The Method and Object of Capital

Jacob Blumenfeld London, June 2nd, Marx and Philosophy Society

The topic of this paper is old, gone over a thousand times, and yet still, no resolution is on the horizon. The question is, how far does Marxs philosophical enterprise depend on a Hegelian method? And furthermore, is this Hegelian form necessary for Marxs project? Is it interesting? Is it worthwhile? There are at least three meanings of dialectic in the thought of Hegel, which may or may not be compatible. First, as described in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Encyclopedia Logic (80), dialectic refers to a particular moment in an argumentative strategy, a rational maneuver that, on the surface, ends in aporia. This is what Hegel calls, the moment of scepticism. Simply put, this process occurs once the understanding has already made or uncovered a certain conceptual distinction in experience, a distinction which comes to be seen as incapable of adequately grasping the object at hand. Dialectic is the name for the process by which this categorical distinction, or finite determination in Hegels language, necessarily turns into its opposite, or sublates itself. In other words, dialectic here signifies a logic of inversion: in order to properly account for the experience of the object, the determinate category being used must be rejected for its opposite. In this sense, inner becomes outer, subjects become objects, absolutes become relative, and particulars become universals. This occurs in all domains, according to Hegel, not just logic, but morality, natural science, politics, and history. For example, if abstract justice becomes too extreme, it turns into its opposite, injustice. This is one way of reading the Terror after the French Revolution. If the

understanding stays within this opposite or inverted category, then the result is skepticism, which can end in suspension of judgment, aporia, or anxiety. Fortunately, there is a third moment for Hegel, the speculative or positively rational moment, in which the opposite categories are reunited and justified in a more complex and concrete category, which is their very ground or basis. Marx is definitely influenced by this strategy of reasoning, and this is clearest in his young writings, specifically the Critique of Hegels Doctrine of the State, The Jewish Question, and the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. In all three of these texts, Marx uses the logic of inversion to turn Hegels concepts themselves on their head. Whether it is civil society and the state, private and public, or mind and world, Marxs strategy is almost always the same: to make sense of the distinctions at all, they must themselves be reversed. Marxs perhaps greatest original insight in this period, the concept and theory of alienation, is a breathtaking tour de force of how the dialectical logic of inversion is at play not only in our conceptual experience, but in our practical social activity as well. A second meaning of dialectic in Hegel concerns his philosophy of history. Dialectic in this sense means the process by which a historical era, because of internal contradictions within the social organization of society, necessarily passes over into a new stage; this development gives the contradiction of that society room to move. The contradiction usually has to do with individual freedom and social coherence, and the proper relation between the two. The classic example of this is Hegels description of classical antiquity, and how the principle of free subjectivity, as exhibited by Socrates and/or Antigone, is in conflict with the cohesiveness of society. According to Hegel, it is

only with the development of Roman Christianity that the principle of individuality is, partially at least, released and allowed to flourish. This dialectic is historical, progressive, linear, and chronological. Marx is also influenced by this conception of dialectic, and this can be seen most clearly in The German Ideology and some of his political writings, such as the Communist Manifesto. In these texts, Marx argues that the dynamic material reproduction of society runs into conflict with the social and political form in which that activity is expressed. The classic example here is the transition from feudal societies to bourgeois societies, and how the bourgeoisies drive to increase productivity internally explodes the logic of feudal ownership and distribution regimes based on heredity, nobility, and serfdom. Hence, the seed of the capitalist mode of production already lies within the feudal era, albeit not fully expressed. A third meaning to dialectic in Hegel, and the meaning that I want to focus on for the rest of this paper, concerns dialectic as the name for a complex method of exposition of a dynamic, articulated whole. This idea of dialectic describes what Hegel is doing in the Logic and the Philosophy of Right, among other texts. For there, he is painfully at work showing, step by step, the logic governing the internal relations of a progressively more complex, and hence, more concrete whole. In the Logic, the whole under consideration is the totality of reason, and in the Philosophy of Right, it is the organism of modern society. In each of these works, Hegel begins with the simplest concept or relation of the whole, and shows why it is incapable of accounting for its object without presupposing a deeper, more complex concept or relation. The methodological problem that Hegel is dealing with is how to present a synoptic picture of an organism-like

