I still have a few bits left before I conclude my Marx thread for now. Think it's 6 paragraphs. I should be able to finish that by next weekend at the latest.

Evans. I read Naming and Necessity in undergrad and haven't touched it since.

Yes, indeed, and hence modes of reference other than definite descriptions (such as naming practices and demonstrative reference) ought to be more fundamental. — Pierre-Normand

I still haven't read more than the introduction of that book. I'll take this as a gentle reminder to read more of it.

Possibly. But, in case where there are more than one individual satisfying the general description, what is it, in your view, that determines which one of them it is that you are referring to? Are you making use of the fact that this individual is is the only one among them who is named "Bob"? In that case, the description seems idle except as a way to help me anchor the reference of "Bob" for purpose of future use of this name by me. — Pierre-Normand

Perhaps this is unsatisfying, but it looks to me that the necessary and sufficient condition for my use of Bob to refer successfully is that 'Bob' is used to refer to the entity. The sense of use I have in mind for 'use' in the previous sentence is that reference to that entity by 'Bob' is ensured by the use of the reference in an appropriate linguistic community. If my description failed to be definite and all the entities which satisfy the description happened to be called Bob, that would be quite unfortunate for telling which is which based on my description alone, but the person the sentences in my description refer to is the unique one I was referring to rather than all the ones which also satisfy the description.

We could distinguish one Bob from others by applying properties to filter the description, but the application of these to better target the required entity is done with the express purpose of disambiguating the Bob I was referring to from the others, rather than providing an interpretation for 'Bob'. In order to find these properties to filter with we'd be required to examine what obtains of Bob; though I don't think the use of these properties to disambiguate the expression thereby provide the sense of the word 'Bob'. Which I imagine is quite similar to finding a definite description.

It might be the case then that 'the Bob with the blue eyes' and 'the Bob with the blonde hair' both serve to distinguish the Bob the sentences in my description were about, but only one such property is required - thus any property which has a singular extension in the implicit domain of discourse would be used to form a definite description, and the choice of property used for the expression is therefore incidental, it would just be required that one such property exists in order to disambiguate my reference.

It looks to me like definite descriptions require a search of the properties of an object in order to give a singular extension, but such a search has a target. If we can target the search to the entity in order to find a definite description for it, we must not require a definite description beforehand to do the search.

This definite description then would successfully function as a singular referring expression just in case there would be one and only one individual who falls under it. (See Russell's analysis of "the ..." — Pierre-Normand

This still seems quite strange to me. Whether the description is definite or not isn't vouchsafed solely by my use of words, it's a feature of whether there's only one thing which satisfies my description or not. No matter the number of things which satisfy my description, it will still be about Bob and not about some Bob-prime. So, would just based on the information I have provided and only upon it, which candidate for the referent of 'Bob' is the subject of the sentence can't be decided... Despite that I'm referring to a specific Bob from the beginning. It's already decided which Bob I mean.

So whether my description is definite or not looks entirely incidental to how I used the words. Why would something incidental to my use of 'Bob' be required to provide a semantics of how I used 'Bob'?

Can you offer a definite description of Bob from that paragraph I wrote about him?

I have to say though, it is surprising to me that one would be required seeing as it's extremely easy to recognise that all the sentences are about Bob, despite that such a description isn't being used to vouchsafe that reference. As a condition for the possibility of reference, maybe, partake in the act of designation? Doubt it.

I do agree that this might undermine my response to Janus, though. In that post I did use that the definite description at the start and the definite description at the end (part 1 and part 2) can't refer to the same entity since they use properties which fail to obtain at some point.

I suppose what I'm trying to highlight is that designating an object doesn't seem to care about transformations in the designated object. And that the space of appropriate/possible definite descriptions changing with time is definitely a sensitivity to change rather than an insensitivity to it.

