Poetry 1

Haiku 1
I tried writing haiku
The format is boring though
Too compressed for me

Haiku 2
I went to a gym,
The resolutioners weren't,
There. Maybe gave up?

BAKEunin
I went to Bakunin the baker
In the hopes he would bake me a cake
But Bakunin the baker
Said, "Jews are all evil"
Then split the First International for politics sake.

Modernism and Mirrors

The opening movement of this piece uses a compositional technique which Gould refers to as 'Spiegelbild' (Mirror image). Each complete statement of the tone row is followed by the same material in retrograde. For example, the piece opens with four rhythmic groups of four. The first two groups of four contain the complete row, the third group is a retrograde of the second and the fourth of the first. Visually we could represent it something like this, with each number representing a semiquaver beat:

1234   5678   8765   4321

The entire first movement is constructed along similar lines.

The use of mirror image techniques is not combined to the literal mirroring of phrases in the first movement. The second movement is a canon in strict contrary motion. Whatever melodic interval is featured in the right hand, the left hand features exactly the same interval in the opposite direction.

Similar symmetrical principles can be found throughout Webern's works. The row for the second movement of the second movement of his Symphony Op. 21, for example is as follows:

F - Ab - G - F# - Bb - A - Eb - E - C - C# - D - B

If we count the number of semitones between each note we get the following:

3 - 1 - 1 - 4 - 1 - 6 - 1 - 4 - 1 - 1 - 3

From this it can easily be perceived that the second six notes of the row are formed from the retrograde of the first six, transposed by six semitones (This interval forms a comparison with the tonic-dominant relations central to tonal music).

The structure of the piece itself consists of a theme, followed by seven variations, and then a coda. The initial presentation of the theme consists of the row being played by the clarinet, while the horns and harp play an accompaniment derived from the retrograde of the row. The first variation consists of the row, transposed up a fifth to begin on C, stated melodically by the first violin. The accompaniment in the second violin is the retrograde of the row beginning on F#, the viola plays the inversion beginning on E, and the cello plays the retrograde inversion beginning on Bb. Each of the lines consists of the melody, followed by an exact mirror, but because the entries are separated in time and the phrases are of differing length, the overall mirror is not exact (The first violin entry begins the variation while the cello ends it, for example).

The fourth variation, which forms the center of the piece, has a kind of mirrored construction, which Webern himself makes much of in his lecture series The Path to New Music. In the same work he makes much of the analogy with the Sator Square:

SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS

This material should be enough to show the importance that Webern placed on Palindromic procedures.

An analogy presents itself to the technique of another composer working at the same time, Olivier Messiaen. In his book 'The Technique of my Musical Language', Messiaen discusses the use of two related concepts - non-retrogradable rhythms and modes of limited transposition. A non-retrogradable rhythm is a rhythm which is the same whether read forwards or backwards. Their construction is exceptionally simple, the total rhythmic unit consists of a rhythm immediately followed by the retrograde and joined to it by a common central rhythmic value. The basic example given by Messiaen is Semiquaver-Quaver-Semiquaver.

Messiaen relates the principle presented by non-retrogradable rhythms in the rhythmic dimension to modes of limited transposition in the melodic dimension. A mode of limited transposition is a group of notes which can only be transposed a limited number of times before repeating itself. The principle of construction is very similar to the construction of non-retrogradable rhythms, the mode actually consists of a combination of a smaller group of notes and it's transposition, with the transposition beginning on the last note of the first group.

Apart from the fascination with palindromic principles of musical construction, Messiaen and Webern share the unfortunate fate of having had their works analysed as if the technical principles of it's construction was the point. One can point to two extreme points of view in the music of the second half of the 20th century by way of contrast. Milton Babbitt came increasingly to regard the musical score as the central point of focus, with compositional technique becoming a central concern, and audibility essentially irrelevant. Steve Reich on the other hand attempted in his early works to utilise only those technical means which are directly perceivable to the listener.

