Purloined Letter

Dear rplevy,

Es beginnet nämlich der Reichtum Im Meere
— Friedrich Hölderlin ‘Andenken’

I was inspired by your post. I wrote that money fetishism theory confused cause and effect. Money fetishism theory is in the game ruled by money. Let us look at the matter a little closer.

First of all, it is necessary to see that commercial intercourse comes up or we don’t need any means of exchange — In the Heian period Japan, a man wanted to have intercourse with a woman or he did not need waka — . It is necessary for economics to emphasize money and take away the religious veil of money. Shinichirō Tomonaga said that physics has tried to find out the true face of goddess who ruled nature through her veil — Martin Heidegger was sure that the goddess physics had seen was fake, but — . Money doesn’t conceal goddess — profound laws of physics — . But it’s true that goddess is beside money.

Karl Marx wrote as follows:

Money is a crystal formed of necessity in the course of the exchanges, whereby different products of labour are practically equated to one another and thus by practice converted into commodities. The historical progress and extension of exchanges develops the contrast, latent in commodities, between use-value and value. The necessity for giving an external expression to this contrast for the purposes of commercial intercourse, urges on the establishment of an independent form of value, and finds no rest until it is once for all satisfied by the differentiation of commodities into commodities and money. At the same rate, then, as the conversion of products into commodities is being accomplished, so also is the conversion of one special commodity into money. (*1)

Commercial intercourse needs money, and without money it has never gone through. We might just as well try to retain Catholicism without the Pope.(*2) There is no minimizing money. It must be noted that money is representation of a religion rules this capitalized world. And it is necessary to take note that money represents the value of commodities to construct variety — It is in market — . Money puts price tags on all creation. Money has relativized all things on the earth. Variety originates in market. Wealth originates in sea. Human beings have made sea the place for trades. When Friedrich Hölderlin reflected on his life by the sea, he was fascinated with the wealth of sea — But the wealth of sea donates the remains to the poets. Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter. (*3) It is necessary to take note that the poets long for variety and keep themselves a long away from there — . Sociality needs market. Market spiritualizes money. Commodities are relativized by money. It is, however, just this ultimate money form of the world of commodities that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers (*4) — And Hölderlin described seafaring as individual. Sie, / Wie Maler, bringen zusammen / Das Schöne der Erd und verschmähn / Den geflügelten Krieg nicht, und / Zu wohnen einsam, jahrlang, unter / Dem entlaubten Mast, wo nicht die Nacht / durchglãnzen / Die Feiertage der Stadt, / Und Saitenspiel und eingeborener Tanz nicht. (*5) It is necessary to leave prosperous markets by the sea, or we cannot find out individual producers — .

Money fetishism theory said that commodities were ensured equality under money. It will be right unless I disaffirm the representation system where only money is common language. Karl Marx found out crisis, it is latent in the money representation system. It is necessary to leave beach, or we cannot reflect on sea — like Hölderlin — . It is necessary to be away from variety money has developed, with the angel of history Walter Benjamin wrote. I told you, ‘It is necessary to see the relation between buying and selling.’ It is easy to understand that communication — There is nothing to divorce communication from sociality — depends a great deal on language. And it is impossible to consider buying and selling without consideration of money. Marx wrote as follows:

The exchange of commodities is therefore accompanied by the following changes in their form.

Commodity — Money — Commodity.
C—————— M ——————C.

The result of the whole process is, so far as concerns the objects themselves, C — C, the exchange of one commodity for another, the circulation of materialised social labour. When this result is attained, the process is at an end. (*5)

It was necessary for Karl Marx to expose the money representation system and be critical of the economists confused use-value and value, the money fetishism theory was useful for him then. When he was critical of the money representation system, Marx was a long away from the money fetishism theory. He exposed what make money transcend — our sociality — . Don’t treat the writings and theories of Marx as individually-resolved. It is necessary to gaze at the processing on the writing of Marx. A glance at above tells that selling is described as the form, C - M , and buying is M - C . In other words, selling is Meaning - Token and buying is Token - Meaning . Being faced with tokens — words, images, and sounds — , we have some senses. End users actualize use-value which is latent in commodity. And it is hard for authors to control his readers — It must be noted that writer sometimes makes himself his reader, but —. It is necessary for authors and producers to experience more hardship than end users. Value is not use-value, token is not meaning, but we let money metamorphose into commodity easily. For money transcends communities, nationalities, and politics, whenever we conform to the money representation system. Use-value is not value, meaning is not token, and we sometimes fail to let commodity metamorphose into money. For commodities are not transcendental. But commodities must be transcendental, or they cannot be sold. The leap taken by value from the body of the commodity, into the body of the gold, is, as I have elsewhere called it, the salto mortale of the commodity. If it falls short, then, although the commodity itself is not harmed, its owner decidedly is. (*7) Seafaring is commonly associated with hardship. It is necessary to see the conflict between use-value and value — meaning and token, electorate and elect — that is latent in commodity (When Marx was critical of indirect democracy, a representation system, he pointed out the conflict between electorate and elect, and said it caused the despotic leader such as Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte). This conflict causes crisis — economic depression — . Marx wrote as follows:

Circulation bursts through all restrictions as to time, place, and individuals, imposed by direct barter, and this it effects by splitting up, into the antithesis of a sale and a purchase, the direct identity that in barter does exist between the alienation of one’s own and the acquisition of some other man’s product. To say that these two independent and antithetical acts have an intrinsic unity, are essentially one, is the same as to say that this intrinsic oneness expresses itself in an external antithesis. If the interval in time between the two complementary phases of the complete metamorphosis of a commodity become too great, if the split between the sale and the purchase become too pronounced, the intimate connexion between them, their oneness, asserts itself by producing — a crisis. The antithesis, use-value and value; the contradictions that private labour is bound to manifest itself as direct social labour, that a particularised concrete kind of labour has to pass for abstract human labour; the contradiction between the personification of objects and the representation of persons by things; all these antitheses and contradictions, which are immanent in commodities, assert themselves, and develop their modes of motion, in the antithetical phases of the metamorphosis of a commodity. These modes therefore imply the possibility, and no more than the possibility, of crises. (*8)

Sociality let us go to market for exchange, but the conflict is latent in sociality harms exchange. And Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote that, it was not attrition rather than failure that social machines limited themselves to, these machines did not function unless they had gone wrong and burst. (*9) Capitalism contains critical bugs, but, without these bugs, capitalism does not function.

It is high time to question where goddess is? She is a commodity — So she tries to be transcendental — , and is double as a individual producer. She has intercourse with someone — It is commercial and sexual — . Prostitute is modern goddess. She is a demigod. An Feiertagen gehn / Die braunen Frauen daselbst / Auf seidnen Boden. (*10) Someone said that Die braunen Frauen, the brown women, were prostitutes. Friedrich Hölderlin anticipated Charles Baudelaire.

(*1) Karl Marx ‘Chapter Two: Excahnge’, “Capital Volume One”
(*2) same as above.
(*3) Friedrich Hölderlin ‘Andenken’, “Gedichte” Reclam p.104
(*4) Karl Marx ‘Chapter One: Commodities’, “Capital Volume One”
(*5) ‘Andenken’, “Gedichte” p.104
(*6) Karl Marx ‘Chapter Three: Money, Or the Circulation of Commodities’, “Capital Volume One”
(*7) same as above.
(*8) same as above.
(*9) Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, translated by Kōsuke IchiKura [ja] ‘Chapter Three: Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men’, “Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia” Kawade-Shobō-Shinsya, p.185
(*10) ‘Andenken’, “Gedichte” p.103