system, without abstracting violently from the dynamism, movement and wholeness of the system. Hegel does this not by progressive deduction, or a simple propositional definition, but by a process of conceptual retroactive grounding, through which every partial category only becomes understood and justified through the following more complex one. The systematic whole Hegel is explaining can never be described by an exhaustive listing of parts or accounts of each parts evolution, because it is not the parts or the histories of each part that are at issue. Rather, it is the live, functioning structure of necessary internal relations which give the whole its very coherence that is at stake. This dialectic as a method of exposition does not give a chronological account of a whole coming to be in time, nor is it a deduction from first principles. At every step of the argument, the whole in question is presupposed. To give an example of how this works in Hegel, let us examine the transition from Abstract Right to Morality in the Philosophy of Right. The objective of the book is to show how the very concept of right demands an elaborate structure of social relations bound by norms of free individuals in recognition of each other, mediated through the family, civil society, and the state. But to move from the structure of abstract right to the recognition of free individuality is not a move in time, or a deduction from the principle of right itself. Rather, free individuality, or moral subjectivity, is the very ground from which abstract right, or law, can even make sense of itself. In other words, without a concept of a moral subject, abstract right fails to account for its very object. How does this work? In the final section of Abstract Right, Unrecht or Wrong, a demand arises to punish those who violate the contracts and rights of property-owning persons. Punishment is not a random affair but the very justice mandated by right to treat the

criminal as a universal bearer of rights, one who deserves the punishment because he is within the law. In this framework, however, the only categories so far developed are person, property, contract, and wrong. Given this constraint, a problem arises in the very criteria of how to distinguish such a universal punishment from a personal vendetta outside the bounds of right. For all we have are categories of abstract personhood, and hence no ability to see any deeper into the motivations or intentions of the actors involved. What is needed is a category that allows us to conceive of an individual who is capable of willing the universal, that is, willing a just punishment for the sake of right, and not merely for personal revenge. With Kantian morality, we get exactly this category, that is, a subject who wills the universal, moral law. Hence, we are now able to account for the problem which arose in Abstract Right, and free it from its previous contradictory expression. The ability to conceive of someone willing the universal, that is, willing justice, is grounded in the very meaning of moral subjectivity, which allows for right to move beyond the problems that the category of mere personhood entailed. This move towards morality grounds abstract right in the first place, allowing us to better conceive of its meaning. It is neither a historical departure nor an a priori deduction, but a grounding of the simple, abstract beginning in a more determinate structure, having the whole in view all the time. It is, as Hegel says, the concept developing itself, freely. This is not a logically necessary step but an act of rational spontaneity immanent to the very idea of right, which leaps beyond the terms of the previous antimony, seeing it from the perspective of the rationally organized whole, that is, the state. In other words, the legal system which binds a state must be grounded on moral subjects who take the law into themselves as well.

It is this conception of dialectic that I will focus on for the rest of this paper, showing how Marx uses it in his later work, especially the Grundrisse and Capital. In numerous letters from 1857 to the end of his life, Marx describes how he took up Hegel again, especially, his Logic, in order to help him work through some of his economic problems, especially the problem of value. In the postface to the second edition of Capital, Marx describes two things that he learned from Hegel: first, the dialectical method of presentation, and second, the historicity or transitoriness of all historical epochs. What Marx does in Capital, and why its readers are so confused by it, is present both Hegelian insights at the same time. While giving a dialectical exposition of an articulated totality from the most simple relation to the most complex, Marx makes it appears as if the system under consideration is transhistorical and independent of human choice. However, at key points he makes it more than clear that this system is historical and socially generated through and through. To show both how an objective system of exchange works in its intricate relations and how such relations are themselves socially based is Marxs grand task. The confusion and conflation between these two tasks allows for all sorts of misreadings, in which Marx is seen as some sort of a historical determinist. But that charge is just as valid as the one which would call a doctor a biological determinist just because he describes the systematic relations by which the body functions as a whole. In the introduction to the Grundrisse, Marx makes this point explicit through his conceptual distinction between the method of inquiry and the method of presentation. This simple distinction has clouded many readers of Hegel, perhaps Marx first of all in his earliest critiques of Hegel. Marx makes it clear that the method of inquiry for any

object starts from observation and builds its way conceptually up from the immediate, concrete phenomenon to the most general abstractions. But, what this method discovers is not some truth independent of the immediate phenomenon, but rather the most general conditions of intelligibility for the very existence of that phenomenon. To present the phenomenon back in thought, one must retrace the path backwards, from the general abstractions to the concrete totality. As Marx writes:

The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even thought it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation and conception. Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought 1

The first path is the method of inquiry; the second is the method of presentation, the proper scientific method for presenting a living, dynamic whole. The problem, however, is that the second method appears as the very opposite of the first, as if it is an a priori construction. Why? Because it is a non-historical, systematic ordering of internal relations, with history only coming to explain the origin of a certain part or relation. But why not give an account of the historical evolution from pre-modern to modern economic society? Marx: The point is not the historic position of the economic relations in the succession of different forms of society. Even less is it their sequence in the idea (Proudhon). Rather, their order within modern bourgeois society. 2 This is exactly the path of Hegels Philosophy of Right, except for Hegel, the structure of the social relations amongst rights-bearing, free moral subjects in a rationally articulated state is depicted in a
1 2

Grundrisse, Penguin Edition. p101 Grundrisse, p108

sense, ideally. But this is not an impossible idealism; it is rather similar in a way to how Marx lays out Capital in its pure manner, without dealing with price-value variations, or contingencies of local scenarios. It is only the idealism of describing a self-reproducing system in its fullest capabilities. -If the object is the system of modern economic relations, and if the starting point should be the simplest relation, then where does one begin? Most people think Marx reduces everything to labor, but this is exactly what he critiques other political economists for doing. Again, in the Grundrisse, Marx describes why the category of labor itself is a historically situated category, which only becomes possible to grasp as a theoretical object in the most complex society. Labor seems a quite simple category, Marx writes, but the concept of labor separate from any laboring activity is historically unique and specific to a modern era. Marx continues: Indifference towards any specific kind of labor presupposes a very developed totality of real kinds of labor, of which no single one is any longer predominant. Hence, if one were to start with the category of labor, then one would already be implicitly presupposing a very developed totality of laboring activities. Making a theoretical point from this methodological insight, Marx writes as a rule, the most general abstractions arise only in the midst of the richest possible concrete development, where one thing appears as common to many, to all. Then it ceases to be thinkable in a particular form alone. 3 This genealogy of categorial abstraction parallels Hegels own tracing of abstract concepts to developed social forms. As he describes in the Philosophy of Right, the category of person, although breached in

Grundrisse, p104

Roman law and developed in Christianity, did not fully make sense until modern societies expanded the realm of free persons beyond an exclusive sphere of citizens. In a similar but more concrete way, Marx describes how the idea of labor in general corresponds not just to a theoretical development, but a real development of society. On the other side, he writes, this abstraction of labor as such is not merely the mental product of a concrete totality of labors. Indifference towards specific labors corresponds to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labor to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference.4 The theoretical object of a labor indifferent to particular manifestations is for Marx tied to a social form in which actual, concrete laboring activity is a socially secondary to ones ability to labor in general. The freeing of this ability from its manifestations is the historical result of the separation of individuals from their means of reproduction. And hence, Marx can conclude that not only the category labor but labor in reality has here become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form.5 What this shows is that the categories Marx uses, even if they appear incredibly simple, like labor, always presuppose the developed bourgeois system, even if they appear to be independent of it in the sequence of presentation. For Marxs task is to show how, given the organic system at hand, every piece, function, and relation is internally related and self-reproducing. This doesnt mean that the system generates every part, but that it subordinates all given parts to its logic. As Marx writes later on in the Grundrisse:

4 5

Ibid. Ibid.