The principles of construction which Messiaen and Webern utilise are not directly audible to the listener. Nonetheless, for neither composer, the point of the music always remains on some level the aural result, and this aural result is always shaped by technique, whether or not the technique is directly identifiable. The listener unacquainted with technical discussions of 20th century music is unlikely to have heard the terms non-retrogradable rhythm or mode of limited transposition, much less be able to identify their use in a piece of music simply from hearing it. None the less, the use of these techniques obviously lends a certain quality to the music and is deployed in the service of an identifiable aesthetic conception:

"Let us think now of the hearer of our modal and rhythmic music; he will not have time at the concert to inspect the nontranspostions and the nonretrogradations, and, at that moment, these questions will not interest him further; to be charmed will be his only desire. And that is precisely what will happen; in spite of himself he will submit to the strange charm of impossibilities: a certain effect of tonal uniquity in the nontransposition, a certain unity of movement (where begginning and ending are confused because identical) in the nonretrogradation, all things which will lead him progressively to that sort of theological rainbow which the musical language, of which we seek edification and theory, attempts to be."

Webern himself seems to have harboured similar sentiments, emphasising in his comments to performers the importance of the expressive value of the music as opposed to it's formal and constructivist qualities.

This is not to deny the striking aesthetic dissimilarities between the music of Webern and Messiaen. Messiaen's music is undoubtedly incredibly rich and sensual, the product of French and Russian influences, particularly Debussy and Stravinsky, as well as the influence of his Roman Catholic faith, while Webern's music is often stark and austere, reflecting his German roots and the existentialist mode of his faith.

The use of 'mirror' techniques in the music seems to be incredibly suggestive, not only from the technical but from the higher theoretical point of view. A mirror image is something which is identical yet not identical. It is a unity on some level of identity and difference. The identity of identity and non-identity is of course one of the ways in which Hegel phrased his philosophical mission statement.

Hegel's discussion of these issues is of course difficult to separate from mysticism. In his Metaphysics Aristotle discusses the law of identity as a foundational principle and rages against the perceived absurdities which those like Heraclitus who deny must originally fall into. If a thing can be both A and not-A, then we lose any kind of foundation for discussion. What is to prevent us from such absurdities as saying that a tree is a boat, a sheep and a mountain range? Indeed, Aristotle claims that all that is recquired to refute Heraclitus is for him to speak. Those who deny the law of identity can only be taken seriously if they retain a plant-like existence.

The mystical identity of identity and non-identity, formulated in terms of the unity of opposites, of which latter day Marxists were to make so much of, is the principle by which he attempts to bring us out of the realm of reflective philosophical abstractions towards a vision of the transcendent freedom which he saw as being central to his vision of human nature or 'Spirit'.

Of course for Hegel there have been three primary modes through which humanity has come to consciousness of this freedom. Apart from philosophy, art and religion have also expressed this vision of freedom, although in which ways which are deficient when compared to philosophy.

One can begin then to form an understanding of the fundamental mysticism which underlies the music of Webern and Messiaen, the unity of identity and non-identity, a contradiction which drives towards a result which expresses the transcendent freedom of the human spirit.

The Twelve Tone System and Tradition

"I think it has to be a stupid blog, the rest are taken." - ZeroNowhere

Duly noted. Riffing on the theme of stupidity being doing the same thing multiple times and expecting different results, here's a riff on themes, more specifically thematic material (Get it? Riffing? Themes? Music?).

The twelve tone system is often seen as a 'revolutionary' turning point in the history of music. According to Howard Goodall, who has a degree from Oxford or something, and writes terrible music, and books justifying the existence of his terrible music, the tradition which developed out of Schoenberg's system has produced 'not a single piece in 100 years that any normal person could listen to.' This is high praise indeed, but we shouldn't get too excited yet.

I think the significance of the twelve tone system can be easily understood in the context of western music up to that point. The characteristic texture of that tradition is (or was) contrapuntal. Beginning with the medieval proscription of parallel fourths and fifths, the gradual recognition of the third as a consonant interval, and the developing preference for contrary motion, the initial development of polyphonic technique reached a peak in the music of the 16th century.

