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, 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’’’ 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 objects/«arithmoi» as if by “pure quantity” alone -- by means of a third «arithmos» of [money-]objects, expressing a qualitative common denominator for that pair of otherwise disparate objects, one whose common character [presently socially-necessary abstract labor-time cost of reproduction] is typically unconscious for its users, 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 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