Social Reality as Appearance: Some Notes on Marx’s Conception of Reality

Abstract

Marx characterizes the commodity in Capital as a 'sensuous supersensible thing'. He rarely uses this formulation and its origin has hardly been investigated. This chapter examines the presentation of the 'real relationship', that is, the presentation of the reality of the genesis of money, the relationship between use-value and exchange value. Marx's first account of the materialist conception of history is also raised in the Critique of Political Economy. Marx uses two formulations: he speaks of a 'reduction' to its common character, and a bit later of 'particular kinds of labour'. The social unity of labour, its 'general character', that which is 'common' to all productive functions, is intrinsic to the products of labour. According to Marx, generality exists 'invisibly' in the commodity in the form of an immediate unity between use-value and value. It exists thus as the 'ghostlike objectivity of value', in which 'all sensuous aspects are eliminated'.