| This question <104|104> overall <95|97> Bobcat: <618|115>. graded A |
| Question 220: Why does Marx explore the mysterious character of the commodity, which is bland and abstract, instead of picking up one of the many striking outwardly mysterious phenomena of capitalism? |
| [96] Bobcat: The Foundation Before the Building. Why study the mystery of the part instead of the mystery of the whole? In our modern society, many people prefer knowing what something is like rather than why the thing is that way. For example, everyone knows that the earth revolves around the sun. But how many of us know how or why this happens? Better yet, how many of us even care as to the how or why? |
| Classical economics and Capitalism tend toward this mindset. Many things are accepted as they are “given”. A BMW may cost $30,000 on the market for no other reason than that's how much it costs. We are not taught to really care why it has that exchange-value. We only care that at the end of the day, if you have $30,000 you can buy a BMW. Similarly, there is a common perception that there is some sort of “equilibrium” in the market where the Invisible Hand pulls a perfect balancing act. Who cares WHY the worker makes $10/hr? He just does because he does. Thus, the equilibrium wage rate is accepted as “given.” |
| The simplicity of this can be evidenced by where it falls in both the development of economic history and in our course of economic study. Adam Smith, the father of modern Economics, swore by the self-regulating mechanisms of the system. Not surprisingly, one of the first things we learn in our first economics class is that where supply equals demand is equilibrium, and that's how it is. Difficult concepts are simplified to the point where they are easily understood but utterly devoid of their original content. And not too many of us care. |
| Marx is certainly not of this persuasion. As is noted in earlier passages, he exhaustively analyzed how an exchange-value is discovered. Through the example of the coat and the linen, his writings suggest that exchange-value is derived from the labor expended in producing the commodity, and not from some value that could be considered inherent to that item. Marx does not care to take anything as given, which is in direct contrast to our usual way of thinking. Why do this? Certainly this type of analysis is tedious and difficult. It is less interesting than studying the big picture. Marx does it this way because he cares to lay the foundation before the building. |
| To Marx, a study of the glaring mysteries of capitalism seems silly if we cannot understand the components that make up the system. The system is too complicated to be taken “as given.” Therefore, in investigating the enigmas of the commodity, the most basic unit of the structure, Marx is laying a foundation which we can build on. Once we understand the commodity, we can then begin to understand the rest of the system. |
|
|
|||||