This organic system itself, as a totality, has its presuppositions, and its development to its totality consists precisely in subordinating all elements of society to itself, or in creating out of it the organs which it still lacks . This is historically how it becomes a totality. The process of becoming this totality forms a moment of its process, of its development. 6

Hegel could have written this sentence. For both are showing the complex ways in which modern society functions as a totality, and not a mere sum of parts. To show this, the method requires a dialectical exposition by means of retroactive groundings in the presupposed whole. In this sense, Marx and Hegels method is adequate to its object. If labor is not the starting point for the investigation into Capital, then what is? In the 1857/1858 Grundrisse and the 1859 Contributions to a Critique of Political Economy, Marx begins his analysis of capital with the concept of money. Since capital is, in a sense, money-making-more-money, then it seems a good place to start. But money, even on the surface, already implies a complex relation of goods, prices and values, and these cant be so easily abstracted away. Something simpler is required. What about value? If money is really just a way in which the values of things are expressed and compared, then surely value is the more elementary form to begin with. The problem here is that value starts from an abstraction of daily experience, and the task is to start with something simple enough in experience which nevertheless presupposes the totality of social relations under consideration. This simple concretum of experience that almost chooses itself for Marx after twelve years is finally, the commodity. One way of reading Marxs Capital is that it begins with a description of simple commodity exchange, and shows how it progressively and historically develops into a modern capitalist society based on some logical deductions. This reading lies in good
6

Grundrisse, p278 emphasis mine

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company, for it is, in fact, the way Engels read Capital, and most other orthodox Marxists of the 20th century. The problem is that the pathway from the commodity to money, and from money to capital, is anything but historical in this book. It is as historical as Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit or Philosophy of Right. Almost every Hegelian shape of spirit or Marxian category of economy did exist historically, but the sequence presented in their works is not their historical sequence but rather subordinate to the argumentative form. -The sequence in Capital, from commodity to money to capital, is not a story of ancient society through feudalism to the present, for money existed in ancient society, as did forms of capital. It is a story, from the perspective of capitalist society, of how these forms relate and develop internally. The commodity is then, in a sense, as primitive as sense-certainty in the Phenomenology of Spirit, being in the Logic, or property in the Philosophy of Right. All of these categories are immediate, simple, and presuppose barely anything at all. But to even make sense of what they claim to describesensory experience, the first idea of thought, or the basis for all lawrequires a complex, multifaceted articulation. At each progressive stage of the argument, these primitive categories are reconceived, filled in, expanded, and developed. The same goes for the commodity. It is not axiomatic for the whole, but neither is it completely abandoned; we are rather conceptualizing everything that is necessary for the commodity to be what it is in capitalist society, and this takes us down a long winding path through the forms of value, the circulation of money, the purchase of labor-power, the production of surplus-value, the development of machinery, the process of accumulation, and the capitalistic

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production and consumption of commodities for the sake of the reproduction of the system as a whole. To show how this works in one section, I will take the transition from the commodity to money in chapter one of Capital, the section on the Value-Form, which Marx called his most Hegelian part. The problem of the section is to show how, given a simple, isolated commodity, one must presuppose something like money to make sense of it. This counterintuitive argument makes sense once we realize that this is not a deduction nor derivation of money, but a grounding of the commodity within capitalist society by means of money. What is a commodity? Marx begins to dissect this seemingly trivial thing by attributing to it what was then standard to most political economists of the time: a use value and an exchange value. The commodity as a bearer of use value fulfills needs, of the stomach or mind, through its consumption. The use value of a commodity is inseparable from its natural shape, its qualitative nature. But a commodity is also a bearer of exchange value, that is, its worth for something else by means of exchange. The exchange value of a commodity cant be measured by its natural shape, but by its quantitative relation to other goods. So, for instance, the exchange-value of one commodity X can be two commodities of Y. In other words, one X is worth two Ys, and this is realized in exchange. And yet, how did we already come to be analyzing the exchange of two commodities? The starting point was one single commodity, which, as Marx says, appears as the elementary form of wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode production prevails. But if we are to presume, like the common sense of both bourgeois

