F.E.D. Dialectics: Part 7.: Karl Seldon on Karl Marx Series. Marx’s Early Systematics of ‘Value-in-General’.

Marx’s

Early Systematics

‘Value-

in-

General’.

Part 7.:

Karl Seldon on Karl Marx Series.

GLOBAL STRATEGIC HYPOTHESES.

Dear Reader,

It is my pleasure, and my honor, as an elected member of the Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.] General Council, and as a voting member of F.E.D., to share, with you, from time to time, as they are approved for public release by the F.E.D. General Council, Karl Seldon’s commentaries on the world-historic breakthrough work of Karl Marx.

This 7th text in this by now long-running series is posted herewith, together with supporting text-images and diagrams [Some E.D. standard edits have been applied, in the version presented below, by the editors of the F.E.D. Special Council for the Encyclopedia, to the direct transcript of our co-founder’s discourse].

Seldon –

“Early in his systematic writings on the critique of political economy, in the Grundrisse, in an early part of its “chapter on capital”, and probably in November of 1857, Marx wrote down, in a footnote, some rare and interesting remarks about the category of [economic-] value-in-general, and about its “systematic”, “taxonomic” relation to both the category of use-value and the category of exchange-value.”

“Marx wrote: “Is not value to be conceived as the unity of use value and exchange value? In and for itself, is value as such the general form, in opposition to use value and exchange value as particular forms of it?”.”*

“Here, we hold, Marx is regarding “value as the general form” – ‘value-in-general’ – as the more general, more abstract, «genos» category, with the categories of use-value and exchange-value, each connecting to it, from below it, but their distinction vanishing up into it, and losing their «differentia specifica», at its level of abstraction/omission of determinations.”

“That is, in the ‘Platonian format’, and in the Platonian concept of [systematic] dialectic, their ‘below-ness’ signifies their being more-specific, more-determinations-rich, more-‘thought-concrete’, «species» categories; less abstract, less general, than the ‘value-in-general’ category, “above” them, that unit[e]s what they have in common, qua “value”. ”

“Yet also, horizontally, they are opposite [to] one another. However, vertically, both together are in opposition to the ‘value-in-general’, «genos» category/-level “above” them, as an opposition of more specific to more general; a “vertical” opposition of (two) «species» to [their] «genos». Thus, their “unity”, that of these two opposites at their native, lower, «species» level – use-value and/versus exchange-value – would reside explicitly only at their, higher, «genos» level, “above” them.”

“But one must, we think, also wonder about a possible third, yet more concrete/-determinations-rich, «species» category, determinately opposite, but horizontally so, to both the use-value category and the exchange-value category, and combining them at that ‘thought-concrete’, «species» categorial level, as a ‘dialectical synthesis category’ for the two, a synthesis or hybridization of the use-value and exchange-value categories. Is such a thing even possible?”

“Well, what could it mean, a concrete unity of use-value and exchange value?”

“What could it mean, ‘the use-value of exchange-value’?”

“Well, consider use-value from a capitalist’s perspective. Labor-power is a commodity that [industrial] capitalists buy. A commodity is a unity/‘intra-duality’ of use-value and exchange-value. The exchange-value, the price, of a labor-power commodity unit is its wage. But what is its use-value, that makes a capitalist want to buy it. It is its capacity to ‘make more exchange-value’ [than it costs via its wage]; its capacity to make monetary profit, surplus-labor producing surplus-value.”

“Likewise, what is the use-value, to a capitalist, of a capital-equity stock certificate commodity, or a coupon-laden bond document commodity?”

“The use-value of the former is its dividend. That is, a capitalist, buying a stock, buys a portion of an individual capital, of an individual capitalist enterprise, and is therefore entitled to an equitable share in its periodic profits [if any], i.e., is entitled to a periodic “dividend”, if any dividend is to be paid for a given period. It is the [profit-shares] incremental exchange-value here that is the use-value of capital stock certificate ownership for the capitalist.”

“A bond commodity gives the capitalist who buys it a stream of interest-payments, with eventual payback of the bond price principal a well. Again, the use-value, to a capitalist, of his or her bond(s) ownership, is the incremental exchange-value – the interest – on the capital-loan principal that the bond-price represents.”

“Of course, not just shares of individual capitals become commodities in these ways; whole companies also become commodities, that can be purchased, “lock, stock and barrel”, by capital-money. The use-value of thus acquiring ownership of an entire “going-concern” individual capital is the incremental exchange-value that it is expected to deliver, i.e., its profitability.”

“So, we have identified at least three sub-species sub-categories of commodities in the third «species» category, whose use-value is their [entitling of access to more] exchange-value: (1) labor-power commodities; workers for hire, (2) capital-asset securities commodities, e.g., stocks and bonds, and (3) “mergers and acquisitions” of entire capitalist companies, that also can become commodities.”

“The above-described categorial ‘content-structure’, of vertical oppositions and horizontal oppositions, and their overcomings, combined, defines a ‘triadic systematic/-taxonomic categorial dialectic’ of the use-value and/versus the exchange-value categories.”

*[Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), Translated and edited by Martin Nicolaus, Penguin Books [Middlesex, UK, 1973], page 267n.].

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