In any case, the issue of the numerical identity of the apple with itself (that is, the issue of its persistence) as picked up at different times, and while its properties evolve, seems to me to be somewhat independent of semantic theories about singular referring expressions and rather a matter of the metaphysics of substances. — Pierre-Normand

Well, let's actually have a description of Bob ageing, more importantly changing properties over time.

Bob was an especially large baby, weighing 9 pounds the day he came out of his mother. He had a distinctive hook shaped birth mark on his left cheek. Bob didn't stay unusually large forever, however, as he peaked at 5 ft 10 inches at 18 and never grew an inch more, despite increasing in weight to 60kg. The birthmark he had on his left cheek continued to fade until he was 25, the once pronounced reddish hook shape faded into regular skin.

It seems to me regardless of what metaphysics holds of Bob's numerical identity of himself to himself with respect to time, 'Bob' will still pick out Bob. The first sentence describes Bob as a baby, the last when he was fully grown. For the sake of clarity of presentation, a birthmark was present on Bob as a baby and is no longer present in his adulthood. Regardless, 'Bob' still picks out Bob.

The problem that I see this poses for definite descriptions being exhaustive and required of all reference isn't that Bob's properties change over time, it's that we can refer to Bob with 'Bob' regardless of any transformation ageing induces to him. I'm trying to give an example of the point that if we perturb a definite description slightly, changing any property within it to something else, it no longer contains the desired object in its extension, it is no longer definite. So, we either require that the definite descriptions which ground reference respond nascently to changes in their object and our interaction with the object demarcates when the space of appropriate definite descriptions updates (appropriate being contains the target object and only the target object in its extension), or that reference to an object was not founded in definite descriptions in the first place.

Given the difficulty we have coming up with definite descriptions of objects with radical property transformations, it seems unlikely to me that the task of coming up with them formulaically and automatically is as easy as required to make them nascent.

I'm not certain that I follow. It seems to me that if I began the paragraph by naming the apple 'Bob' and substituting all instances of 'it' with Bob and 'its' with 'Bob's', that would remove the anaphoric reference. If this seems illegitimate, a similar story could be written about a person's corpse, named with 'Bob's corpse' since it was Bob's. Or indeed Bob himself changing over time.

Do you see this as undermining your objection? I believe it's likely that I've just failed to understand something crucial.

The definite description of the particular apple you are referring is the one you have given of the whole process of the apple's change from apply freshness to mouldy noxiousness that occurred to that particular apple. Of course, the process might not actually have occurred in your kitchen and you could be referring to a hypothetical apple. You might not even have a kitchen for all I know; in which case you won't have to worry about cleaning it. — Janus

An apple sits alone in my fruit bowl. Through its process of ageing, its skin turns from green to red in patches, maturing into a uniform red , eventually it begins decaying; the red turns to brown, mould starts to appear and it loses its shape, becoming more black mulch than apple. Its smell changes from barely detectable from range apple scent to the sweetness of rot and alcohol. The process of decay causes it to collapse in on itself. Now it's a pile of smelly mouldy black crap the flies are feasting on. — me

(this will hence be called the paragraph)

I'm unconvinced. The paragraph regarding the apple contains various phrases that reference the apple, whose ability to refer doesn't depend on the entire paragraph being a definite description. For example, the 'its' in the first line refers to an apple which is not showing signs of decay, whereas 'eventually it' refers to an apple which is showing signs of decay. In order for the first 'it's reference to require the construction of the entire paragraph it seems to me that if the words after an it were removed, all previous its would stop referring as there would no longer be the same definite description underlying them all. IE:

An apple sits alone in my fruit bowl. Through its process of ageing, its skin turns from green to red in patches, maturing into a uniform red — fdrake

(this will hence be called part 1)

apparently requires:

eventually it begins decaying; the red turns to brown, mould starts to appear and it loses its shape, becoming more black mulch than apple. Its smell changes from barely detectable from range apple scent to the sweetness of rot and alcohol. The process of decay causes it to collapse in on itself. Now it's a pile of smelly mouldy black crap the flies are feasting on.

