting points) he believes they have.

There is a very striking passage on the relationship of alienation and the production of exchange value:

“The reciprocal and all-sided dependence of individuals who are indifferent to one another forms their social connection. This social bond is expressed in exchange value, by means of which alone each individual’s own activity or his product becomes an activity and a product for him; he must produce a general product – exchange value, or, the latter isolated for itself and individualized, money. On the other side, the power which each individual exercises over the activity of others or over social wealth exists in him as the owner of exchange values, of money. The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket. Activity, regardless of its individual manifestation, and the product of activity, regardless of its particular make-up, are always exchange value, and exchange value is a generality, in which all individuality and peculiarity are negated and extinguished. This indeed is a condition very different from that in which the individual or the individual member of a family or clan (later, community) directly and naturally reproduces himself, or in which his productive activity and his share in production are bound to a specific form of labour and of product, which determine “his relation to others in just that specific way."

“The social character of activity, as well as the social form of the product, and the share of individuals in production here appear as something alien and objective, confronting the individuals, not as their relation to one another, but as their subordination to relations which subsist independently of them and which arise out of collisions between mutually indifferent individuals. The general exchange of activities and products, which has become a vital condition for each individual – their mutual interconnection – here appears as something alien to them, autonomous, as a thing.”

The concepts which later become alienation and commodity fetishism are rooted in the monetary system, in this analysis. I'm quoting it because it's an under-appreciated point made very precisely. Alienation and commodity fetishism aren't mental attitudes, they're social phenomena characteristic of exchange in capital's monetary system. Which, themselves, influence how people think and feel.

The Chapter on Money

Like Harvey, I'm going to skip most of this chapter. The first bit is looking at a spreadsheet which a Proudhon-ist had (for Marx) misinterpreted. And the spreadsheet itself allegedly shows Proudhon's idea was wrong, or at least insufficiently justified. I don't know any Proudhoun, so I can't comment how successful the criticism was. I believe the criticism. broadly stated, is that Marx sees Darimon and Proudhon as construing credit as a form of money circulation. Which is bad. Maybe because they go in opposite directions around the circuit of capital. You pay for a thing (money circulation, passing money on), you ask someone else to give you a lend (taking on a debt, making a promise to pass money on later).

Marx construes the error highlighted in the spreadsheets as an instance of a more fundamental error - can you reform an individual institution in the circuit of capital to improve things? Yeah! But can you reform an institution in the circuit of capital to remove anything which is necessary to the functioning of capital? Hell no. So anything it partakes in which is necessary to the functioning of capital is not reformable without attacking more fundamental parts of the circuit of capital. Those non-reformable parts include every injustice and pathology so implied by the fundamental developmental mechanisms of capital. Like power dynamics between bosses and workers, landlords and workers, landlords and companies and so on.

The chapter then goes into how reforming the monetary system, in principle, would not work. Why? Anything which would work to make money flow around capital's circuit needs to imitate all of its functioning. So it wouldn't matter if money is gold or silver or a chit of paper. It would still need to do what it needs to do for capital. There's a bit on how money needs the commensuration of all types of labour and thus needs to work as a universal quantifier on value. Those ideas seem to be developed more thoroughly in Capital Vol 1.

There's a passage on depreciation of product values. Marx's brief account is that if 1/10 of the expected grain was produced over a season. Someone who buys the grain at 10 times the price would change all purchasing patterns in the economy. If the buyer values grain as 10 times the price it did before a crisis, then all other products require 10 times as much quantity as they did previously to be equal in value to a given amount of grain. So if X multiply in value by a factor of A, then all other things have their value divided by a factor of A. This represents "the decreased productivity of capital in all other forms".

“With or without metallic money, or money of any other kind, the nation would find itself in a crisis not confined to grain, but extending to all other branches of production, not only because their productivity would have positively diminished and the price of their production depreciated as compared to their value, which is determined by the normal cost of production, but also because all contracts, obligations etc. rest on the average prices of products. For example, x bushels of grain have to be supplied to service the state’s indebtedness, but the cost of producing these x bushels has increased by a given factor. Quite apart from the role of money the nation would thus find itself in a general crisis.”

Which is stressed that a crisis in the production of a commodity is not principally a monetary crisis - "where is all the gold going now lol? shit we don't have enough gold, it's a crisis" -, it's "our country is bleeding gold because we're spending it all on grain imports".

Marx expresses a germinal form of his labour theory of value - that the value of something is equated to its socially necessary labour time. Again that theory is detailed more in Capital Vol 1. But there is a cool quote showing that Marx saw there being a strong distinction between value and price!

