Content area
Full text
Only through developed industry-i.e., through the medium of private property-does the ontological essence of human passion come into being in its totality as in its humanity; the science of man is therefore itself a product of man's establishment of himself by practical activity.
-Karl Marx
In the exposition of volume 1 of Capital, Marx presents the transition from capitalism viewed from the perspective of relations of exchange, including the sale and purchase of labor-power, to the capitalism viewed from the perspective of its production as analogous to the transition from "appearance" to "truth." In commodity exchange, equivalents are always exchanged for equivalents. Thus, barring swindling, it is impossible to understand from the point of view of exchange how valorization, the increase of value, is possible. In order to grasp this secret, which after all is the heart of the capitalist mode of production, it is necessary to leave the market of exchange and turn to an examination of production.
Let us therefore, in company with the owner of money and the owner of labor-power, leave this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone, and follow them into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there hangs the notice "No admittance except on business." Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital itself is produced. The secret of profit-making must at last be laid bare. (1977, 280; emphasis mine)
In turning to production Marx finds "labor-power" the commodity uniquely capable of producing more than it costs and thus producing value. It is in the abode of production, after the commodified labor-power has been sold, that Marx finds not only the difference constitutive of value but also the asymmetries of power which underlie and support the apparent equivalences of exchange. The owner of laborpower has no choice but to sell his or her labor-power as a necessary condition of survival, while the buyer of labor-power can theoretically select from a large market of possible workers. Asymmetry underlies the apparent exchange of equivalents. This is why Marx presents the transition from exchange to production with such a dense rhetorical flair that indicts the entire bourgeois liberal doctrine of rights. "The sphere of circulation or commodity...