(this will hence be called the part 2)

for the various 'its' and 'it's used in the passage to refer to the apple in the bowl in the first place.

Moreover, if what you say is true truncating the paragraph at some point must also produce definite descriptions of the same entity. I believe it should be the case that if two definite descriptions apply to something those definite descriptions should not be contrary; eg, 'My father' should not share a referent with 'my mother'. This is problematic, as truncating the paragraph at:

An apple sits alone in my fruit bowl. Through its process of ageing, its skin turns from green to red in patches, maturing into a uniform red — fdrake

gives a definite description which requires the apple to have turned from green to red; any other changes are counterfactual suppositions. Then when we include the next part of the paragraph:

eventually it begins decaying; the red turns to brown, mould starts to appear and it loses its shape, becoming more black mulch than apple. Its smell changes from barely detectable from range apple scent to the sweetness of rot and alcohol. The process of decay causes it to collapse in on itself. Now it's a pile of smelly mouldy black crap the flies are feasting on.

The apple is now required to be brown, mouldy, and descending into mulch. The two definite descriptions are contrary, thus they must refer to distinct entities. However, there is a single entity whose properties and transformations the descriptions track.

Furthermore, even if we grant that the entity associated with the description in part 1 and the entity associated with the description in part 2 are the same, this makes the additional information in part 2 entirely superfluous for the purposes of securing reference to the entity. IE, the entity in part 1's reference is not sensitive to counterfactual supposition or change; as part 2 destroys those properties of the apple which facilitate its definite description in part 1.

You need to embrace spontaneous composting.

Please forgive me if this has already been covered, but isn't insensitivity to change or counterfactual supposition precisely the behaviour we'd want out of our practices of referring?

An apple sits alone in my fruit bowl. Through its process of ageing, its skin turns from green to red in patches, maturing into a uniform red , eventually it begins decaying; the red turns to brown, mould starts to appear and it loses its shape, becoming more black mulch than apple. Its smell changes from barely detectable from range apple scent to the sweetness of rot and alcohol. The process of decay causes it to collapse in on itself. Now it's a pile of smelly mouldy black crap the flies are feasting on.

Throughout that description, the apple loses the colour of its skin; the definite description 'the green apple in my fruit bowl' stops picking out the entity I'm referring to - the same for all the properties it has which change over the course of decay. Regardless of the point in the description however, the 'it' refers to the apple. IE, regardless of the changes in the apple's properties, it is still that which is being referred to, and 'it' still picks out the unique entity in the description.

Imagine instead that referring really only works in the presence of a definite description, the 'it' at the beginning is 'the lone apple in my fruit bowl', at some point that 'it' must stop referring to the apple iff a unique reference must be accompanied by a definite description. This, however, is not what we observe when reading the paragraph; it tracks a process of change of a unique entity; facilitated by the rigidness of 'it' there;, rather than a series of transformations between distinct ones; the distinctions each furnished with their necessary definite description which at some point fails to obtain.

Marx continues, reading the fetishism of commodities further back towards the foundations of his analysis; the distinction between abstract and concrete labour and the social division of labour which comes along with this.

Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it.[28] Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language. The recent scientific discovery, that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the human race, but, by no means, dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves. The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific social character of private labour carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value – this fact appears to the producers, notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered.

A lot of this is a restatement of the previous analysis of commodity fetishism, but interpreted into the relationship between abstract and concrete labour. Such a relationship is accompanied by a form of value, of which Marx has already characterised, and a social coordination of labour - independent production of commodities for profit. But I think the special emphasis in this part is on the mediating role value plays in economic and social life.

Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic.

