Matt.+239-259


 * THE CHAPTER ON CAPITAL (Notebooks II pp. 8-28, III-VII) 239**
 * The Chapter on Money as Capital 239**
 * Difficulty in grasping money in its fully developed character as money 239**
 * Simple exchange: relations between the exchangers 240**

He is clearly setting up for a critique of the Proudhonists here, because of their focus on money as a potential equalizer:

"It is equally clear, on the other side, that to the degree to which opposition against the ruling relations of production grows, and these latter themselves push ever more forcibly to cast off their old skin -- to that degree, polemics are directed against metallic money or money in general, as the most striking, most contradictory and hardest phenomenon which is presented by the system in a palpable form. One or another kind of artful tinkering with money is then supposed to overcome the contradictions of which money is merely the perceptible appearance. Equally clear that some evolutionary operations can be performed with money, in so far as an attack on it seems to leave everything else as it was, and only to rectify it. Then one strikes a blow at the sack, intending the donkey. However, as long as the donkey does not feel the blows on the sack, one hits in fact only the sack and not the donkey. As soon as he feels it, one strikes the donkey and not the sack. As long as these operations are directed against money as such, they are merely an attack on consequences whose causes remain unaffected; i.e. disturbance of the productive process, whose solid basis then also has the power, by means of a more or less violent reaction, to define and to dominate these as mere passing disturbances" (240).

"On the other hand, it is in the character of the money relation -- as far as it is developed in its purity to this point, and without regard to more highly developed relations of production -- that all inherent contradictions of bourgeois society appear extinguished in money relations as conceived in a simple form; and bourgeois democracy even more than the bourgeois economists takes refuge in this aspect (the latter are at least consistent enough to regress to even simpler aspects of exchange value and exchange) in order to construct apologetics for the existing economic relations" (240-41).

How does the money relation appear to extinguish all inherent contradictions of bourgeois society? I suppose by lifting evident forms of inequality? "As subjects of excahnge, their relation is therefore that of equality" (241).

On the buyer and seller: "Since they only exist for one another in exchange in this way, as equally worthy persons, possessors of equivalent things, who thereby prove their equivalence, they are, as equals, at the same time also indifferent to one another; whatever other individual distinction there may be does not concern them; they are indifferent to all their other individual peculiarities" (242).

"The fact that this need on the part of one can be satisfied by the product of the other, and vice versa, and that the one is capable of producing the object of the need of the other, and that each confronts the other as owner of the object of the other's need, this proves that each of them reaches beyond his own particular need etc., as a //human being//, and that they relate to one another as human beings; that their common species-being [//Gattungswesen//] is acknowledged by all. It does not happen elsewhere -- that elephants produce for tigers, or animals for other animals" (243).

From the Oxford Dictionary of Politics:

"A concept (Gattungswesen) employed extensively by Hegelians in Germany in the 1830s and 1840s, used primarily to argue for the absolute uniqueness of man due to man's possession of consciousness: not just consciousness of self, which other social animals possessed, but rather consciousness of species or essential nature. Hence man was sui generis in his ability to reflect about his own species and also in the ability to make his own nature an object of thought. The contemplative life was distinctly and exclusively human. Indeed, man was taken to transcend a merely animal individuality in thought and for some, like Feuerbach, this meant that human individuality was not selbst-sein, being oneself, but mitsein, being with another. Marx extended the concept of species-being. While he accepted that man was unique, he also believed that the distinctively human attribute was not thought or consciousness per se, but rather free and conscious material production. It was, therefore, free labour which constituted man's active species life." — John Halliday

The following large extract seems very important, but is entirely over my head (243-45):

