Money
Money is not merely a denominator of value, but a mediating function through
which all individual commodities are exchanged, and through which the
value-relation among all commodities is constantly adjusted and readjusted. For this
precise reason, money exists as an organizer of the system of commodities, namely, a
transcendental apperception X of human exchange (22).
Value—classical, neoclassical, ex ante facto, ex post facto,
--- difference between communities, value corresponds to the difference
between the relational systems (230)
--- M--C—M
---circulation process
---credit
---crisis—money > commodity
--worker as consumer has to buy back his products
Surplus value
…one has to be cautious about surplus value. This is usually ascribed to Marx,
but it derived from the Left Ricardians. That is to say that Marx’s critique of classical
economy implied the critique of the surplus value theory, which considers the
production process as the only place where the exploitation of surplus value takes
place (285).
Different from profit---surplus value (essence), profit (historical starting point)
(242-43)---S/v (surplus value) vs. S/c+v (profit)
Against a unitary system(227)---Against the equilibrium between supply and
demand(227)--Against equilibrium price (228)
Circulation process (224)---Marx sought to reconsider surplus value from the
vantage point of circulation (235).
antinomy—in and not in (224)---the realization of surplus value is completed
in the process of circulation, but the process of circulation is not enough for
the realization. To solve this aporia, the being of manifold systems must be
introduced again (237).
different value systems (227)---only where there are heterogeneous systems
can money transform into capital that gains surplus value from the exchange
between systems.(227)---the surplus value arises from the differences
between manifold systems. (228)
In the manner of Kant, Marx points out an antinomy. He says, on the one
hand, that surplus value (for industrial capital) cannot be attained in the
process of production in itself, and, on the other hand, that it cannot be
attained in the process of circulation in itself…this antinomy can be undone,
that is, only by proposing that the surplus value (for industrial capital) comes
from the difference of value systems in the circulation process (like in the
merchant capital), and yet that the difference is created by technological
innovation in the production process (11).
The process M—C—M is split---M-C and C-M occur in different times and
places. (231)
Worker as consumer---surplus value is engendered only in totality by worker
selling their labor power and with the money buying back the commodities
they produced (239).
Relative surplus value—Only where there is a difference in price between
value systems: A (when they sell their labor power) and B (when they buy the
commodities), is surplus value realized. This is so-called relative surplus value
(239).
Total surplus value-----When Marx assumed that total surplus value was being
distributed to individual capitalists, he conceptualized it within a synchronic,
equilibrium system. This can be grasped only on the transcendental level (not
on the empirical level). Rather now the spatial coexistence of branches should
be transposed back into temporal succession once more (247).
Distributed between workers of different industrial branches (246-47)
Surplus value cannot be realized only as total social capital. Here is a vital
important implication: Inasmuch as surplus value can only be realized globally,
the movement to terminate it must be transnational (292).
State
The absolutist monarchical states conspired with the merchant class, monopolized
the means of violence by toppling feudal lords (aristocracy), and finally abolished
feudal domination (extra-economic domination) entirely. This was the very story of
the wedding between state and capital (14).
The amalgamation of absolutist state and mercantilism. (270) what is called
liberalism is also a form of the absolutist-mercantilist agenda, an economic policy
that hegemonic states always adopt (269).
The state is essentially mercantilist (270).
Relationship with other states---In order to grasp the state as an autonomous
entity, we have to see it as existing in relationship with other states (275).
…absolutist states appeared amid the competition with each other in world
capitalism (275).
No matter how social democratic the state appears within itself, it is hegemonic to its
exteriority—namely, even under the slogan of “humanitarian intervention” (275).
Nation
The nation is based on principles of exchange different from those of state and
capital (277).
1) Protected by the absolutist state, merchant capital (bourgeoisie) grew up and
nurtured the identity of the nation for the sake of creating a unified market.
Yet this was not all in terms of the formation of the nation….(2) While
individual agrarian communities that had been autarkic and autonomous were
decomposed by the osmosis of money, their communalities—mutual aid and
reciprocity—themselves were recovered imaginarily within the nation (278).
It was amid the bourgeois revolution that these three were officially married (278).
…capital(liberty), state(equality), and nation(fraternity) copulated and
amalgamated themselves into a force that was inseparable ever after (278-79).
Association
This is a form of mutual aid, yet neither exclusive nor coercive like community.
Associationism can be considered as an ethico-economic form of human relation that
can appear only after a society that once passes through the capitalist market
economy. It was thought that Proudhon was the first to have totalized it; according to
my reading, however, Kant’s ethics already contained it (13).
I think the possibility lies in associationism: to develop a circulation system using
local currency, and thereby to nurture producers/consumers’ cooperatives and
connect them to those in the First World. This would be noncapitalist trade and could
form a network without the mediation of states (295),
The association of associations is far from the organization of the tree structure,
while at the same time it would remain isolated, dispersed, and conflicting, if it did
not have a center. So it needs a center, but the center should exist as a function just
like transcendental apperception X and not something substantial (306).
