Friday, November 20, 2015

Seldon in Session, #11: Seldon on 'The Uttermost Root of "the exchange-value" [Marx]'.










Dear Reader,



Reproduced below is one of Karl Seldon’s most characteristic characterizations of the cognitive  psychohistorical causal core of modern human history [E.D. edits applied] --

As Marx was so often wont to note, modern, “capital-relation”-centered society, centered on the “capital-relation as predominant “social relation of production”, is the form of society ‘‘‘founded on [the] exchange-value’’’, and, as we so often note, Marx’s ‘‘‘elementary or accidental form of [Commodity-]value’’’, the arche'-category of the categorial dialectical progression content of Marx’s magnum opus, Das Kapital, is the uttermost root thereof, the uttermost root of ‘‘‘the exchange-value’’’, and of all of its profound psychohistorical consequences.

That ‘‘‘elementary form of value’’’ is, we hold, the, mostly-unconscious, ideological core paradigm of the Modern «Mentalité»’ entire, of the Modern Human Phenome:  the equal valuation of pairs of qualitatively different Commodity objects /«arithmoi» as if by pure quantity alone, C--M--C' in Marx’s personifications ‘praxis-algebra’ -- by means of a third «arithmos» of [Money-]objects, implicitly expressing a qualitative common denominator for that pair of otherwise disparate Commodity objects, one whose common character [presently socially-necessary abstract labor-time cost of reproduction] is typically unconscious for its users, thus inculcating, in the cognitive neuro-plasticity of those users, the semblance of a purely quantitative praxis.

The Modern World -- the world of the capital-relation, of the alienated labor relation [the sold-labor, wage-labor-relation] -- with all of its pluses and minuses, vis-a-vis the previous incarnations of collective humanity, and of the ‘human phenome, stems from this!”


-- a characterization which I feel to be eminently worthy of your deepest consideration.



Regards,

Miguel






















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