Kommentar zu Hegel und Marx, Chapter 15
Beginning with the Commodity
When the first volume of Capital appeared in 1867, Marx had been working on it for twenty years. The book has a dual nature that struck its earliest readers. It is full of historical detail, statistical data, and reports by factory inspectors — and at the same time it follows a presentation that advances from the simplest determination to the most complex, without the sequence of chapters corresponding to the sequence of historical events.
This dual nature is where the question of this book is decided. Whoever takes the polemics of the prefaces for the method sees an empiricist who occasionally lapses into dialectical phrasing. Whoever looks at the presentation sees something else.
Marx does not begin with observations about markets or factories, but with a sentence that already contains a critique: “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form” (MEW 23, 49).
More hangs on this sentence than a first glance shows. It does not say that wealth is a collection of commodities. It says that wealth appears so — and with that, the first sentence already contains a critique that the whole book unfolds. Real wealth is something other than the sum of what can be sold; what does not occur in this form falls out of the picture, and what does occur in it is not thereby good. [[kapitalismus-einfuehrung:16a]] traces this out in detail.
The beginning, then, is neither a definition nor an observation. It takes a form of appearance and treats it as what it is: a form behind which something stands. The commodity, taken this way, contains on closer inspection a contradiction — it is a useful object and at the same time the bearer of a social relation.
The unfolding of this contradiction drives the presentation forward. Exchange value seeks an independent shape and finds it in money. In money it is at first only a point of passage: the commodity turns into money in order to buy other commodities, and the goal at both ends lies with the useful objects. This form flips over. In the movement that starts from money and returns to increased money, the commodity is now merely a means. This determines capital — and at the same time raises a question that circulation cannot answer: where does the increment come from, if in exchange like is exchanged for like?
The answer leads out of circulation and into production, and no path would have led there if the presentation had begun with observations about factories. It first had to show that circulation cannot explain the increment.