Ethics
The movement against capitalism is an ethical and moral one (287).
Consumers’ civil acts, including the problematization of environmental and minority
issues, are moral, but the reason they have achieved a certain success is that a
consumers’ boycott is the most dreadful thing capital can imagine. In other words,
the success of the moralist intervention is guaranteed not only by the power of
morality in itself, but more crucially, because it is the embodiment of the asymmetric
relation between commodity and money. There, in order to begin an oppositional
movement against capital, it is imperative to discover a new context where labor
movements and consumers’ movements meet, and this not as a political coalition
between existing movements but as a totally new movement itself (294).
Transposition
The movements of consumers’ boycotts have long existed empirically, but the attain
a radical implication comparable to the Copernican turn only when they are posited
in the context of the theory of value form and seen as a transposition from relative
value form to equivalent value form(from seller of labor-power commodity to buyer
of a commodities); and further in the context of the capital’s metamorphosis: M-C-M’
(296).
…it is in the transcritical position where workers appear as consumers, namely, at the
front of circulation (300).
Marxists failed to grasp the transcritical moment where workers and consumers
intersect (21).
Worker as subject
Those who sell their labor-power commodity have no other choice but to be passive;
yet again there is an exception in the structure: this is a topos where workers appear
to be the subject—the place where the products of capitalist production are sold.
This is the place of consumption. This is the only position where workers can stand as
buyers, with their own money (288).
For capital, consumption is the place where surplus value is finally realized, thus the
only place where it is subordinated to the will of the other, that is, the workers qua
consumers (288).
With respect to our position, however, the consumer position is something that
should be rediscovered and redefined. All in all, surplus value that sustains industrial
capital can exist, in principle, only thanks to this mechanism that worker in totality
buy back what they produce. Surplus value is finally realized on the consumption
point, the place where capital is confronted by alterity and compelled into a salto
mortale as a seller of commodiites (289).
…value is fully realized only in the process of circulation. Therefore, it is only here
that the moment for workers to be subject exists (291)….In our context, we rather
have to find the moment for class struggle in the theory of value form in capital(291).
….The split between production and consumption constitutes capital, while it is also
this moment that can terminate capital (291).
Those who are in the position of capital are subjective (active), while those who are
in the position of having to sell their labor power are inevitably passive. Therefore, it
is only a matter of inevitability that workers can only engage in the economic struggle
where they negotiate with capitalists over their commodity value. In Capital, the
moment for workers to be subjective is found when the shift of workers’ position in
the categories—commodity-money—takes place: from the labor-power commodity
to being the money en masse that buys commodities (293).
Futur anterieur
What we perceive as constituted in production (value) is in truth the product of
exchange:
The temporality is that of the future anterieur: value “is” not immediately, it
only “will have been,” it is retroactively actualized, performatively enacted. In
production, value is generated “in itself,” while only through the completed
circulation process does it become “for itself.” (zizek, 2006b 52)
Transcendental apperception (illusion)
Borrowing from Kant’s paradigmatic notion of transcendental apperception, Karatani
claims that in itself the value of a commodity does not exist, since it is determined in
a system of relations with other commodities – which is why the price of the
same product differs from country to country, or even within the same country
(Karatani, 228)
Surplus value is thus conceived as the invisible transcendental link between two
different surface phenomenon: M-C (production) and C-M’ (circulation). What
one should add here is that, precisely because value is purely formal
determination, in itself nonexistent, it always-already operates reflexively, i.e.,
within each of the two surface phenomena (production and circulation) from
whose tension it results
Instead of elections (democratic parliamentarism), he suggests instituting a lottery to
decide who is temporarily in charge of associations. The solution would take us
beyond the capitalist state and not yet answer the need for centralized power to
coordinate operations. The function of this centre would be “just like
transcendental apperception X and not something substantial[…] the
associations would be united by a central committee consisting of a
representative of each dimension (Karatani, 306)
Karatani discusses at great length the various parallax shifts in Marx’s argument; as
Marx moved from Germany to France to England, he also moves from the
critique of German idealism (Hegel and young Hegelians), to the critique of
French “utopian” socialism and political theory, to the critique of British
empiricism and political economy.
Karatani argues that Marx’s critique of political economy operates precisely in the
antinomy, or parallax, between the labor theory of value, on the one hand, and
Bailey’s (and the neoclassical economists’) positivistic dismissal of value theory
altogether on the other.