We can only imagine the complexities hidden under the decisions to price commodities for sale. The specific price obtained must weigh the costs accrued in the supply chain, the logistic efficiency and its costs, forecasted demand, how much purchasers are willing to spend, a weighing of required profit margins per unit sold and the affordability of those units. Not to speak of competitors selling competing goods, forecasted revenue from advertising, efficiency gains from outsourcing... Or of the concrete labour done by those who produce these goods in the first place. While we may disagree with Marx on his account of value, it seems to me difficult to disagree that labourers who produce commodities for the most part interact with economic life only through the their value productivity - of the costs of labour versus the profits of sale. In this manner, the price tag on a good in a supermarket represents a catastrophic condensation of human life into, first, the economic analysis of price, and then finally into a single number.

Psychological interventions are often scored on operationalised scales, how sad do you feel on a scale of 1 to 10? These are rightly seen as quite ridiculous, and at least are a terribly lossy representation of mood, not to speak of how feelings relate to lifestyles. One wants to say a single number should not bear such a burden of complexity - that we can say the same for prices is an indication that commodity fetishism is actually operative in our lives.

Though, the opacity of the conditions which produce every good has become a talking point in recent years, through the problematisation of climate change and pollution accrued to put an item on a shelf, and of ethical ('fair trade') which allows the creation of premium goods through the transparency of their supply chain. All facilitated of course through the evocation of moral consumption by advertising campaigns. Which goes to show, even the formal structure of commodity fetishism can be repurposed for the creation of revenue.

Still, for the most part the price is all we see.

I'd be down for Riemann and Kant and would lead the discussion on Riemann if you'd have this ignorant schoolmaster's musings. I hope @StreetlightX finds the time to lead the discussion on Kant. That would be a cool thread.

A general note on Marx's methodology first, after exhibiting the underlying structures of value, its relationship to labour, and the various forms in which value expresses itself, he takes his previous exegesis and sews it in the place of his original target of analysis; commodity production and exchange. I've put this previously as using his account of commodity fetishism in reverse; taking the mode of appearance of socioeconomic reality and analysing its structure (the account so far, including of commodity fetishism), he then pivots on this revealed structure and embeds it in the mode of appearance of socioeconomic reality.

A reasonable analogy here might be in terms of modular programming. You have a big task to do, you break it up into little components which are easier to solve, solve the components and substitute the solved components into the overall logic linking them. The overall logic linking them in my analogy is the structure of commodity production and value in capitalism (the topic of chapter 1), the components here are the duality of use and exchange, the consequences of this duality in terms of the social structure of labour, the distinction between abstract and concrete labour, the value forms and commodity fetishism (the broad subtopics the chapter deals with); all of these subtopics are 'passed' to the overall logic of the account and will be referenced as modules to be called upon later in the book, and checked for required modifications.

The subsequent account these modules and logic facilitate is that of the circulation of commodities and money; setting out the semantics for x is worth y in terms of the value forms, use and exchange, labour power and abstract labour, interface with agents in exchange networks as different facets of the process. For the workers, C-M-C', the expenditure of labour power in the production of a commodity becomes codified in the relationship between a labourer and their place of work - as a wage labourer. Providing the semantics for labour as a commodity in C. Exchange of (supposed) equivalents then forms the semantics for the transition from C-M (it is an act of exchange, being payed for your work) and from M-C (an act of exchange, using wages to buy goods and services).

The top down perspective, from exchange to labour, becomes codified in the moments M-C-M', the dashes are given a meaning through Marx's account of exchange and the value forms, and starting from M rather than C is viewing the perspective from the acquisition of labour (ownership!) rather than its expenditure.

So, with that note on broader context and methodology out of the way...

Marx characterises commodity fetishism from a slightly different angle next, from the perspective of the constitutive producers of commodities rather than top down from exchange. From the next paragraph we get the often quoted 'material relations between persons become social relations between things'. He also re-emphasises the necessity of the social division of labour in producing commodity fetishism, and gives a brief characterisation of how the social division of labour actually facilitates commodity fetishism.

As a general rule, articles of utility become commodities, only because they are products of the labour of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their work independently of each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange. In other words, the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things.

