Jim.+239-259

Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital, pp 239-259

242: use value = particular natural characteristics of commodity + particular natural need

243: no appropriation of commodities by force. “the juridical moment of the Person enters here.”

voluntary transaction, freedom of individual, equality presupposed.

exchange as the economic base, equality and freedom as the ideal superstructure

245: “...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.”

“Equality and freedom presuppose relations of production as yet unrealized in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages.”

247: “Thus, if one individual accumulates and the other does not, then none does it at the expense of the other.”

/fair exchange, exploitation happens elsewhere

“...appears as the surface process, beneath which, however, in the depths, entirely different processes go on, in which this apparent individual equality and liberty disappear.”

248: French socialists saw freedom and equality as being perverted by money and capital, when in fact they were created by money and capital.

249: “And now, indeed, in opposition to these socialists there is the stale argumentation of the degenerate economics of most recent times (whose classical representative as regards insipidness, affectation of dialectics, puffy arrogance, effete, complacent platitudinousness and complete inability to grasp historic processes is Frederick Bastiat…”

250 both wages and capital are seen by Bastiat and co as payment for services done by one individual for another.

capital is the higher realization of money

the history of landed property is the pre-history of capitalism

merchant capital, circulating capital (commodities), and usurer’s capital all pre-date capitalism, existed in previous societies before money relation was generalized

circulation doesn’t exist by itself, isn’t self-renewing, is just the surface form

257: 16th century England exchanges wool for Dutch commodities -> enclosure of the commons, because trade of surplus goods is transformed from “passive trade” to production for the purpose of exchange

capital as a relation, as a process