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economists and modern citizens do, that every commodity must have an exchange value, then we cant help but invoke another, different commodity in which this value is expressed. The use-value of a coat is contained in its own material qualities that satisfy my need for warmth and protection, but when I bring the coat to the market for barter, the value of coat is no longer expressed in these qualities, but in something else, like a pound of coffee, for instance. This other commodity, the pound of coffee here, functions as an equivalent. It is, functionally speaking for the purpose of exchange, equal to the coat. And yet it is not equal in its material being at all, neither in its physical constitution, the tools and labor required to make it, nor the needs it satisfies. So how can two commodities with nothing materially in common be rendered equivalent? Marx argues that this equivalency is purely social. This claim may seem trivial, but it reflects back on the nature of the commodity and forces up to reconceive our prior category. To grasp the value of a single commoditya skill taken for granted by everyone in a market economy requires one to already move beyond the single commodity under reflection and see it in its social web of significance. In other words, its exchange value doesnt make sense outside its exchange relations. This internally motivated rethinking of the commodity is neither an inversion of categories nor a historical sequencing; it is dialectical in the third sense outlined above, a conceptually determined retroactive grounding of a simple abstraction in a more concrete determination from the perspective of the presupposed whole. The jump to the equivalent continues with a series of conceptual moves that expands until something like money is in view. Briefly, the argument goes like this. With the emergence of the need for another commodity to even make sense of the value of a

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single commodity, we have reached the stage of a relative equivalent. That is, the coat can be equal to a pound of coffee, but theres nothing requiring it to only be equal to that. It can also be equivalent to a quart of whisky, a pair of shoes, a set of backgammon, or whatever the owners deem fair and equal in the social process of exchanging. 7 Hence, the exchange-value of the coat is relative to a whole series of commodities in differing proportions. The series of commodities that function as relative equivalents are themselves equal to a series of other various commodities in differing proportions, and so on, and so on. This engenders another problem for determining the value of a single commodity. It seems as though it is impossible to pin down, for it to be stable and fixed. And not only that, but it makes it practically hard for owners of commodities to switch registers all the time to keep adjusting the value in different goods. If no one has whisky, shoes, coffee or backgammon, but a chicken, bible, bourbon, and chess, then whats the proper exchange relation for those goods to the coat? The value of one commodity becomes endlessly deferred to an ongoing series of proportions. What we begin to have is an infinite chain of exchange relations, which looks like this: A commodity X = B commodity Y = C commodity Z. The single commoditys value, reconceived first as the value expressed in another commodity, is now reconceived again as the value expressed in the chain of equivalent commodity proportions. This new development grounds what was previously unthought and hence only partially true. And yet, with every dialectical development, the contradiction is not resolved, but only raised to a higher level. The positing of the series

The ground of this worth, socially necessary labor-time, is not required for the argument at this stage

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of relative equivalents screams out for a solution to its inner instability. Is there a way of grounding the series itself as a whole? At this point in the argument, Marx introduces a notion which is formally the same as our modern idea of money, although it is not called that yet here. It is the idea of the general equivalent. The way to resolve the instability of a commoditys value in the series of relative equivalents is to posit a single commodity which can act as a universal measure for all commodities. This single commodity will have the function of being the rod against which all commodities are held, and the differences in the exchange values of commodities will be measured in proportions of this one commodity. Hence, the exchange values of different commodities will no longer be qualitative, but quantitative. For instance, if we take the general equivalent to be corn, then all the aforementioned commoditiescoats, coffee, whisky, shoes, etc.can be measured in terms of proportions of corn. One coat can be equivalent to one pound of corn, one pound of coffee can be two pounds of corn, one quart of whisky can be six pounds, a pair of shoes can be a pound and a half, and so on and so on. Now, the differing commodities themselves can be exchanged using representations of corn as the measuring rod against which they exchange. For instance, one quart of whisky is equivalent to six coats! The material presence of the general equivalent, in this case corn, is not necessary to find out the value of different commodities. It works in the imagination as is determined, as all value is, socially. The idea of the general equivalent, or the one commodity which acts as the measure of exchange-value of all other commodities, is the third step in reconceiving the original nature of a single commoditys value. It is no giant step at all to realize that the