The first sentence, 'as a general rule... other' summarises the previous developments of the section, commodities are useful goods that are produced for exchange', and it is because they are produced for exchange that 'the private individuals' who work on them encounter others' labour as their resultant goods rather than the workers who are producing them. This also uses the previous established idea that production for exchange levels all commodities to the structure of their value alone without their material constitution - as Marx puts it (with my comments in brackets) 'the specific (concretely useful) social character of each producer’s labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange (as raw social labour)'.

One way of summarising the economic relationships between groups of commodity producers is that they only encounter the product of other groups' labour in terms of the finished product in the market. Commodity fetishism, then, is the peculiarity that the only social engagement producers have with other groups of producers, vis-a-vis production, is place the product has in a shop.

This is also echoed in C-M-C' as the facets of circulation that wage labourers have access to are their own labour power (the original C) and the goods and services they buy with it (C'). IE, workers are isolated from each other through the exchange abstraction, and only meet as the commodities they produced being held on a shelf.

So, despite Marx's characterisation of commodity fetishism as mysterious, and as a 'theological subtlety', it's nevertheless a real part of capitalist production. For Marx, it really is the case that workers from different factories only encounter different worker groups' labour through the market. That is, commodity fetishism is (again) not simply a psychological state of over-emphasis on commodities or arbitrary desire for useless tat, it has the specific meaning of social relationships between worker groups being mediated by exchange - through the market.

Marx then takes a step back and relates commodity fetishism to the more central feature that commodity production is capitalism is structured to create value rather than satisfy needs (exchange value vs use value):

It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire, as values, one uniform social status, distinct from their varied forms of existence as objects of utility. This division of a product into a useful thing and a value becomes practically important, only when exchange has acquired such an extension that useful articles are produced for the purpose of being exchanged, and their character as values has therefore to be taken into account, beforehand, during production. From this moment the labour of the individual producer acquires socially a two-fold character. On the one hand, it must, as a definite useful kind of labour, satisfy a definite social want, and thus hold its place as part and parcel of the collective labour of all, as a branch of a social division of labour that has sprung up spontaneously. On the other hand, it can satisfy the manifold wants of the individual producer himself, only in so far as the mutual exchangeability of all kinds of useful private labour is an established social fact, and therefore the private useful labour of each producer ranks on an equality with that of all others. The equalisation of the most different kinds of labour can be the result only of an abstraction from their inequalities, or of reducing them to their common denominator, viz. expenditure of human labour power or human labour in the abstract.

Again, this makes sense as a remark which attempts to frame workers' economic relationships with each other on a produced good to produced good basis (material relations between people turn into social relations between things), only now it emphasises the role that the notion of universal equivalent (money) plays in the satisfaction of want. The genericness of C-M-C' only makes sense if indeed there is a universal equivalent M which workers can use to satisfy their wants and needs (C') and that commodities are produced which satisfy those wants and needs (social division of labour).

The two-fold social character of the labour of the individual appears to him, when reflected in his brain, only under those forms which are impressed upon that labour in every-day practice by the exchange of products. In this way, the character that his own labour possesses of being socially useful takes the form of the condition, that the product must be not only useful, but useful for others, and the social character that his particular labour has of being the equal of all other particular kinds of labour, takes the form that all the physically different articles that are the products of labour, have one common quality, viz., that of having value.

This bit links commodity fetishism to the theme of alienation, not broached yet in the book. The link here is 'In this way, the character that his own labour possesses of being socially useful... takes the form of condition...of having value', the economic role that a worker's skills play is only the value which is created through their application and the exchange value of their labour power (their wage). The only way you matter is your productivity, not the skill which makes your productivity possible, or the social roles your skills could facilitate.

I don't think you'll find that in Capital unfortunately.

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.