According to Karatani, Marx rejects Ricardian essentialism (the labor theory of value
in its classical form), but also insists, against Bailey’s (and later, neoclassical)
nominalism, that a “transcendental reflection on value” (6) is necessary in order to
make sense of capitalism as a system….In a parallel way to how the empty,
transcendental form of the “I” keeps subjectivity together through time, so the
transcendental category that Marx calls the “value-form” keeps the capitalist
economy together….Marx is making a Kantian “transcendental” argument, when he
posits the double value-form of the commodity (use-value and exchange-value)
against both Ricardo’s essentialist (substantive) labor theory of value, and against the
nominalist, positivist and ultimately neoclassical rejection of the very category of
“value”.
Karatani here argues that value and surplus value, as posited in volume 1 of Capital,
are the transcendental conditions of possibility of capitalism. Value and surplus value
are the preconditions that make it possible, empirically, for capitalist profit. But value
and surplus value are themselves never encountered empirically. Empirically, we only
encounters prices and profits.
…a transcendental condition of experience. We only encounter “surplus value” in and
for itself in the way that we encounter time, space, and causality in and for
themselves. They are conditions of experience, rather than things that we encounter
within experience. This is why, Karatani says, “Marx’s labor theory of value and
Ricardo’s are fundamentally different”; for Marx, “it is not that input labor time
determines the value, but conversely that the value form (system) determine the
social[ly] necessary labor time” (244)
Transcendental and value form: “all the enigmas of capital’s drive are inscribed in the
theory of value form….Value form is a kind of form that people are not aware of
when they are placed within the monetary economy; this is the form that is
discovered transcendentally” (9)
Transcendental and money: Money, Karatani says, “is like a Kantian transcendental
apperception X, as it were…money as substance is an illusion, but more correctly, it is
a transcendental illusion, in the sense that it is hardly possible to discard it.” (6).
Marx contrasts money as a transcendental form with “the substantial aspect of
money such as gold or silver. To take it substantially it, to Marx, fetishism (196). Since
its use-value is purely formal or transcendental, money doesn’t have to take the form
of precious metals; it can be made of paper, or even be entirely virtual….”Anything –
anything – that is exclusively placed in the general equivalent form becomes money;
that is, it achieves the right to attain anything in exchange” (7)….
As a universal equivalent or transcendental form, money does not merely put
external terms (objects sold as commodities) into relation; it molds and alters those
terms by the very fact of equating them (money as universal equivalent is what
transforms things into commodities in the first place).
Transcritique
For Karatani, such “trans-critique” is made possible by, and exercised through, the
reflexive movement in-between cultures, communities, and cognitive
perspectives. …Kant and Marx’s outsider-position vis-à-vis their subject matter and
context. Karatani illustrates this by Kant’s refusal to become a state philosopher by
remaining in Konigsberg, and through Marx’s outsider-postion vis-à-vis the German,
the French, and the British cultures respectively. More importantly, he suggests that
Kant oscillates between, rather than “sublates”, rationalism and empiricism, while
Marx is taken to stand in between Ricardo (emphasizing the producer sphere of
capitalism) and the unjustly forgotten Bailey (emphasizing the circulation sphere as
value-gererating)….This was to see things neither from his own viewpoint, nor from
the viewpoint of others, but to face reality that is exposed through difference
(parallax) (3)…..Such a methodological outsider-or in-between position allows both
thinkers to radically question the existing presuppositions shared by their
contemporaries.
From parallax to transcendental
In Karatani’s account, Marx delineates the “transcendental conditions” of a capitalist
economy. But these conditions involve antinomies, which can only be traversed
(since they are never definitely resolved) by a process of continual “parallax,” or
shifting of focus between one position and another. A Kantian “transcendental
deduction” occurs in the form of what Karatani calls “transcritique”, a shuttling
back and forth between the disparities generated by the shifts in perspective.
Karatani suggests, therefore, that the often-alleged “discrepancy” between Volumes
1 and 3 of Capital is actually quite similar to what happens in Kant, “whose first
critique tackles the issue of subject in general, but whose third critique engages
in the issue of plural subjects” (243)….In Volume 3, “Marx deals with plural
capitals, while at the same time transcendentally asking how it is empirically
possible that they realize profit or the rate of profit” (243) Just as the Third
Critique involves an antinomy between 1) the universal nature of aesthetic
judgment (the fact that it demands to be accepted universally) and 2) the
ungrounded singularity of an individual aesthetic judgment( the fact that it
cannot appeal to any preexisting concepts for justification), so Marx’s Volume 3
involves an antinomy between 1) the grounding of price in value, and of profit in
surplus value (Thesis: Ricardo); and 2) the independence of price from value and
of profit from surplus value (Antithesis: Bailey)
Surplus—parallax—transcendental
Surplus value itself, as a transcendental form, is predicated on a discontinuity, or
incommensurability, between heterogeneous registers of value. In Marx’s most
direct formulation of the theory, there is a discontinuity in the realm of
production between the value of the worker’s labor-power as a commodity, and
the value of the commodities produced by that labor power. But when surplus
value is realized in the realm of circulation, the incommensurability is one
between the two circuits C-M-C and M-C-M’
Regulative idea
A regulative idea, as defined by Kant, s “an ideal which constantly offers the ground
to criticize reality” (Karatani, 217). Karatani considers modes of exchange D,
association, a regulative idea….Unlike constitutive concepts, regulative ideas
“are concepts of what would be the final state of a practice according to some
absolute standard” (6). They do not need to be considered as if they already
occur or even will exist….nourishing association as a regulative idea is essential
because one must have a theoretical faith to imagine the possibility for
transcending the capitalist nation state.
