.Part I situated the question of economic forces and relations in both social and historical context. It showed that economic forces never operate in isolation; they can only exist within concrete social formations, which are themselves constituted by hierarchical power relations. Those social and political structures of power form the background for economic forces. For example, because a feudal society is populated by lords and serfs, economic forces under feudalism look utterly different than economics in a liberal civil society in which there literally are no such things as lords and serfs. This means that the economic cannot be studied abstractly; it can only be grasped as an element and a logic within a specific, and specifically defined, social formation.
Moreover, Part I demonstrated that social orders develop, change, and transmute over time—that is, within history. Economic relations are historical relations that cannot be excised from temporal movements. Chapter 3 explored the historical emergence of a capitalist mode of production—a capitalist social order. The transformation of social, legal, and property relations—starting in England in the sixteenth century—led to the reorganization of large parts of society’s production of goods. For the first time in history, large swaths of societal production were rearranged for an entirely new set of ends or purposes. This brought into prominence the force of capital, which we described through the code whereby money is used to produce commodities for the express purpose of selling those same commodities for profit.
In Part II we pivot and zoom in. We pivot away from historical analysis toward a more abstract and analytical attempt to study the economic forces and relations that operate in a capitalist social formation. We zoom in on precisely those key elements that make up the central core of economics within a capitalist social order, thereby leaving the historical analysis behind (for now). Each chapter of Part II therefore focuses directly on one such element: money (Chapter 4), commodities (Chapter 5), and profit (Chapter 6). This means that we will be analyzing in detail, and in sequence, each element in the formula for the capitalist use of markets: .
We must constantly keep in mind, however, that this zoomed-in approach means that everything explained and unpacked in Part II exists within the context of a capitalist social order. If at any point while discussing money, commodities, and exchange we were to pan out, the camera would always reveal that we were located in a capitalist society. We would find the elements under study to be situated within a social order organized by and according to the terms of capitalist production. Whereas Part I contains material that almost never makes an appearance in even the longest economics textbooks, Part II addresses more traditional material from economics. At the outset then, we should underscore a few key differences.
1. We start with money. Whereas most analyses either exclude money entirely or relegate it to an ancillary role, we emphasize that money is an economic force, and that all economic relations take the form of monetary relations. There is no possibility of “bracketing” money from the analysis, and there is no such thing as a “real economy” separate from money.
2. Each chapter centers on one key element or relation, but each of these elements remains bound up with and constantly presupposes and implies the others. Commodities, money, and profit cannot appear in isolation from one another; none “comes first” in the logical analysis, even though we have no choice but to present one prior to the others in the running chapter order. The order of the chapters should not be taken to reflect any kind of logical or historical priority of concepts. Partially in an effort to drive this point home, we start with money (the element so often excluded or marginalized by traditional approaches), but this does not mean that money exists first. There cannot be money without economic activity, which often takes the form of exchange of commodities. None of these elements can exist without the others.
3. Because capitalism provides the background for the analysis of these core concepts, each element is marked by and depends on the code of capital—even as our study of these elements is what will make it possible to grasp more precisely how that code works (in Part III). In other words, though these chapters take a more abstract approach, this does not mean that they offer an ahistorical analysis. We will be concerned here with the nature of money, commodities, and profit as they exist and operate under capitalism. Other, noncapitalist, social formations had trade, and thereby exchanged goods and services; money predates the emergence of capitalism by thousands of years; and the limited sense of profit as net revenue does not depend on a capitalist mode of production. However, money and profit under capitalism take on unique and crucially important properties, which it will be our task in Part II to unpack and grasp. Finally, according to the specific and precise conceptualization of commodities that we provide here, strictly speaking, the commodity only comes to exist within a capitalist social order. This does not preclude or deny the fact that goods have been produced, traded, and sold for money (and even for a kind of profit) prior to capitalism. Nonetheless, we will show that the nature of the capitalist commodity is unique to capitalism, and this has enormous implications for a wide array of economic forces and relations.
In any case, it proves impossible to grasp the complex nature of the capitalist commodity without first trying to make sense out of an element equally complex and mysterious—namely, money.