“ Price therefore is distinguished from value not only as the nominal from the real; not only by way of the denomination in gold and silver, but because the latter appears as the law of the motions which the former runs through. But the two are constantly different and never balance out, or balance only coincidentally and exceptionally. The price of a commodity constantly stands above or below the value of the commodity, and the value of the commodity itself exists only in this up-and-down movement of commodity prices. Supply and demand constantly determine the prices of commodities; never balance, or only coincidentally; but the cost of production, for its part, determines the oscillations of supply and demand. ”

Continuing from here:

“(4) PRODUCTION. MEANS OF PRODUCTION AND RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION. RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION AND RELATIONS OF CIRCULATION. FORMS OF THE STATE AND FORMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN RELATION TO RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION AND CIRCULATION. LEGAL RELATIONS. FAMILY RELATIONS.”

This subsection seems to be simultaneously a digression and an acknowledgement of loose ends from the rest of the discussion in this section. We've previously gone through production, consumption, exchange, circulation and distribution briefly - and shown these interdependent social processes are generated and sustained by the dynamics of production processes. Reference to "the state", the "population", international relations, nations and so on were also in the section, and these haven't been written about yet. There's some bullet points on some topics related to these.

Do you think this subsection is one of those digressions of profound insight Harvey spoke about, @Moliere? Or does it have a more central; or culminatory; role in the section?

The bullet points go as follows:
1 ) War precedes peace. War creates and demarcates societies, which can exist in peace afterwards. Put another way, the steadiness of bourgeoise society depends on past violence.
2 ) Historiography and anthropology are kinda bullshit unless they're also looking at economic functioning. Political economy needs to be included in any analysis of culture and states.
3 ) Lots of issues are derivative of the character of production in society. Cultural inheritance and politics can behave like organisational constraints to the productive process without changing the fundamental aspects of the circuit of capital.
4 ) Marx seems to feel the need to distinguish his concept of materialism from naturalistic materialism. It's difficult for me to tell if this is referencing physicalism in political economy, Marx's inheritance from Greek metaphysics. Or both of them. Or none of them.
5 ) How the means of production and relations of production (making stuff considered through what's made and how vs making stuff considered as a social organisation) relate to each other and their internal tensions (@Jamal - think this is the theme you highlighted in your recent post on Dialectic of Enlightenment.
6 ) Institutional development can decouple from productive development. See Roman private law and modern production.
7 ) How has the possibility of a global conception of history and production become possible in bourgeoise society? This relates to the theme of capitalist economy concentrating and maintaining its predecessors and the role they still play in the current developmental trajectory of capital.
8 ) I've no idea what this means. Something related to "population" as a fundamental category for analysis, but considered in an anthropological sense? Maybe Marx thinks he can do it better with his new way of analysing history.

There's then a digression on the development of art and the human imagination. A thoroughly wonderful pair of quotes within it:

All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them.

A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naïvité, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm? There are unruly children and precocious children. Many of the old peoples belong in this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm of their art for us is not in contradiction to the undeveloped stage of society on which it grew. [It] is its result, rather, and is inextricably bound up, rather, with the fact that the unripe social conditions under which it arose, and could alone arise, can never return.

I think this is a simultaneous statement of a few things:
A) The old art is dead, we are no longer in the social form to create it.
B) We still imitate the old art, it's an aspirational goal.
C) This references the "uneven development" of social, aesthetic and economic processes.
D) We have a nostalgia for the old art.
E) But we've got the potential to create new art.

I can hear Adorno grumpily burning their approving gaze into the back of this passage's head.

Social subjection and individual agency have become indiscernible poles of the machinic engagement. — Number2018

Is the contrast you are bringing out between what @Moliere and I's shared position and what you're stating is that we're emphasising the poles of the "machinic engagement" rather than their reciprocity. As in, are you interpreting what we've both written as too focussed on individuals and societal processes as really independent entities, rather than ones which are conceptually distinct but mutually determining?

How does the social contract play into that? As a means by which individuals coordinated volitions become normatively binding?