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general equivalent is the formal category of which gold is the specific content in the real history of money. For reasons related to the chemical-makeup and particular history of precious metals like gold, this one commodity becomes the dominant general equivalent by means of which are commodities are measured, and eventually, by means of which all commodities are exchanged. This is the conceptual foundation for understanding the money-commodity. Has Marx shown us the historical genesis of money? Not necessarily. The historical genesis of money takes many paths, starting two millennia ago, diverging and converging with credit, barter, debt and other exchange forms. It is only with capitalism that money becomes central to the functioning of society, and it is only from the perspective of such-centrality that we can ask the questions about the conditions of possibility for money to emerge as dominant, whether or not it historically took this path. The argument is about logical form, not chronological events. Has Marx derived money from the nature of a single commodity? Again, not necessarily. Only if we assume a society in which commodities must be universal bearers of value, do we get the contradictions that lead to the development of the general equivalent and the money-form. Hence, only if we already presuppose the whole of capitalist society can we motivate the dynamic movement requiring the analytic lens to expand from one single commodity in insolation from all others to a commodity only being intelligible in its relation to the totality of all commodities. What occurs in the transition from commodity to money is the process by which the initial contradiction between use-value and exchange-value in a single commodity is shown to be overcome only with the category of money. In other words, commodities themselves are not

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intelligible on their own terms, if we presuppose that they are bearers of value , and hence we must bring in the category of money, a much more complex abstraction, to make sense of the initial simple abstraction. But money doesnt solve the problem of the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value completely, it only gives it room to move. Money allows the implicit duality in the commodity to express itself by separating out one of its functions and objectifying it in another form. The function of serving as a bearer of exchange-value is given over to the money-commodity. In Hegelian terms, the concept has been developed into its ground. There are two conclusions I would like to make from this analysis concerning the relationship between Hegel and Marxs dialectic. First, in one sense, Marxs philosophy is dependant on a Hegelian conception of dialectic (as a method of exposition) in his presentation of the value-form, from the commodity through money to capital; this is in some sense analogous to the way in which Hegel presents the development of the concept of will from abstract right through morality to ethical life. Both presentations are retroactive groundings of provisional categories in more complex wholes. In this sense, dialectic is not a historical, efficient causality, but an exposition of a given whole that reproduces itself. The ordering of categories is in no way determined by the recapitulation of a historical chain of causation; it is articulated on the basis of purely systematic considerations. It is such systematicity that is essential for grasping a totality in its interconnectedness. This dialectical method begins by analyzing incomplete abstractions taken from a dynamic, interwoven system and then shows how each part requires a deepened understanding of the relations between and dependencies with other parts of the same whole. The goal is for a complete comprehension of an organism in

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action which can never be seen all at once. Dialectic is the name for this impossible task of conceptual reconstruction, and in this sense, Hegel and Marx are agreed. Secondly, and more speculatively, perhaps there is deeper reason that Marx uses Hegels dialectical method to analyze value and capital. Why is the dialectical method of exposition particularly suitable to the study of this object, the value-form? In other words, is this more than a method applied externally to a content? Rather, could it be that this is the very method of the content. This could only be the case if Marx and Hegel are actually analyzing the same object. What is this object? In this most general sense, it is how free individuals come to determine their own lives in mutual recognition of each other, forming a social whole. Hegel is doing this from the perspective of right: he is analyzing the subjects as bearers of rights, in their ideal-form, as free subjects. Marx, on the other hand, is doing this from the perspective of things: he is analyzing the subjects as bearers of commodities, starting from material exchange, not idealist subjectivity. this reading, these are not contradictory, but complementary arguments. What exactly is different though? Marx gives us a more concrete determination of the social whole, which is able to account, intrinsically, for the appearance of the whole moving itself. Marx shows why we must practically treat the social whole as if it was something ideal, independent, and autonomous from our own self-activity. This is because of the dynamic of the value-form, in which we must transfer the expression of human powersocial laborto an object whose task it is to represent this, irrespective of this recognition of its social basis. Hence, we are practically compelled to misrecognize social actors, and attribute value to the movement of money-capital itself. Hence, the social wholemodern societyis not just suitable to the Hegelian method; On

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they are one and the same. What is exchange anyways but the mutual recognition of labor? But exchange within the social totality of capitalist society distorts this recognition, and functionally treats the object itself as the source of activity. Hence, we see, internal to the system, the genesis of the method.

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