Reflecting again on this question and in the light of Alfred Sohn-
Rethel's Geistige und koerperliche Arbeit (1970 -- the English translation
is unfortunately deficient), and his Warenform und Denkform (1971,
untranslated, as far as I know) with its remarkable 1936 critique of
the Frankfurt School, Statt einer Einleitung: Expose zur Theorie der
funktionalen Vergesellschaftung, Ein Brief an Theodor W. Adorno
(this was Sohn-Rethel's doctoral dissertation, and was also remarkable
for being published at all in Germany in 1936) -- it occurs to me that
(and perhaps this is all just restating the obvious):
1. The commodity is literally a prefiguring [embodiment] of
need-satisfaction. It therefore presupposes the existence of an objective
correlative (a consumer) with an unsatisfied need.
2. In capitalist commodity-production the commodity capital produces is
labour-power, whose use-value is the capacity to valorise capital [an evidence
of the hypertrophy of commodity-production and the exhaustion of capitalism's
historical mission is the coexistence of historically-unprecedented pools
of pauperised, landless proletarians in the reserve army -- 1.5 bn at least --
with the overaccumulation of capital in the metropoles and a high-waged
workforce of no more than 200 million worldwide, required to produce the
mass of relative surplus-value needed to valorise it].
3. The capitalist labour-process is therefore a moment of the [rigorous]
exclusion of Nature (matter) since commodities cannot be realised except as
values, ie shorn of phenomenal [material] form. The content is value, the form
is matter.
4. The capitalist mode of production therefore requires as its 'adequate'
science a mode of nature-objectification, without which valorisation is
literally impossible and even unthinkable.
5. Capitalism thus calls into existence Nature as object-realm, in order
to exclude it by knowing it [the task of philosophy began with the first
true price-forming markets, presumably in Periclean Athens. But Zeno and
Aristarchus could not become Newton and Galileo until proto-capitalism
already launched the process of self-expaning value production].
6. Once Nature is known [objectified, thru the historical working-out of
bourgeois science] the space between need and satiation must collapse, both
phenomenologically-speaking, and in value terms. The commodity cannot by
definition be the bearer of a prefigured need-satisfaction if it already
embodies/is the other it prefigures. Equally, the exclusion of Nature
collapses/is inverted once Nature qua object is totalised by production, which
is the long-run tendency of science even though this totalising arrives
perversely through the mystificatory processes of detail labour and reductive
science. In the full development of the social division of labour, Nature itself
is captured and above all the nature of humans.
7. Thus value as the object of production (ie its self-expansion) points
irretrievably beyond its origins to its self-effacement, and its work is
completed when the social divison of labour is totalised, a historical state
which self-expanding value prefigures in its own totalised nature. Thus the
ultimate fate of capitalism is written all over its fate: to be extinguished in
its own development, out of which will also be extinguished the
phenomenological [and physiological!] distinction between needs and
satisfactions.
8. The true object of production is humankind itself, and just as humankind is
imprisoned within the reifications of bourgeois science, so will it be
emancipated when that science loses all objectivity and becomes the moment of
self-creation.
Mark