It may be concluded that instead of this appearance - ‘the totality of the process appears as an objective interrelation,’- it is indeed generated by ‘the mutual influence of conscious individuals on one another and by their own collisions with one another.’ And yet, there is also ‘an alien social power standing above them, produce their mutual interaction as a process and power independent of them.’ So, aren’t there two mutually controversial generative processes? On the one side, you mention ‘collusions and interactions of ‘conscious individuals’; on the other, you write that precisely these interactions are produced by ‘an alien social power standing above them.’ Marx himself evaluated the process of social production as the important notion of his work: “The guiding principle of my studies can be summarised as follows. In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.” (Marx, ‘Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’). — Number2018

@Moliere - I think Number's point isn't inconsistent with how you've put it. Also I wouldn't read your contrast, Numbers, as a contradiction. It can very well be that people create systems together which are impersonal and have a bizarre logic that constrains them. A bureaucracy, any workplace culture, a conflict dynamic in a relationship. The bizarre powers that guide people's relationships.

From the quote you've given, I read it that the specifically productive relationships that have conscious people "collide within them" are characterised by a bizarre alien, self sustaining logic that the process of production generates and sustains.

My bottom line: It's unethical to presume informed consent, on the basis that the consent was not expressly refused. — Vera Mont

Then that would apply to both. Your conclusion is consistent with the paper's main argument.

ahh! this question is great. It's the exact sort of thought I was having that his theory actually supports fiat currency. — Moliere

I think it does too. At least for the Marx of Capital Vol 1. Equal valuations of commodity amounts don't care whether their representative's amount of "objectified labour" is derived from the socially necessary labour time of gold amounts, or a representative of commodity ratios alone - like a representative of gold, silver, bronze, eggs all at the same time. I think all that matters for a money to fall under Marx's analysis is the money is used to represent value relations socially and for exchange, socially, to be embedded in the circuit of capital. "How can it work with fiat rather than gold?" seems to me the same question as "How can it work with gold rather than silver?".

Would WBGD really be worse than this? — Xanatos

If you believe opt in consent is the difference between surrogacy and opt out organ donation being ethical, yes. But I think the argument in the paper makes a good case that the moral intuitions which make opt out organ donation ethical should also apply to WBGD. At least insofar as they concern a person's autonomy.

(3) THE METHOD OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

This section begins with an elaboration of the pattern of analysis covered in section ( 1 ). Specifically how previous economists have idealised capitalist economies and forced those idealisations onto the functioning of capitalist economies. This is adjusting the world to fit a model, rather than adjusting a model to fit the world. Then how does this happen?

The previously made error in method is twofold. Firstly, it has the wrong starting points. Secondly, it infers connections in the wrong way. Both errors are categorical errors, they are errors in style rather than blunders. The two errors germinate from the same style of thinking - it contaminates them both.

The wrong starting points - Marx has criticised starting with the whole of a thing and breaking it apart into constituent elements. EG, what is life? Well it moves, it needs food... Rather, he prefers starting by isolating a concept he knows which is a part of a whole. EG, what is food consumption for a living organism? Well it needs to do that to keep itself going... The first way will be called The Bad Way, the second way will be called The Good Way.

He prefers The Good Way because it begins with an explorable mechanism which can be compared directly with how things work. The Bad Way instead requires fixing fundamental concepts of the whole of a thing from the point of departure of its analysis. In the the Good Way, you get to find out what you need to assume about what you're analysing to make it match the world on a fundamental level. In the Bad Way, you assume how something works at a fundamental level and work out how to distort that fundament to fit the world. In essence, the Good Way abstracts from concretion and recontextualises the abstraction in the concrete. The Bad Way concretises from an abstraction already conceived under a concept, and splits up the concretion to cover states of things implied by it. In other words, The Good Way lets you check all of your working once or twice, the Bad Way makes hard to check all your working at all - your starting points and inferences.

He uses that insight to shit on Hegel. But of course Hegel would idealise reality, he found the generating concepts of his own ideas in the process of their analysis! What is concrete is a concept! What founds that is mind! Marx finds the above error characteristically Hegelian, the most blatant example of the error in method.

He also uses that insight to shit on other economists. Despite respecting Adam Smith, Smith was construed as often treating production as the central feature of all economies - but because Smith started with capitalist production and treated it as production universally, he ended up distorting what would apply to all systems of production due to setting up production as capitalist production. An error which may be generative of the myth of barter, and treating the capitalist economy's use of money as the way in which currency has always been used.

Smith's error then propagated to the conception of labour. Smith got it half right, half wrong. Smith was right in thinking that all products (use values) were the result of labour - past labour, objectified labour - and that held for all economies. But Smith got it very wrong when he considered that all economies were indifferent to who did what insofar as they determined the value of products. The latter statement is true of capitalist economies with their characteristic function of money, but not of labour as considered universally. The equation of labour universally and labour in capitalism is an instance of reasoning The Bad Way - applying a fundamental conception and being unable to test it.

