Re: Capital is wrong

George,

Commodities are both use-values and exchange-values. Just because a
commodity is/becomes useful (why would you buy it otherwise?) does not
mean it is not a commodity. As for the distinctions between forms of
capital Marx would certainly not deny this--especially since your
distinctions of forms of capital are in part the result of his work. What
Marx is saying is that the wealth of capitalist society APPEARS or
PRESENTS itself as an immense accumulation of commodities. You say that
Marx is wrong because bourgeois society is not an immense accumulation of
commodities. Right! This is what Marx is arguing! The goal of capital is
to show that the commodity is bound up in a social totality. The criticism
Marx is making is the exclusive focus on exchange relations rather than
production relations, the former blinding people to facts of surplus
production in bourgeois society. Marx thus begins with the commodity to
reveal the core dynamic of capitalist production: capitalist accumulation.
He then concretizes these abstractions by fleshing out his analytical
skeleton with detailed historiography (which was, as Carl noted, never
completed). This was why Marx expended energy in "deconstructing"  
commodity fetishism--to reveal the social reality beneath the material
appearance of the commodity form.

Andrew Austin