The Money of the Mind and the God of Commodities – The real abstraction according to Sohn-Rethel

Nuno Miguel Cardoso Machado

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: According to Sohn-Rethel there is a “secret identity” between commodity form and thought form. Commodity exchange is a real abstraction – embodied in money – and constitutes a social a priori which reflects itself in the conceptual abstraction, i.e., in the abstract thought typical of commodity-producing societies: philosophy (in ancient Greece) and modern science (in capitalism). However, the theory of Sohn-Rethel has a fundamental flaw: its exclusive identification of the real abstraction with the sphere of circulation results in the ontologization of labor which, on the contrary, is a capitalist specificity and the original source of the abstraction in this society.

Keywords: Sohn-Rethel; real abstraction; commodity form; thought form (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A11 A12 A13 B24 B31 B41 P1 P10 P51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hme, nep-hpe and nep-spo
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