Marx uses highlighting Smith's error in labour as a pivot point. He criticises wealth, agriculture, land, rent, joint stock companies, national wealth in the same manner; taking a conception of them which was seen as universal, highlighting how their conceptions each employ The Bad Way, and drawing out what makes their conceptions historically contingent and ultimately universalising something from capitalism into the past inappropriately.

Since that error's so commonplace, and has been for years and years, the standard conceptual relations between economic concepts has also been screwed over by it. That means there's all kinds of bad starting points, which then engender the Bad Way of relating them. In that regard Marx feels he needs to fix the categories he's going to analyse and the order in which he'll analyse them.

The order obviously has to be (1) the general, abstract determinants which obtain in more or less all forms of society, but in the above-explained sense (Good Way - me). (2) The categories which make up the inner structure of bourgeois society and on which the fundamental classes rest. Capital, wage labour, landed property. Their interrelation. Town and country. The three great social classes. Exchange between them. Circulation. Credit system (private). (3) Concentration of bourgeois society in the form of the state. Viewed in relation to itself. The ‘unproductive’ classes. Taxes. State debt. Public credit. The population. The colonies. Emigration. (4) The international relation of production. International division of labour. International exchange. Export and import. Rate of exchange. (5) The world market and crises.

I don't want to talk about it. My planet needs me.

:up:

@Xanatos - find some way to talk about that without posting that link, or any other links like it.

Cheers.

@Moliere - were you sent an invite link this week? I've yet to receive one.

Thank you!

I'm intermittently unable to concentrate and ill, I've only gotten round to Grundrisse readings today, but have read the companion statements. Some notes I've made from the first week's readings are as follows:

Subsection summaries (from Marxists.org translation)

Section 1) “1. Production, Consumption, Distribution, Exchange (Circulation)


“Independent Individuals. Eighteenth-century Ideas"

This section is about the economists Marx is reacting to. More specifically, the intellectual climate of economics at the time. The chief accusations levied in this chapter are twofold. Firstly, that hitherto economists have tended to conceptualise the economy before inspecting it to see how it works. Secondly, behaviour and properties of people are dictated by how the economy was seen to work in these conceptualisations. Both are instances of "fitting reality to the model" rather than "fitting the model to reality". Though perhaps it is better to say that the the intellectual climate of economists idealised how the economy functioned, didn't inspect it, and assumed people behaved as if they were were governed by the idealised, ahistorical, model.

"“Eternalization of historic relations of production. – Production and distribution in general. – Property"

This section is about the mechanism of idealisation in the first section. The imagined models of the economy are reified as if they are natural laws. Rather than historical specificities. Marx seeks to depart from that reification to instead model capital as a process of continual development. That occurs over history, through the transition of modes of production, as well as within capital itself. Capital itself is being construed as a process of contingent development which follows general tendencies, historically, rather than natural laws, eternally. But you can look at commonalities in production to see what's shared, and start analysing there.

Section 2) “(2) THE GENERAL RELATION OF PRODUCTION TO DISTRIBUTION, EXCHANGE, CONSUMPTION”

There are some categories of capitalist economy which are often treated independently. They're also treated as being mutually exclusive. Together they form the general functioning of a capitalist economy. They are production, distribution, exchange and consumption. Treating them independently is silly, since they are mutually and conceptually dependent. Nevertheless you can split them apart for reasons of analysing them and their inter relations.

Consumption and Production

Consumption and production are interdependent. When something's produced, components of its fabrication process are used up. Things wear, break down, change in form. That is consumption. When something's consumed, When something's consumed, it also sustains a labourer. It produces and refreshes a necessary part of the production process. But clearly that's not the same as gears needing to be oiled and wear on machines.

They also relate procedurally. As moments of capital's circuits. They're corollaries of each other. Mutually necessitating. Production is production for consumption. Consumption is of produced goods.

There's a metaphysical way they relate too. A product is only a product insofar as it can be consumed. Consumption is only consumption insofar as it creates the need for continued production.

Lastly, the concepts of production and consumption have a primary relation. Production produces consumption, and also the need to consume produced products, as production controls which products are accessible. In that regard, consumption can be seen as part of the process of production.

These three things reinforce each other. They are analogous phenomena in different registers. But consumption and production are not identical. Conceptually interdependent? Yes. Saying something about one says something about the other? Yes. But they're not done by the same people. Other stuff goes on. Like distribution. And exchange.