The social character of labour being the production of goods which satisfy needs for sale; then the magnitude of value, arising from the relationship of productive labours, is stamped onto the commodity as the capacity for price. Another way of putting it is that value-value relations obtain between commodities rather than the labours which produce them - and good-good relations are mediated by value. Marx condenses this in passing to form a tighter characterisation of commodity fetishism:

This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

From the bolding, commodity fetishism is when the economic relationships between people become the value (or monetary) relationships between things. The sense of this 'become' is important to attend to, as Marx sees it as a necessary feature of commodity production:

This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

The inseparability arises from that goods are produced for exchange, and in order to enter into exchange the good must relate to all other goods in some manner to ground its value relations; in this manner the relationships between goods which fix their relative values (and monetary expressions), despite being nothing more than the result of an aggregate of negotiations of prices and constraints of production - of human labour and its social form -, are treated as relationships between the produced items - of human labour congealed into the commodity as value -. The concrete acts of production's subordination to abstract labour occurs due to the exchange relations and their underlying value relations between commodities. In order for these relationships to be subordinated to commodity-commodity relationships, labour must be differentiated under a social division of labour which isolates expenditures of labour power through the goal of producing different commodities. IE, the social division of labour is just as necessary as the emphasis of value over use value in producing commodity fetishism. As previously suggested, a social division of labour coordinated through value production is a necessary companion of the production of commodities, and from above suffices to produce the fetishism of commodities. Thus, commodity fetishism is more than simply a widely held mental state, it is a necessary expression of a social division of labour mediated through commodity production; which is ultimately the production of value. While it influences how we think about capitalist production, that influence is an internal moment of the social structures supporting capitalist production.

I view it as no coincidence that Marx's discussion of commodity fetishism culminates his initial discussion of value theory and immediately precedes the discussion of commodity circulation. Commodity fetishism's explanatory role here is why capitalism appears firstly as 'an accumulation of commodities' and then, only under analysis, finds that such an accumulation requires a specific organisation of social and economic life to occur. Moreover, the social relationships between people finding expression in the value relation of things sets up the discussion of the circulation of commodities and money; Marx's emphasis on labour utilises commodity fetishism in reverse to summarise features of capitalist production through commodity relationships; which then can be unpacked into their grounding constraints on production.

M-C-M' and C-M-C' are more informative than people-people-people-people-people precisely because of their leverage of the idea of commodity fetishism.

I had a similar experience on salvia, in which this inner demon was revealed as a pontificating coward and a scared parasite. The obsessive self mockery, abuse and violent intrusive thoughts that characterise my 'second thoughts' were revealed as a coping mechanism to put the world at a distance, due to fear of dependency developed from growing up in an abusive household with traumatised adults (polygamous cult of personality made out of mostly mentally ill people). I self distanced to the extent that I used to feel incredibly exposed whenever someone intuited anything about my mental state or preferences, even if it was just that I was having a good day, or a bad one. Constant stoicism as an affectation to cover the vulnerabilities of a mind warped around unstable attachments.

Eventually this distancing somatized and I developed dissociative disorder; giving me absence seizures, but more recently I've been sufficiently connected to myself (as a result of two talented therapists) to fully develop the intrusive thoughts and trigger scenarios of PTSD, so finally I'm getting effective treatment rather than addressing symptomatic comorbidities (depression, anxiety, dissociative disorder and hallucinations).

Last section: The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was. [26a]

Whatever the fetishism of commodities is, it can't be characterised by analysing use value alone. Rather, the fetishism of commodities arises when the social conditions of production and exchange are configured through exchange values; that is, there is a market of produced goods exchangeable for money and produced for profit.

The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determining factors of value. For, in the first place, however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, may be, it is a physiological fact, that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles, &c. Secondly, with regard to that which forms the ground-work for the quantitative determination of value, namely, the duration of that expenditure, or the quantity of labour, it is quite clear that there is a palpable difference between its quantity and quality. In all states of society, the labour time that it costs to produce the means of subsistence, must necessarily be an object of interest to mankind, though not of equal interest in different stages of development.[27] And lastly, from the moment that men in any way work for one another, their labour assumes a social form.