Salto Mortale
The emphasis falls on what Marx called salto mortale performed by the commodity
the moment it is sold, thus realizing its value which, as Marx stressed through
his reading of Bailey, enjoys a purely relational status; thus it does not exist in
itself but only if inserted into a system of equivalence with other commodities
From Parallax to ethical
When in his little known text ‘Dreams of a visionary Explained by Dreams of
Metaphysics” Kant wrote of the “pronounced parallax” resulting from adding to
my perspective “the notion of another’s reason outside of myself,” he was
attempting to prevent “optical delusion”, thus rectifying the meaning of human
knowledge (Kant quoted in Karatani, 47)….Kant’s stance, Karatani argues, ought
to be measured against his groundbreaking notion of parallax….Karatani’s next
step concerns the effort to solve what he sees as the Kantian problem broached
by Marx. Following Kant, he argues that mortality is the only solution to the
ontological deadlock of thought. From a Marxian angle, Kant’s moral law
provides a potential way out of the epistemological impasse embodied by
capital. Karatani goes so far as to claim that for Marx, “communism was a
Kantian categorical imperative, that is, practical and moral par excellence’
Karatani resorts to the image of the parallax to locate not only the origins of Kant’s
critical thought but especially the surplus that drives capital forward and
demands the intervention of a moral stance to realize an alternative economic
model
Ethical and exchange
The other can come from an outside community that does not share a common set
of rules (125). Yet this morality will never be achieved so long as we live in a
society dominated by commodity exchange (viii)
Ethical—others as ends---communism
[For Kant] becoming moral was less a question of good and evil than of being causa
sui and hence free, and this compels us to treat other people as free agents. The
ultimate message of Kantian moral law lies in the imperative: “Act so that you
use humanity, whether in your own person or in any other person, always at the
same time as an end, never merely as a means….” (Karatani, vii, viii)
In the context of a capitalist economy where people treat each merely as a means
to an end, the Kantian “kingdom of freedom” or “Kingdom of ends” clearly
comes to entail another new meaning, that is, communism (Karatani, vii, viii)
In this gap between appearance and the thing-in-itself resides an essential possibility
to challenge, revise, and transcend the current order. Moreover, Kant addresses
the need to go beyond the mere experience of appearances in the ethical
domain, where his categorical imperative gives immediate proof of the law of
reason. The Kantian path to ethical transcendence is crucial, first, since it
suggests the content of the categorical imperative, i.e., never to treat another
merely as a means, but always also as an end. Moreover, Karatani maintains that
this shows that Kant situates this ethical demand squarely in the emerging
capitalistic order, as the imperative to treat another never merely as a means is
clearly taking into account the capitalistic mode of instrumental reason, in which
others are economically reduced to mere means.
State---different Gramsci and Foucault
The problem with Gramsci and Foucault, Karatani argues, is that they see the state as
either civil society or immanent power because they only see it from within, i.e.,
they miss the crucial detail that the state exists in competition with other states,
and the competition is about capital: “No matter how social democratic the
state appears within itself, it is hegemonic to its exteriority – namely, even under
the slogan of “humanitarian intervention’ (Karatani, 275)
Bailey and Hume
Karatani notes that Bailey’s skepticism [regarding the labor theory of value] is similar
to Hume’s criticism that there is nothing like a Cartesian ego cogito (5)
Credit
One can here think of the role of credit. Money and finance/credit allow the
separation of acts of exchange (purchase and sale) in time and space.
“C-M(selling) and M-C (buying) are separate, and precisely for this reason, the
sphere of exchange is infinitely expandable in both space and time.
State and others as means
Karatani analyzes the modern social formation as the result of three modes of
exchange – reciprocity of gift and return, plunder and redistribution, and
commodity exchange—which combine to form the capitalist nation state.
Through the examination of Kant’s moral imperative, Karatani contends that so
long as we live within the confines of the capitalist nation state, we will treat
others merely as means to an end.
Nation—state—capital
With the protection of the state, the bourgeoisie cultivated the national identity,
which allowed for the creation of a unified market (278). Reciprocity and gift
return (mode of exchange A) that used to be practiced within the agrarian
communities was fictitiously recovered in the form of the nation.