Distribution and production

Distribution apportions produced goods to people. But not only that. Who distributes the products and who decides that? Ultimately who counts as producing each product - who owns the production process - decides how the products enter the networks of capital. In that regard those people are determinative of distribution. But society must be set up so that distributing products is principally determined by how products enter the market and how people relate to products.

Thus, the distribution of products is also a social process. It's not just goods being assigned to people, it's how the assignment works socially, and furthermore the way society is structured to ensure that means of assignment. Production and distribution are interdependent. Who gets what is decided by who produces what and how. Who produces what and how is decided by who gets what. The principal way production and distribution meet is through the distribution of ownership of means of production. This is simultaneously a fact about production and distribution. And a nod to the fact that means of distribution long predate capital.

“(c1) Exchange, Finally, and Circulation

Circulation is all the exchanges put together and interacting; "circulation is the totality of exchange". It's also embedded in production. Any interstice comes with exchanges - need wood to produce a chair? Gotta buy wood. Need to sit with support? Gotta buy a chair. Who gets access to what is thus mediated by exchange; and thus circulation. This then relates to distribution; who accesses what is determined by the means of distribution. And thus production; who decides who exchanges what is determined by who produces what and how. Make the thing? You better buy things. Own the means of making? You exchange to get what you need to buy things.

Summary point:

Despite production, distribution, exchange, circulation and consumption all reciprocally codetermining (mediating), the way in which things are produced determines all the others. Who owns production determines distribution; production generates distribution. Who can buy what is determined by who produces what; production generates exchange. Production makes demands for its processes and satisfies other process's demands, including self maintenance; production generates circulation. Production sustains the need to rely upon it for need satisfaction; production generates consumption.

Oh I see you already did the thing. Sorry.

Thanks for all this @Moliere. May I ask you a favour? I'm trying to read along with the Marxists.org version, but I suspect the page numbers are way off compared to the Penguin Classic that Harvey's working from. Could I ask you to post the first line of Page 83 and page 115 in your version? In the marxists one they don't seem too related to Harvey's discussion topics. The translations are different too.

@Wayfarer

Integers are outside the naturals.
Rationals are outside the integers.
Reals are outside the rationals.
Complex numbers are outside the reals.
Quaternions are outside the complex numbers.

The table of number systems at the bottom of the quaternion hyperlink might help you! There's lots of sets that have the integers inside of them.

seeming — aminima

Perhaps I misunderstood the terms. I interpreted seeming as an act of perception - what you see. So the thing with green leaves and a brown trunk seems like a tree.

I interpreted judgement as an inference, like "If I hear a loud ringing noise (seeming?), and my friend next to me does not (defeater), then the ringing noise could be tinnitus"

I don't see the utility. Even if we were to take "it seems that X" as prima facie evidence that X, we'd almost immediately encounter someone for whom it does not seem that X, and thereby immediately have equally good reason to think that not X. — Isaac

Yes!
It seems to Bob that P, absent defeaters.
It seems to Alice that not-P, absent defeaters.

Aren't in contradiction. If Bob and Alice were brought into the same context - "immediately encounter" - then that would introduce a defeater. The principle as stated removes such scenarios - if it seemed to Bob that P, but it was also the case that It seems to Alice that not-P, and those are both known, it works like a defeater. Just as you used it to undermine justification that P and justification that not-P.

Though I don't know if only seemings can count as defeaters for seemings. Like if I see a black blur moving quickly past my window in a Y-ish shape, I could infer that was a black bird. If I see a bird fly at the same speed across the window again, with the same shape, and it's white, I'd have a defeater for the first claim as a seeming, but only if it simultaneously seemed like the same bird.

Perhaps you could clarify if you see judgements as being part of seemings @aminima? Is the principle neutral on the question? Furthermore:

thereby has at least some justification for believing that P — aminima

Where does this "at least some justification" come from when applied to a judgement/experience like seeming? Interested in how the inference works.

The quick answer is because it feels that way to me. So what's the longer, more considered answer?....I guess the question is why do I feel that way. I guess it's because the person looks just like a normal person who is asleep, unconscious, or comatose. The look like a person. They breath. Their heart beats. I think devaluing their humanity devalues all the rest of ours too, which is a dangerous thing for a society to do except, as I said, for something vitally important. — T Clark

Do you feel the same way about opt out organ donation? I agree that WBGD feels totally repugnant, whereas organ donation doesn't. But I find the analogy in terms of human dignity hard to construct. I imagine people would be much more likely to opt out if they had sufficient informed consent laws for WBGD, because of how disgusting it is.