This 'modal' style of counterpoint is marked by very limited concern for harmonic progression. Typically cadences only occur at the very end of a piece, every other harmony is simply a result of the relationship between the melodic lines. This is why students since the early 18th century have been introduced to the study of counterpoint through the Palestrina style - it allows for a pure focus on the treatment of consonance and dissonance without adding the extra complication of having to produce 'correct' harmonic progressions except for in the final cadence.

The development of the sense of harmonic progression and key, referred to generically as 'tonality' or sometimes 'functional harmony', which was to remain a part of music until the first half of the 20th century, produced a change in contrapuntal style, reaching an original peak in the music of JS Bach. The sense of stability provided by 18th century tonality, as well as the facility provided by writing instrumental rather than vocal music, allowed for much greater freedom in the use of chromaticism and dissonances. In the most famous example, the B minor fugue from Book I of the WTC, Bach writes a fugue with a theme which uses all twelve notes of the chromatic scale.

By the end of the 19th century the development of chromaticism threatened to destroy the tonal foundation which it had grown out of. Beginning with Debussy composers rapidly began to abandon the rules on which the development of the previous 200 years of music had been based. In the Debussian style, any chord is allowed to follow any other chord, with the only consideration being, for Debussy at least, the beauty of the sound.

Schoenberg characterised the prior history of music as a gradual process of the emancipation of the dissonance. Audiences had been accustomed to hear more remote key relations and more elaborate dissonances as an integral part of musical style. But the dissonance was still treated as dissonance, that is, as something to be resolved.

The essential element of the contrapuntal style, whether of Palestrina, Bach or even Wagner, is the treatment of dissonances. The kinds of extended chords which we accept as an integral element of the style of Debussy would sound peculiar or even discordant if inserted at random into a piece by Mozart, because the Mozartean style treats those relationships as dissonances, not as free sonorities.

But what happens when, as in Debussy's music, chords other than the triad can be treated as consonant, and the momentum provided by the need for harmonic resolution becomes lost as all chords can be treated as equally good at any point in a piece as any other?

This is not to say that a contrapuntal style of sorts is not possible without the traditional methods of treating dissonance. In fact, if no interval or chord is considered dissonant or in need of resolution, it would seem that initially we are provided with the greatest possible contrapuntal freedom. We can write any melodic line against any other and the result will always be harmonically 'correct', because we have given up entirely any notion of harmonic correctness.

Yet in another sense the emancipation of the dissonance completely destroys the contrapuntal style, because the essence of that style consists precisely in it's treatment of dissonances. When dissonance ceases to be a concern of musical style, that means the death of contrapuntal art. No technique is required to arbitrarily combine any given melodic line with any other.

This is where the twelve tone system comes in. And although it was indeed at the time a 'revolutionary' conception, I think in one sense it is perhaps one of the most conservative developments in the history of 20th century music. I mean in this way - the twelve tone system is an attempt to rescue contrapuntal technique from the apparent abyss into which it seems fated to fall once musical style ceases to regard any combination of notes as dissonant.

It is well known that Schoenberg first developed the technique in the early 20's, a time which also saw the development of 'neo-classicism' and the 'new objectivity'. As Stravinsky and his cohorts sought to beat back the expressionistic excesses of romanticism and return to Baroque and Classical ideals of proportion and clarity of line, Schoenberg introduced the world to the twelve tone system with his Suite for Piano Op. 25. It might seem peculiar that such an innovation in technique should be introduced to the world in a piece which is formally modeled on a Baroque dance suite. But as we have already detailed this is one of the most conservative artistic 'revolutions' that could be imagined.

Schoenberg's pupil Webern is often regarded as the bridge between the style of the former and the music which emerged after WWII written by composers like Boulez, Stockhausen and Luigi Nono. Certainly Webern seems to have been the most enthusiastic advocate adopter of the twelve tone system. The music of Schoenberg and Alban Berg always has a fundamental tension between the new style and an immense nostalgia for the old, a nostalgia which would lead Schoenberg himself to return occasionally to writing tonal music. Webern's music is often praised or derided because he alone seems to lack affection for the romantic past.

