A Companion to Marx’s Capital

The commensurability of commodities is not constituted out of their use-values. "

What makes it exchangeable must be something else, and that something else is discoverable only when the commodity is being exchanged (and here the idea of movement and process starts to emerge as crucial)

so we have to use the power of abstraction instead in order to arrive at similar scientific forms of understanding (90).

Marx wants to recover the intuitive power of the dialectical method and put it to work in understanding how everything is in process, everything is in motion.

Dialectics has to, in short, be able to understand and represent processes of motion, change and transformation. Such a dialectical method "does not let itself be impressed by anything, being in its very essence critical and revolutionary" (102-3), precisely because it goes to the heart of what social transformations, both actual and potential, are about.

"I criticized the mystificatory side of the Hegelian dialectic nearly thirty years ago;' he says, referring to his critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.

Equipped with those fundamental concepts, we can begin working back to the surface-the method of ascent-and discover how deceiving the world of appearances can be.

Marx's method of inquiry starts with everything that exists-with reality as it's experienced, as well as with all available descriptions of that experience by political economists, philosophers, novelists and the like.

His aim is to convert the radical political project from what he considered a rather shallow utopian socialism to a scientific communism

And it was in the 1840S in France that many radicals, for the first time, cared to call themselves communists, even though they had no clear idea of what that might mean.