The fetishism thus arises from the configuration of effortful time expenditure in capitalist production; that is, when productive labour is characterised as social labour; which is value creative. This is another of those moves Marx makes to transform questions about the relationships of commodities into questions about the configuration of labour which created them. Unsurprisingly, then, beginning the analysis with an indication that fetishism (still not defined) arises out of social structures underpinning exchange value ultimately leads to situating fetishism in the very relations between labour and produced goods; and moreover their dual notions of human labour in the abstract/social labour and goods produced to realise value - for profit. So...

Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself. The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labour power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products.

when economic life seen through the prism of value, the goods produced obtain social relations concerning them. Which is a strange distortion, a necessary elision of the specificity of work when the value produced matters more than the good which bears its stamp. The fetishism here is quite commonplace and intuitive to us - if we consider pricing a good which will be sold for profit, it will be assembled from other goods with their own prices, there are assembly prices for all goods involved; in this manner the social configuration of labour which produces a good is seen as a supply chain within a logistical framework, rather than as a product of disciplined labour. The depoliticisation of economic concerns has its roots in commodity fetishism; as commodity fetishism is the elision of the specificities of human labour in production and the concurrent framing of production in terms of good-good, value-good or value-value relations.

The formulae C-M-C' and M-C-M' developed in the next chapter thus indicate the social coordination of exchange and profit through the value relations of commodities, rather than the social relations of their producers, purchasers and investors. Of course, such social relations do play into the real economy as prices are negotiated and calculated by humans and not the commodities themselves. The most bizarre feature of this is that good-good, value-value and good-value relations obtain real causal efficacy and are granted such in our conceptions of the economy, despite that the material constituents (use values) of goods are developed by human agents and their exchange values are negotiated by humans. That 'the market' is seen as a self regulating system of purchases and production is an extreme exemplification of this equation of humanity with capitalist economic activity. We are the selves that regulate the market, but are thus the market itself.

You can start, I have other things to do.

Love belongs to the form of life rather than the sentence. A lossy presentation is a feature of every definite proposition.

The underlying relationship between affect and its expression is of a mismatch of registers. Were it that I could speak only my mind, I could express the depths of my love. I always love more than words can say.

Only if you join my hermetic circle of overly mathematical Marxism.

It's not exploitation if it's TPF. :)

I might be able to finish what I set out to do in thread this weekend, at least that's my goal. I'll have a good crack at it on Saturday. It shouldn't interfere.

In my experience graph theory concepts are very difficult to explain to applied researchers and very numerate people. They only seem simple in principle when you've grokked the idea of an arbitrary binary relation.

Here is a link to the paper. When would reading start? I plan to finish the last section of Chapter 1's value theory in my Marx thread before going into something else with the same detail, only one section left (commodity fetishism) now, and I'll have done what I planned to do in the thread.

I've wanted to read "On the Hypotheses which lie at the Bases of Geometry (1873)" by Riemann for some time now, it's somewhere between mathematics and philosophy; there are no theorems, just a navigation of a-priori concepts of space ('magnitudinal extensions') which motivate definitions of different geometries. It's only 15 pages though!

I'd never let a being on topic get in the way of a fun post to write.



Here's a few Youtube channels.

Cool videos on calculus, loads of animations to give a good picture rather than lots of proofs and manipulating equations.

Huge repository of lecture series going from basic arithmetic to advanced calculus, including tangents on applied mathematics

Channel devoted to exam style questions for later year high-school math (16-18), Khan Academy (second link) usually has the same content as this. I chose PatrickJMT as his videos are really clear and concise, and excellent exam prep.

Math enthusiast Youtube.

