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[113] Hans: Answer to 74 SF's message [109] is almost the right answer to Question 74. The
only quibble which I have is that SF did not start with the right
definition of a commodity here. See p. 41, right column, of my
Annotations: a commodity is use value and value, the product of useful
labor and the congelation of abstract labor. This is what a commodity
“is”. Then Marx implicitly uses the argument in 138:1 that the
commodity must appear as what it is, i.e., it must have a double form
reflecting these two inner aspects of it. The use value form is its
bodily form, its “natural” form, but Marx says it must also have a
value form. He will use the whole Section 3 of Chapter One to derive
this value form: the commodity's exchange value with other commodities
is only the most primitive of value forms, the best developed and most
important one is the commodity's price, i.e., its exchange value with
money. Question 74 was asking: why must a commodity appear as what
it is? It is a review question, i.e., here my Annotations are asking
something which they just finished trying to explain. The economic
reasoning which Marx hid behind this quasi-Hegelian argument is, and
this is the answer to Question 74: commodities are produced
privately, and they must enter into some social context in order to
socially validate their private production decisions. This social
context is the exchange, therefore commodities must have an exchange
value or a price in order to prepare them for the exchange.
All this is contained in SF's answer, and SF used his own words,
but I hope that what I just wrote made things a little clearer for
everybody. |
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