And yet, Webern embodies the contradiction between revolution and reaction which is present in the Second Viennese school to the most extreme extent. He had gained his musical education under the tutelage of the musicologist Guido Adler, and had become enthralled by the musical technique of the renaissance contrapuntal masters. He alone threw himself heart and soul into the twelve-tone system because he saw in it the way back to the strict contrapuntal technique which he had so admired in the 15th and 16th century masters.

Hopefully this gives a general idea of the significance of the music of the Second Viennese school. Generally, as I have said, it is music which in it's fundamental aesthetic should give no issues to the listeners of Classic.fm. That it has not made headway here is I believe a simple matter of historical contingency. I have no doubt that in a few years hence pieces such as this will make their way into the Classic.fm hall of fame, once it is seen correctly as a bulwark against modern degenerate forms of music:

History and Politics

We should not be looking to history as a catalogue of political positions which we can translate into contemporary practice, as if history was just some grand revolutionary laboratory. This transforms contemporary politics into an endless discussion over the minutiae of the past, and the politics of the past into a theater of shadow puppets, reflecting only the author's contemporary political concerns. In a similar vein, Frederick Bier criticised analytical historians of philosophy for using history as a veil for contemporary debates, transforming Kant, for example, into a 'cognitivist', or Hegel into a 'neo-Kantian', 'social epistemologist'.

This puppetmasters view of history, leads to an inability to comprehend the real historical process. If Hegel is made acceptable to contemporary philosophers by robbing him of his speculative abstractions and his 'absolute Spirit', how are we to make sense of the later development of the Hegelian school? Robbing the past of it's content ultimately leads to total impotence in understanding the present.

The process of history is not a closed one moving towards a definite preconceived end point. Contemporary Left Communist organisations might like to view the history of the 'Left' as moving inexorably towards the validation of their own positions. This would be to ignore all the elements of contradiction and opposition in that history. It means reading history backwards instead of forwards.

Men and women make history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing. The emphasis here should be on the fact that it is real men, and real women, in real circumstances, who are the ones making history, and not any ideological abstractions. To reduce the history of the period from 1914 to 1927, for example, to a history of various positions on parliament, the unions, the 'united front', the 'national and colonial question', would be to write a history of ghosts.

Taking a 'position' on this or that historical event - for or against 1917, for or against Brest-Litovsk, for or against the Spanish Civil War - is all too easy. All I need to do is make the decision, this or that. Nothing consequential emerges. On the other hand, when we begin to really look at, analyse and attempt to understand and explain events, countless difficulties emerge. This is the point at which theoretical production begins, as opposed to the formation of positions.

The difficulty in writing about Hegel

In our previous post we promised to undergo a study of Hegel's Logic. Although we have in fact finished reading the Logic, what we noted was the difficulty of writing about this work. This is a result of personal inadequacy, although we wanted to say many things, we could not state anything that we considered really important.

Hegel's philosophy, if we are to do justice to his thought, cannot be considered separately from the history of philosophy. He considered philosophy and the history of philosophy to be essentially the same thing.The stages arrived at by thought in the course of the Logic all have analogies in the history of western philosophy, and Hegel himself draws many of these analogies - between the stage of pure Being and the philosophy of Parmenides, between that of Becoming and Heraclitus, the stage of Being-for-self and the One and Many to atomism. 

Most significantly, the all important transition in the Logic from the absolute substance to the Concept, the leap from necessity to freedom, is also a sublation of the system of Spinoza (And again it is Hegel himself who notes that the stage of the absolute substance corresponds to Spinozism, and the sublation of this to the sublation of Spinozism).

Lacking the full range of philosophical resources to do justice to Hegel, we nevertheless found ourselves drawn to writing about him. Rather than engage in this systematically (a style which would suit the personality of Hegel), we preferred to do it more sporadically and freely (a style which suits our own personality).

We also find ourselves as a matter of course always drawn back inexorably to Marx, and particularly again to Capital. We feel compelled to explore more deeply the interconnections between the Logic and Capital in as thorough a manner as possible, but this involves more work, and more reading of Marx, which takes time.

