Part 2: Chapter 4

Well, this now appears as the "project," in every sense, that it ought to be. My real apologies (to whom, I don't know) for the halting nature of this reading. Responding to Seth's last post, which was responding to my last post, I think we can suggest something a bit further about what this work is after--now that capital has been raised as a topic. Is it wrong to assume that a book called "Capital" will really be about capital? Wrong, or naive?

If the argument of the first chapters appeared as a "progression" in which more complicated forms of exchange "arise"--starting with barter and ending with paper currency--"The General Formula for Capital" is exactly that: general, formulaic. How can there be a narrative with a logical formula--indeed, with a tautology? The formula is M-C-M, but "the result, in which the whole process vanishes, is the exchange of money for money, M-M."

As I was arguing before, following the structuralists, the "logical order" of presentation and the "historical development" do not correspond. Here we may say that I was only following Marx, who refers to "the appearance of capital" in two senses. Logically, money, "the ultimate product of the circulation of commodities, is the first form of appearance of capital." And historically, the first "form of appearance" of capital is when it "confronts landed property in the form of money; in the form of monetary wealth, merchant' capital and usurers' capital." But this historical development is disregarded:

However, we do not need to look back at the history of capital's origins in order to recognize that money is its first form of appearance. Every day the same story is played out before our eyes.

Here the two registers are disjoined. What is "historical" is not past, but is happening "every day." Capital first appeared as money in the 16th century, but it also will first appear as money in every case: today and tomorrow.

* * *
The tautology M-M, however, has much more "going on" than just "money which begets money" (the Mercantilist description).

* M-M is not self-contained, but must be constantly renewed. The surplus value cannot be withdrawn from circulation, but has to be put back: "the final result of each separate cycle... forms of itself the starting point for a new cycle."
* Thus M-->C-->M is an endless movement. Rather than a tautology, one gets... well, we shall see how we want to describe this. An ascending line? A Möbius strip? I don't know that I can get into the "topology" of this infinite movement, but it is at the least not a ping-pong match.
* Valorization, Marx says, is "self-valorization," of which money is only the "independent form by means of which its identity (as value) may be asserted." In valorization, unlike in hoarding, "there is no antagonism" between money and commodity--capital has to take the form of a commodity in order to "throw off surplus-value from itself." But the subject of this process is value. It is to value that the "occult ability" of self-valorization belongs.
* Marx likens this occult ability to another famous tautology: the identity of God the Father and God the Son. Although they are differentiated and take disguised forms and can be "thrown off" from one another, their difference can also "vanish again, and both become one." [We recall the strange scene in Paradise Lost where God and Jesus have a conversation in Heaven, before Man has even been created.]
* Not only the commodity, but the capitalist himself is the "bearer" of this movement of value. I should ask Seth here if the commodity (or money) is referred to by this same word, Träger. [Seth?] And perhaps later on we will pull out the Hegelianisms or their inversions here.

I've read a bit further than this, but I wanted to get the ball rolling again. I also read Derrida's Specters of Marx in the interim, so perhaps I will have something to say about that, too.