A very insightful article, but I do think that something smells fishy here! I would argue that exchange value is essential to nature, as opportunity cost of making survival decisions, which would lead us to reconsider capitalism as necessary extension of nature rather than a contingent difference from nature.
A lion chooses which prey to hunt, therefore makes a comparison between hunting for a gazelle or a buffalo. And of course any comparison of different things with 'greater than' or 'lesser than' already implies that somewhere in there is an equal sign. So, life constantly makes judgments, not abstractly, but certainly intelligibly. Exchange is already implicit in all of life, not only human society. Exchange value exists in nature! Things are not different in nature, but are always being compared, maybe even more so than we do, because survival is more urgent! If we give some credence to nature, or to life at the very least, and compare ourselves to life, then we see human abstraction as an extension of (rather than distinction from) life.
So critique of capitalism vis-a-vis exchange values is actually critique of nature! Oh boy! Maybe this is one of those things we should take as necessity rather than contingency, no?
In general, the idea of 'facticity' itself can make any thinking run amok, since almost anything of relevance is already human, or alive at the very least. And so if we contrast X human quality with the 'facticity', and we say that X doesn't exist in nature, that it was a human invention, a 'primary difference' introduced by humanity so to speak. Arguments taking the shape of 'primary difference' of humanity appear in all different kinds of thinking and leads to all different kinds of conclusions. But really, it's rooted in the abstraction 'facticity' (which, iirc from some of you Hegelians online, Hegel critiques Kant's noumena by saying that they are already posited by himself from a phenomenal perspective, and therefore Kant is in a catch-22 - I would relate 'facticity' to 'noumena' here).
So I think in this article you are starting from noumena or things-in-themselves or facticity rather than exchange values or relationality or phenomenology as a primary feature of nature, which is what I fundamentally disagree with.
That's an excellent comment, and in fact that's exactly the direction the paper heads in, especially when we move into considering Karatani. The "value-form" does not necessarily have to be reduced to just how it is quantified in labor, which begs the question of all the different ways "exchange" manifests in nature and society. It exactly this point that puts the emphasis not on "changing the labor-form" (as has been traditionally focused on) but an emphasis on changing "modes of exchange," which is a shift in "how we value" (not "that" we value). There is always something like valuation and exchange in nature and society, so the question is how we might shift these and Capital from Discourse to Rhetoric (to use my language). We should discuss this! Again, excellent comment, and I hope you are well!.
Hey O.G. Rose!
A very insightful article, but I do think that something smells fishy here! I would argue that exchange value is essential to nature, as opportunity cost of making survival decisions, which would lead us to reconsider capitalism as necessary extension of nature rather than a contingent difference from nature.
A lion chooses which prey to hunt, therefore makes a comparison between hunting for a gazelle or a buffalo. And of course any comparison of different things with 'greater than' or 'lesser than' already implies that somewhere in there is an equal sign. So, life constantly makes judgments, not abstractly, but certainly intelligibly. Exchange is already implicit in all of life, not only human society. Exchange value exists in nature! Things are not different in nature, but are always being compared, maybe even more so than we do, because survival is more urgent! If we give some credence to nature, or to life at the very least, and compare ourselves to life, then we see human abstraction as an extension of (rather than distinction from) life.
So critique of capitalism vis-a-vis exchange values is actually critique of nature! Oh boy! Maybe this is one of those things we should take as necessity rather than contingency, no?
In general, the idea of 'facticity' itself can make any thinking run amok, since almost anything of relevance is already human, or alive at the very least. And so if we contrast X human quality with the 'facticity', and we say that X doesn't exist in nature, that it was a human invention, a 'primary difference' introduced by humanity so to speak. Arguments taking the shape of 'primary difference' of humanity appear in all different kinds of thinking and leads to all different kinds of conclusions. But really, it's rooted in the abstraction 'facticity' (which, iirc from some of you Hegelians online, Hegel critiques Kant's noumena by saying that they are already posited by himself from a phenomenal perspective, and therefore Kant is in a catch-22 - I would relate 'facticity' to 'noumena' here).
So I think in this article you are starting from noumena or things-in-themselves or facticity rather than exchange values or relationality or phenomenology as a primary feature of nature, which is what I fundamentally disagree with.
Hope this makes sense!
All the best,
Jurij
That's an excellent comment, and in fact that's exactly the direction the paper heads in, especially when we move into considering Karatani. The "value-form" does not necessarily have to be reduced to just how it is quantified in labor, which begs the question of all the different ways "exchange" manifests in nature and society. It exactly this point that puts the emphasis not on "changing the labor-form" (as has been traditionally focused on) but an emphasis on changing "modes of exchange," which is a shift in "how we value" (not "that" we value). There is always something like valuation and exchange in nature and society, so the question is how we might shift these and Capital from Discourse to Rhetoric (to use my language). We should discuss this! Again, excellent comment, and I hope you are well!.