At present we do have a specific plan to write on a certain aspect of overlap between Marx and Hegel, on which more later.

What is the nature of Hegel's Logic?

We have decided to embark on a study of Hegel's Science of Logic. We will be reading from the translation by George di Giovani published in 2010 by Cambridge University Press.

The first question that presents itself to us is, what type of book is it exactly that we are reading? After all, Hegel's Logic is neither a textbook of logic, nor metaphysics in the traditional sense.

It seems that we cannot answer this question satisfactorily merely from our preliminary readings of the text. Hegel himself tells us that "knowledge of [Logic] only emerge[s] as the final result and completion of it's whole treatment." (pp.23) We can merely recite a few preliminaries.

The subject matter is thinking. Or more specifically, we are told that we are to examine "conceptual thinking." From a survey of the table of contents we gather that what this means precisely will only be made fully clear to us in the third part, when we will be given the doctrine of the concept. So again, we are instructed to be patient - the full nature of the process itself can only be appreciated once we have already completed it.

The introduction first presents us with a picture of knowledge. In this picture, the truth is something outside thinking, an object for the consideration of a subject. The truth of thought consists in it's adhering to the nature of the object, but since thought is presupposed to be something entirely alien to it's object, it cannot actually represent the latter truly. What it produces in fact belongs solely to it's nature, and so the object remains as an unknowable thing-in-itself.

This picture should be familiar to us, it is the philosophy of Kant, the results of which were given to Hegel's generation to content with.

In contrast to this, we are told that traditional metaphysics had a higher point of view, inasmuch as it began from the standpoint of the unity of thinking and the thing to be thought.

But then onto the scene comes the Understanding.

Understanding it seems is a crucial dramatis personae in the dialectical drama. It abstracts, separates, and remains fixed in these separations. "The understanding determines, and holds the determination fixed." (pp.10)

But as it determines, it finds that it's determinations come into contradiction with each other. At this point, the critical philosophy of Kant and his followers retreats. Reality cannot possibly contradict itself. So, goes the sad tale, they gave up in despair. Since our attempts to grasp the thing-in-itself are contradictory, they cannot possibly succeed. We must retreat from metaphysics.

But where Kant left off, our great dramatic hero - dialectical reason - begins.

Dialectical reason is negative, it recognises contradiction and negates it. It is the negation of the self-negation of the fixed determinations which arise in the course of the activity of thinking. As such a negation of the negation, it is at the same time positive. Unlike skepticism it does not retreat in despair, but moves ever onward in it's progress towards the absolute.

Absolute knowledge is the standpoint from which the opposition between consciousness and it's object is completely resolved. It is the standpoint reached by us in the course of Hegel's prior work, the Phenomenology of Spirit. At this point, however, it is not our part to discuss this work.

Kant's philosophy, it seems, was one of despair. It left us with an unbridgeable separation between subject and object, between consciousness and the thing-in-itself. And it left us with contradictions that, while banished from the realm of reality, were left for the subject.

Hegel's philosophy rises above the separations and contradictions, it begins from the standpoint of absolute knowledge, and proceeds through dialectical reason. Proceeds to what though? To truth. A truth which is "the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite spirit."

And here the modern mind is bound to despair. Hegel's philosophy stands revealed as theology. What then, is it's interest to us?

From the subjective side, the profound influence that Hegel had on the history of thought cannot but provoke us, if we wish to gain insight, to study his work.

But I think there is something deeper.

Hegel conceived his Logic as the science of thinking. But this thinking is not something static, it is a form of activity, it produces thoughts. This is why it is possible for the discipline of philosophy, for example, to have a history. Although it would appear at first sight that the history of philosophy contradicts it's concept, since it is concerned with truth, and truth is something which it seems should not have a history, but be valid in any time and place, it is actually entirely in it's nature that it should be so.

