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[44] Yossarian: Re: Which came first, the abstraction or the production??? Marx defines a commodity on the first page of Capital: “The commodity is,
first of all an external object, a thing which through its qualities
satisfies human needs of whatever kind.” We can conlude that the
commodity, by Marx's definition, is as old as the first human, and
therefore predates capitalism. Abstract human labor, on the other hand,
is a relatively new invention, specific to the capitalist mode of
commodity production. Before this period commodities were judged valuable
solely on the merit of their usefulness. The capitalist mode of
production, conversely, reduces the measurement of value to the labor
which it (the commodity) embodies. The need for a universal measurement of
value across the spectrum of varying commodities (through the abstraction
of labor), in which commodities are viewed as pieces of tangible labor
power, was realized only under capitalism. This makes it impossible,
therefore, for the abstraction of labor to precede commodity production,
as Gus has stated in [35]. |
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