| This question <19|19> overall <19|21> Hans: <18|22>. |
| Question 47: Someone says: The exchange-value of an item is created through demand, not by the item itself. If nobody demands the item, it cannot be traded for anything. In other words, exchange-value is created by people wanting the item. How would Marx argue against this? |
| [20] Hans: Individual and society. Eastwood tries an answer in [19] and, heeding the advice I had given in [18], he looks for the answer in the distinction between use-value and exchange-value. Although this is an important distinction, it will not help us with the question at hand. For the present question we need to make a distinction between individual and social powers. Here is an attempt to answer question 47, but I am open to suggestions and corrections: |
| Marx knows, of course, that nothing happens in society without some individual carrying it out. But he would caution us that this should not lead us to think that everything in society can be explained by individual goals and motivations. Individual goal-directed activity can have side effects that are neither intended by the agents, nor under their control. |
| Historically, capitalism is an epoch in which mankind not only tries to emancipate itself from natural constraints, through unheard-of increases in technology, but in which also the individuals try to emancipate themselves from the constraints imposed by the society they live in. Although this is a laudable goal, necessary for the flourishing of the individuals, they are, unfortunately, doing it wrong: they are acting too atomistically and are relating to each other only through the products they exchange with each other. By this they give too much power to anonymous market forces which develop their own dynamics. |
| If we want to be able to resolve this predicament we have to understand it. The first step in this understanding is to realize that the things which we are producing, the commodities, have acquired social powers of their own. It is not merely a figure of speech by Marx, but an important fact about our society, that exchange-value, for instance, is a social power possessed by the commodity, and not something which the individuals handling the commodity may or may not give to the commodity. |
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