Onto the scene jumps Marx. 'Activity' is not just the production of ideas, he tells us, it encompasses a much greater variety of things. In the first place, of course, the production of material life, and also of human social relationships (since production is always social production). Only after humanity has secured for itself a basic level of development of it's productive forces can it afford for one part of it to concern itself solely with mental labour - the production of ideas, and in fact this production is always bound up with material production (vulgar economics is in many ways merely a compendium of the ideas produced by the capitalist in the normal progress of his life).

In fact production, human activity as such, is not something which occurs in the misty realms of the absolute idea. It is a process of metabolism, through which human beings regulate their relationship to nature. It always has a natural and material basis. This is the meaning of materialism.

It is not the materialism of Helvetius or Holbach, in which human beings appear as passively determined by their environment. It is a materialism which has taken on board the active side, which, as Marx notes in his famous Theses on Feuerbach, was developed by idealism, however abstractly.

The assurances of analytical philosophy, that Hegel's contradictions are meaningless, his system a form of mysticism, cannot reassure us communists, who have grasped the reality of separation and opposition as it exists in contemporary life. If Hegel's philosophy is mystical, it is only because we live in a world in which everything is mystified, where the relationships between human beings take on the prosaically real appearance of relationships between things.

In such a world, the separation of subject and object appears as the separation between human beings, whose life essence is their activity, and the means of realising their activity. The subjects have become objectified, and the objects personified. Human physical existence has become a commodity, and the objects which humanity uses to produce it's material life have become personified in the figure of the capitalist.

If Hegel tries to rise above this world of separation and contradiction through pure contemplation, we cannot bemoan him the effort. He saw the problem, however obscurely refracted through the lens of speculative philosophy. This is the basis on which we retain interest in Hegel today, and the basis on which we commit ourselves to a study of the great drama of dialectical reason.

We know the what, and for ourselves also the why. All that remains is the work itself. This Hegel tells us is divided into two essential parts, the 'objective' and the 'subjective' logic. The former is divided into the doctrines of being and essence, and corresponds to some extent to what was formerly understood as ontology. The latter is the doctrine of the concept. All of this, we are told, will only be fully understood at the end of the journey. Let us begin.

Notes on Money Part I: Notes on the Value-Form

Marx notes in the preface to the first edition of Capital, that chapter one, and particularly the section on the value-form, will probably constitute the most difficult part of the whole analysis for the reader. If the history of Marxism shows us anything, it shows us that he was probably overly optimistic about the difficulties presented by the rest of his work to his readers.

Nonetheless the section on the value-form is both singularly peculiar and generally overlooked. That this is so can be seen from a recent book on the empirical workings of the UK banking system. In a chapter on the history of monetary theory we read Marx listed alongside the classical economists Ricardo and Mill, who viewed money as merely a veil over commodity exchange.

In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx explicitly warns us against seeing money as a mere technical instrument, cunningly devised to work around certain inconveniences which arise in the process of direct barter. Money is, of course, on Marx's account, a commodity. And it would seem to make sense to say that it does arise from more basic forms of the exchange relationship. It is not money as such, after all, that makes commodities exchangeable with one another, but their quality of being the products of human labour in the abstract.

But to express this quality of being the products of universal labour, their must be a 'form' appropriate to the 'content' of value. This form is the value-form.

The value-form is, in essence, the relationship between one commodity and another. The first chapter of Capital begins with the relationships between commodities, which are related to one another as equivalents. It finds lying behind this character of equivalence, their circumstance of being the products of abstract labour. But the form in which this initially presented itself now requires analysis.

The general development of the value-form is tripartite. We begin with the simple relationship of commodity to commodity. Then this expands, revealing an endless world of commodity relationships. Finally all commodities relate to one commodity in particular as the general equivalent. When a precious metal, in particular gold, is established as the general equivalent, we have the money form, which is in essence no different from the general form. The latter develops from the expanded form, which in it's essence is merely the multiplication of the simple form.

The analysis of the simple form of value is therefore the most important and difficult part.

We begin with a simple equation, x linen = y coats.

