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willow
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The commodity form and, hence, the law of value, are fully developed only in capitalism and are fundamental determinations of that social formation, according to Marx. When they are considered valid for other societies the result is that, "the truth of the law of appropriation of bourgeois society must be transposed to a time when this society itself did not yet exist. For Marx, then, the theory of value grasps the "truth of the law of appropriation" of the capitalist social formation and does not apply to other societies. It is thus clear that the initial categories of Capital are intended as historically specific; they grasp the underlying social forms of capitalism postone - time labor social domination Even the mere conceptual abstraction labour is as a concept of social universality bound to this relation; the concept as a concept is a product of the foregoing real abstraction and is not to be understood apart from this as transhistorical. robert kurz - critique of postone You ask me about the idiosyncrasies of philosophers? There is their lack of historical sense, their hatred of even the idea of becoming, their Egyptianism. They think they are doing a thing honour when they dehistoricize it sub specie aeterni - when they make a mummy of it. All that philosophers have handled for millennia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has escaped from their hands alive. They kill, they stuff, when they Worship, these conceptual idolaters - they become a mortal danger to everything when they worship. Death, change, age, as well as procreation and growth, are for them objections - refutations even. What is, does not become, what becomes, is not. Now the all believe even to the point of despair, in that which is. nietzsche - twilight of the idols Ethics is usually dead politics: the hand of a victor in some past conflict reaching out to try to extend its grip to the present and the future raymond geuss - realismus, wunschdenken, utopie
Only in this context which sees the isolated facts of social life as aspects of the historical process and integrates them in a totality, can knowledge of the facts hope to become knowledge of reality. This knowledge starts from the simple (and to the capitalist world), pure, immediate, natural determinants described above. It progresses from them to the knowledge of the concrete totality, i.e. to the conceptual reproduction of reality. This concrete totality is by no means an unmediated datum for thought. lukacs - what is orthodox marxism When labor becomes represented in its social form in the process of exchange, however, it is necessarily also represented in its abstract form. This latter determination is social, and thus not directly measurable in the way that private determinations are. postliterate - why labor is the substance of value The labor which constitutes value should not be identified with labor as it may exist transhistorically. Rather, it is a historically specific form that would be abolished, not realized, with the overcoming of capitalism. postone - time labor and social domination A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses ... It is only a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. marx - capital vol 1
willow
i’m not even feeling this too strongly at the moment i just wanted to migrate it from twitter, got reminded by recent posts