Week 1, Jan 1-7, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 1 'The Commodity'

Vampire [any] · edit-2 11 months ago

Week 1, Jan 1-7, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 1 'The Commodity'

quarrk [he/him] · edit-2 11 months ago

Agreed with all of this; and also: the repetition is partly due to the methodology. If Marx talks about the same thing multiple times, it is often from different perspectives, like taking a photo of the same object from different angles, to get a complete view of it. So it's not so much a verbatim repetition, but instead a second look from another angle, to eliminate "one-sidedness".

This is basically how dialectical thinking works. A contradictory thing is understood in its totality only by understanding it from all sides, each side being limited. The classic example in Hegel is the contradiction between Being and Nothing, and their unity in Becoming, which is evident only after viewing things from the perspective of each Being and Nothing and realizing that they each move into their opposite. E.g. Being something is to not be anything else, which taken to the extreme looks like nothing at all; and Nothing itself appears as a state of Being with no content.

This dialectical approach, examining the same forms and content from different sides — e.g. from production, from exchange, from different roles in the productive process — this occurs both within each volume, and between all the volumes, with volume 3 being a sort of unity of volumes 1 and 2.

ComradeRat [he/him, they/them] · 11 months ago

Yeah this point about different angles is very much how I understand Marx's thought and presentation. Bertell Olmen's book Dance of the Dialectic has some a good description:

The third mode in which Marx's abstractions occur is that of vantage point. ... There are many similar, apparently contradictory positions taken in Marx's writings. They are the result of different abstractions, but not of extension or level of generality. They are due to different abstractions of vantage point. The same relation is being viewed from different sides, or the same process from its different moments.

In the same mental act that Marx's units of thought obtain an extension and a level of generality, they acquire a vantage point or place from which to view the elements of any particular Relation and, given its then extension, from which to reconstruct the larger system to which this Relation belongs. A vantage point sets up a perspective that colors everything which falls into it, establishing order, hierarchy, and priorities, distributing values, meanings, and degrees of relevance, and asserting a distinctive coherence between the parts. Within a given perspective, some processes and connections will appear large, some obvious, some important; others will appear small, insignificant, and irrelevant; and some will even be invisible.

Week 1, Jan 1-7, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 1 'The Commodity'

Week 1, Jan 1-7, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 1 'The Commodity'

Week 1, Jan 1-7, we are reading Volume 1, Chapter 1 'The Commodity'

Discuss the week's reading in the comments.

Resources