The first thing that is done is to separate the expression into two 'poles', the relative and equivalent forms. These poles have the character of being both inseparable and mutually exclusive. They mutually condition one another, linen can only take the relative form because coats, on the other hand, take the equivalent form and vice versa. But precisely because linen takes the relative position, it cannot function as equivalent.

We should be familiar with the general conception of a relationship of two sides, in which both are inseparable and mutually condition one another, yet also exclude each other. It is the general character of the relationship between wage-labour and capital. Capital can only function as such because it finds labour-power on the market as a commodity, and the labourer is only a wage-labourer because they have been separated from the objective conditions of realising their activity, and are confronted by the latter in the form of capital.

The mutually excluding aspect of the relationship may seem somewhat arbitrary in the simple value-form. We can just as easily flip the equation and express the value of coats in the value of linen. This constitutes a general defect of this form of value.

The commodity, as a use-value, is the physical existence of the commodity, it's body. The commodity can only express itself as a value in the body of another commodity. A commodity is the contradictory unity of use-value and value. We see that this is further developed in the form of value, in the separation into relative and equivalent poles. The relative form is the body of the commodity, which expresses it's value in terms of an equivalent. The equivalent is the other, in which value must be expressed.

Marx develops four pecularities of the equivalent form. These are (1) that a concrete use-value becomes the form of appearance of value (2) that concrete labour becomes the form of appearance of abstract labour (3) that private labour becomes the form of appearance of directly social labour (4) that the fetishism of commodities reaches a new height in the equivalent form.

Here we will briefly note the similarities between this part of the analysis, and the philosophy of Hegel. In Hegel's philosophy, particulars have no existence, no reality as such, except as incarnations of the absolute. What is rational is real, and what is real is rational. Similarly, in positing a particular thing as equivalent to another in exchange, this particular thing becomes the form of appearance of value. The result of a concrete labour process becomes the form in which the commodity reveals itself as the product of human labour in the abstract.

"This inversion (Verkehrung) by which the sensibly-concrete counts only as the form of appearance of the abstractly general and not, on the contrary, the abstractly general as property of the concrete, characterises the expression of value. At the same time, it makes understanding it difficult. If I say: Roman Law and German Law are both laws, that is obvious. But if I say: Law (Das Recht), this abstraction (Abstraktum) realises itself in Roman Law and in German Law, in these concrete laws, the interconnection becoming mystical." (The Value-Form)

This suggests in a preliminary way the unique power of the dialectic in understanding the laws of motion of bourgeois society.

Previously we noted that in the simple form of value, the exclusiveness of the two sides can seem somewhat arbitrary, since it is just as easy to subjectively consider things the other way around. This expression of value is also limited in that it only embraces two particular commodities. These difficulties force us to move from the simple to the expanded form.

The expanded form is essentially what it says, an expansion of the simple form. Whereas before we merely had two commodities, now we have an endless wealth of commodity relationships, each expressing their value in terms of all the others. This prompts a comparison with the Hegelian notion of a 'bad infinity', a merely endless repetition of a finite series. In contrast to this, real infinity "consists in being at home with itself in its other, or, if enunciated as a process, in coming to itself in its other." (Encyclopaedia Logic, Being)

In contrast to the bad infinity of the expanded form, the general form of value is the real infinity of the world of commodities. The whole world of commodities finds the adequate expression of their values in an other, a commodity excluded from the rest and standing apart from them. The precise nature of this commodity makes no odds, at a certain point in history it appears that cattle performed this function for example. The precious metals however, with their qualities of uniformity and infinite divisibility, in general prove the most adequate substance, hence the money-form.

Since the money-form is only established at first in the fact that all commodities measure their value in terms of money, the first determination to be examined is money as a measure of value. But this ideal determination also implies the possibility of actual exchange, and the function of money as a means of circulation. Finally as the unity of these two moments, we have the fully developed concept of money as universal wealth.

The section on money introduces for the first time, the possibility, though no more than the possibility, of crises. We have seen that money is merely a development from the nature of the commodity itself, as the contradictory unity of use-value and value. Hence, the possibility of crises actually derives itself from the commodity as such, the cell-form of bourgeois society.