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# System prepended metadata

title: Notes on Capital from Leeds Reading Group

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# Notes on Capital from Leeds Reading Group
**Chapter 2: The Process of Exchange** (Dave)
 -exchange happens through bearers of commodities and through consensual exchange and it’s also a juridical relationship

[he slags off Proudhon for ages here but David Harvey basically says that this is about Marx critiquing what he sees as a flawed approach that will reproduce bourgeois values]

In this discussion - he says that it is only as bearers of these economic relations that they encounter each other 

For an owner of a commodity it has no direct use value otherwise he wouldn’t be trying to exchange it – it has exchange value – it has use value for its non-owner.

For it to become a use value it has to be exchanged i.e. its value has to be realised (for it to be exchangeable the abstract labour within it has to be recognised as such to be exchangeable for something else). On the other hand they have to be useful to be realised as values (exchangeable) - but we only see this through the process of exchange

Basically, saying it is simultaneously an individual and a social process (the exchanger wants to realise his own needs but doesn’t care about whether that exchange satisfies specific immediate needs on the other side of that transaction). – looks into this more

To the owner of every commodity it appears as a universal equivalent (understood as being worth x linen, y shirts etc) but because every commodity owner thinks like that there isn’t actually a functioning universal equivalent. They don’t move beyond being use values here until they are brought into relations with a universal equivalent so that their value is realised.

Money becomes money through a social process (crystallizes out of exchange)– this is deepened and broadened through exchange and the opposition of use-value and value – need to give external expression

“at the same rate, then, as the transformation of the products of labour into commodities is accomplished, one particular form of commodity is transformed into money” [this feels mega significant]

Commodity exchange relies upon the notion of people being independent owners of things and being alienable (separable from them)

Exchange becomes a normal process through repetition and because of that some things start being produced with the exclusive intention of being sold – from that point the distinction between usefulness in direct consumption and usefulness for exchange becomes firmly established.

An independent value form only arises from the multiplication of different commodities entering the world of exchange – problem and solution arise at the same time – it is at first momentary being called into being only for moments of exchange but crystallizes as money over time.

The form of money is accidental at first but it’s determined by the most useful items from outside a community or the most directly alienable (e.g. cattle) – it arises with nomads because cattle are alienable and because they frequently come into contact with external communities

 

Precious metals are naturally suited – needs a uniform quality, needs to be divisible and capable of being reassembled

 

Money then attains a dual use-value (special use value as a precious metal for fillings in teeth or luxuries) and a formal use value for its social function.

 

Money form is merely the reflection thrown upon a single commodity by the relations between all other commodities – people sometimes get it backwards and assume that there is no inherent value to gold/silver because they work from its specific form as universal equivalent

 

Money can only express its own value relatively in other commodities, once it enters into circulation its value is already given

 

What appears to happen is not that something becomes money because other commodities express their values in it but that commodities express their values in something because it is money

 

So basically over time money gets taken as a given so there’s a simultaneous fetishism of money alongside commodity fetishism

 

Peoples productive relationships assume this external form which is independent of them and they are related to each other in an atomistic way.