"Accordingly, the juridical moment of the Person enters here, as well as that of freedom, in so far as it is contained in the former. No one seizes hold of another's property by force. Each divests himself of his property voluntarily. But this is not all: individual A serves the need of individual B by means of the commodity //a// only in so far as and because individual B serves the need of individual A by means of the commodity //b//, and vice versa. Each serves the other in order to serve himself; each makes use of the other, reciprocally, as his means. Now both things are contained in the consciousness of the two individuals: (1) that each arrives at his end only in so far as he serves the other as means; (2) that each becomes means for the other (being for another) [//Sein für andres//] only as end in himself (being for self) [Sein für sich]; (3) that the reciprocity in which each is at the same time means and end, and attains his end only in so far as he becomes a means, and becomes a means only in so far as he posits himself as end, that each thus posits himself as being for another, in so far as he is being for self, and the other as being for him, in so far as he is being for himself -- that this reciprocity is a necessary fact, presupposed as natural precondition of exchange, but that, as such, it is irrelevant to each of the two subjects in exchange, and that this reciprocity interests him only in so far as it satisfies his interest to the exclusion of, without reference to, that of the other" (243-44).

"That is, the common interest which appears as the motive of the act as a whole is recognized as a fact by both sides; but, as such, it is not the motive, but rather proceeds, as it were, behind the back of these self-reflected particular interests, behind the back of one individual's interest in opposition to that of the other. In this last respect, the individual can at most have the consoling awareness that the satisfaction of his antithetical individual interest is precisely the realization of the suspended antithesis, of the social, general interest" (244).

In other words, acting in self-interest is acting in general interest? And what to make of this "antithetical individual interest" against the "suspended antithesis"?

Out of the act of exchange itself, the individual, each one of them, is reflected in himself as its exclusive and dominant (determinant) subject. With that, then, the complete freedom of the individual is posited: voluntary transaction; no force on either side; positing of the self as means, or as serving, only as means, in order to posit the self as end in itself, as dominant and primary [//übergreifend//]; finally, the self-seeking interest which brings nothing of a higher order to realization; the other is also recognized and acknowledged as one who likewise realizes his self-seeking interest, so that both know that the common interest exists only in the duality, many-sidedness, and autonomous development of the exchanges between self-seeking 245 interests. The general interest is precisely the generality of self-seeking interests. Therefore, when the economic form, exchange, posits the all-sided equality of its subjects, then the content, the individual as well as the objective material which drives towards the exchange, is //freedom//. Equality and freedom are thus not only respected in exchange based on exchange values but, also, the exchange of exchange values is the productive, real basis of all //equality// and //freedom.// As pure ideas they are merely the idealized expressions of this basis; as developed in juridical, political, social relations, they are merely this basis to a higher power. And so it has been in history. Equality and freedom as developed to this extent are exactly the opposite of the freedom and equality in the world of antiquity, where developed exchange value was not their basis, but where, rather, the development of that basis destroyed them. Equality and freedom presuppose relations of production as yet unrealized in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages. Direct forced labour is the foundation of the ancient world; the community rests on this as its foundation; labour itself as a 'privilege', as still particularized, not yet generally producing exchange values, is the basis of the world of the Middle Ages. Labour is neither forced labour; nor, as in the second case, does it take place with respect to a common, higher unit (the guild).

"Now, it is admittedly correct that the [relation between those] engaged in exchange, in so far as their motives are concerned, i.e. as regards natural motives falling outside the economic process, does also rest on a certain compulsion; but this is, on one side, itself only the other's indifference to my need as such, to my natural individuality, hence his equality with me and his freedom, which are at the same time the precondition of my own; on the other side, if I am determined, forced, by my needs, it is only my own nature, this totality of needs and drives, which exerts a force upon me; it is nothing alien (or, my //interest// posited in a general, reflected form). But it is, after all, precisely in this way that I exercise compulsion ever the other and drive him into the exchange system" (243-45).


 * (Critique of socialists and harmonizers: Bastiat, Proudhon) 247**


 * SECTION ONE: THE PRODUCTION PROCESS OF CAPITAL 250**
 * Nothing is expressed when capital is characterized merely as a sum of values 251**
 * Landed property and capital 252**
 * Capital comes from circulation; its content is exchange value; merchant capital, money capital, and money interest 253**
 * Circulation presupposes another process; motion between presupposed extremes 254**
 * Transition from circulation to capitalist production 256**
 * Capital is accumulated labour (etc.) 257**
 * 'Capital is a sum of values used for the production of values' 258**