With regard to actually learning mathematics, I'd suggest Khan Academy as a primary resource. The videos typically have a 'general explanation, specific problem' format. Often with more than one example problem. The best way I've found to use their videos is to watch the concept being introduced, follow through their first example in detail - do so until you think you understand the idea -, then try the second example given. If the video doesn't have a second example, Google usually provides one by using the key words used in the introduction, the title of the video or both at once.

Indeed. It all requires work, and different areas require developing different competences. Intuitions at one stage can become theorems at another; just as what once was a theorem can become an intuition. Moreover, intuitions can impede as well as guide the resolution of a problem, just as much as they can facilitate or stymie the development of precise conceptual problems. From this vantage point, learning mathematics is riddled with joyous revelation and shameful folly in equal measure, the same as learning any other skill.

Not so with Euclidean geometry puzzles! You end up thinking in much different terms from algebra operations; the choices in constructions you can make are from a much broader space, and the constraints of the problems have to be cottoned onto in a different way. What algebraic operation will tell you that bisecting an angle is a poor initial step in dropping a perpendicular from a point to a line?

With algebra, you preserve the numerical equality of the sides of the equation - whatever moves that do that are allowed. With Euclidean geometry proofs, you're not conserving the equality of sides of an equation, you're trying to make an ordered sequence of interacting (properties of) shapes which exhibit a target property (or shape). The 'exhibition' occurs within the drawn picture, rather than in the last line of x =...

Yes, and I think the answer to the area of squares will have to come from a bit of algebra. But it feels like cheating. — Banno

Interesting, I just got the double angle one by applying the 'equal arc length swept over by a radius => equal area swept out in the circle' calculus intuiton, which also felt like cheating.

I breezed up to doubling an angle. Now I'm stumped.

I'd add that sometimes the 'simple way'; the guiding intuition; isn't always accurate, as it's quite common to discover that real structural symmetries or logical relationships between mathematical objects don't mirror the imaginative background you have about them - which usually translates to either assuming too much or to little.

Two examples I have of this are: you want to prove that a proper subset is always smaller than its superset, is the nesting of two circles in a Venn diagram a proof? .

The second is is that when teaching introductory topology, you generally require that the student has seen elementary real analysis (continuity and convergence of functions and sequences) so that they understand metric spaces (with their metric topology), which are the go-to intuition to provide for a topological space.

This is amazing!

A lot of the unemployment measures the government uses were redefined when the current Tories took office, a process which began under Blair. I'll try and find you a citation at a later date.

You know this is accounted for in the definition right? This is how the definition works. 'For all epsilon greater than 0...'

This means you don't understand the distinction between a limit of a sequence and its elements. You would if you spent more time studying the links. Who knows, it might take more than 18 minutes of study to understand!

18 minutes was chosen because that's how long you took to survey the links. 18 minutes isn't even a complete introductory lecture on the topic, which usually has at least 2 university level math courses devoted to it, and even more involving it... That's hundreds of hours. You tried for 18 minutes.

I'm not actually avoiding your argument, wondering why the limit can be said to exist when it is in the closure of a set (a supremum or infimum) rather than simply in the set itself is one of the first concepts you have to understand or teach when you're teaching convergence of sequences. This is literally what the resources I linked for you explain.

Limit points deal with the more general case of convergence in topological spaces, the mathematics of complete metric spaces are what covers this specific example. Study the links and you'll learn something, continue to ignore them and you'll continue spouting rubbish.

Though yes, I agree that what you are talking about is a sticky point for understanding convergent sequences. This does not make it wrong, this means it requires care to grasp.

Limit points don't have to be part of the set of convergent function evaluations towards a point, they just have to be in (metric) topological space underlying them.

Edit: in real analysis this roughly translates to 'sets don't have to contain their supremum or infimum', 0 is the infimum of any increasing sequence of x's which are plugged into f(x)=1/x - the sequence of function evaluations, that the limit exists and is 0 is ensured by the properties of monotonic decreasing sequences in a complete space.

Perhaps if you understood elementary calculus you would realise it is not an error.