I have already emailed this to people, but it belongs here... so here it is:

We were wondering what Marx was doing in his construction of the commodity - the 'structuralist approach'? - and Ben was saying that he felt that a separation of use-value and exchange-value was happening (sorry if I'm putting words into your mouth Ben!). Then I was reminded of the notion of alienation to which Marx so often refers, the notion of a collective human construct that amasses such authority and becomes so wide-spread that it gains an independent power/ force over the humans that created it - it becomes alien to them, something they can no longer influence, something external to them. (Think of the Feuerbach argument, 'Man was not created in the image of God, but God in the image of man'.)

Sooo...It struck me, after buying what I feel to be highly over-priced pasta in an impulse of starvation, that we have become so separated from the labour embodied in the commodities we consume, that we have no idea what the equivalent value/ the common denominator/ basic value unit is at the time of consumption - we have no idea what the 'objective' exchange values of commodities are. To use a made-up primitive example; no longer do we labour in close proximity to the others in our tribal group and know how much labour-time went into each commodity that we consume.

(No longer do we know that 20yrds of linen embodies as much labour power as 1 coat. For all we know the 20yrds of linen that we hand over for our coat could be lining the tailor's pockets with a lot of extra exchange power because he has a coat-making machine that cuts the embodied labour of a coat to 1/4 the time that we think it takes. The capitalist infrastructure has become so convoluted with international trading and exchange-rates that we usually have no idea how much labour went into the growing of our bananas and the production of our cars, for example.)

As such, the opportunity to rob people blind in M&S arises when they just want some pasta (£3.15 for a packet of tortellini!). The basic exchange unit is a phantom. This could be superfluous to Marx's argument at the moment, but it is a conclusion to one aspect of the text that I had been thinking about and not fully expressed in the reading group, so I'm sending it out here!

Capital, a mighty work

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"Capital, a mighty work, contains what is simply one of the three great scientific discoveries of the whole of human history: the discovery of the system of concepts... which opens up to scientific knowledge what can be called the 'Continent of History'. - Louis Althusser