"Value manifests itself as exchange value, as a quantitatively determined relationship, in virtue of the fact that one commodity can be exchanged for another"
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Austere on the surface, Hilferding's line is doing something sharper than definitional housekeeping: it smuggles a politics into an equation. By insisting that value "manifests" as exchange value, he treats value not as a moral quality or a natural property of a thing, but as something that only becomes legible inside a social mechanism - the market - where commodities face each other as equivalents. The cool phrasing matters. "Quantitatively determined relationship" reads like neutral science, yet it quietly demotes the romance of "worth" to a ratio produced by institutions, power, and habit.
The subtext is a warning against common-sense realism about prices. If value appears only as exchangeability, then price is not a transparent window into what things "really" deserve; it's the numeric expression of a historically specific arrangement where production is organized for sale, not use. That word "manifests" does double duty: it acknowledges that value seems to show up as a number while implying that the number is a form of appearance, not the whole truth.
Context sharpens the stakes. Hilferding, a Marxist economist writing in the age of cartels, banks, and the consolidation he famously analyzed as "finance capital", is circling a problem industrial capitalism makes unavoidable: when credit, monopoly, and state policy reshape markets, the supposedly simple act of commodity exchange becomes the stage on which power writes itself as arithmetic. The sentence is a thesis in miniature: capitalism makes relationships between people look like relationships between things, and then dares us to call that objectivity.
The subtext is a warning against common-sense realism about prices. If value appears only as exchangeability, then price is not a transparent window into what things "really" deserve; it's the numeric expression of a historically specific arrangement where production is organized for sale, not use. That word "manifests" does double duty: it acknowledges that value seems to show up as a number while implying that the number is a form of appearance, not the whole truth.
Context sharpens the stakes. Hilferding, a Marxist economist writing in the age of cartels, banks, and the consolidation he famously analyzed as "finance capital", is circling a problem industrial capitalism makes unavoidable: when credit, monopoly, and state policy reshape markets, the supposedly simple act of commodity exchange becomes the stage on which power writes itself as arithmetic. The sentence is a thesis in miniature: capitalism makes relationships between people look like relationships between things, and then dares us to call that objectivity.
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| Topic | Money |
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