just on quality before i move back to music forum...
Also: the process of exchange can't be conceptualised non-abstractly by its participants, if it was able to, commodity society and thereby money simply wouldn't exist. so the two are linked, this is why i think value is important to consider. value is a material social relation but an immaterial object, hence you cannot have a perfect representation of value, it's not possible. Marx isn't really a scientific naturalist, if he was, value would have to be measured materially, which it can't. surplus value obviously can. as an object, a table is not inherently endowed with an exchange value, only value in its abstract and use value, so, in essence, just use value, it ascertains the character of exchange value on the market. so when we talk about use value, value and exchange value, what we are arguing is that *value* is the concept that encapsulates the two, but also allows us to derive the abstraction of the cellular commodity. Every commodity can be reduced down the *form* of the commodity, and hence *equality of all values.*
For instance:
can you imagine going to a shop and saying i want to exchange this imperfect, abstract representation of value (call it a perfect forgery of a banknote with 'surplus value' written on it rather than £10) for a bottle of wine, but all I'm doing is giving you is appropriated labour, not anything that really can be considered a £10 note. mans would think you loony. And if someone did that, they would openly exposing the fetishism of commodities, because that is all what money is, the highest general equivalent of value. money in some senses then today is also a form of quality, mathematically and epistemologically. in this sense, the abolition of money also means reconnecting our head and hand together, something antithetical to bourgeois thought.
When you go to a shop, you are not literally saying I need a bottle of wine and its given to you. this is what is meant by abstract labour, in the sense that capitalism reduces all labour to its own abstract logic and hence is able to represent all labour through money. if it didn't, there would still persist forms of barter and mutual aid, other forms of subsistance, patronage, stuff like that.
So the hollowist construction (and maoists in the US traffic in this) is saying third world workers don't appropriate surplus value whereas first world workers do. if third world workers didn't, they would die. capital *alienates* the class from itself as such, hence marx's distinction between class in itself (even cops are proletarians according to this definition) and class for itself, the partisans fighting for their political supremacy and communism. this is the meaning of the totalitarian dictatorial class party, all the condensations of the classes historical existence. this is different to *a formal party* existing in a specific time period in a specific location. formal parties can degenerate, and always have done and always will do. the class party cannot degenerate unless, of course, the class is killed as a social fact. this would however mean that capitalism would not be able to sell what it produced and collapse completely. so instead what they try is universal basic income, an attempt to castrate the atomised class party even further. this is possible,, because of disastrous historical mistakes both made by communists who ended up crossing the class line - capitalist leaders in waiting, (third international) and certain dissensuses of the proletariat. communism is closer in this aspect to islamic salvation, there is no dawn and no christ dying for our sins. we either continue to make mistakes of seismic historical proportions and lead to microsovereignties and starvation, or we attempt to repent not for forgiveness but in the hope that we are forgiven. unfortunately, most communists are christian atheists, and this is a big problem. I blame Zizek very much for making this hip and trendy.
