Evald Vasilyevich Ilyenkov. The school should learn to think (№ 284804)

The fact is that the highest law of market relations is the exchange of equivalents - equal values. If I have an item worth five rubles, I can exchange it for other goods, which also cost five rubles. I can’t exchange five purchases and sales of five rubles and twenty rubles through exchange (unless, of course, speculation and deceit are excluded). But how then is profit, surplus value, capital possible? His law is constant "self-growth." And from here the question arises: “Our owner of the money, which is still just the larva of the capitalist, must buy goods at their cost, sell them at their value and still extract, in the end, more value from this process than he invested in him. Its transformation into a butterfly, into a true capitalist, should take place in the sphere of circulation and at the same time not in the sphere of circulation. Hic Rhodhus, hіс salta! (Here is Rhodes, jump here!). So how, without any deception, that is, without any violation of the higher law of the commodity world, suddenly “capital” appears? A phenomenon whose characteristics are directly contrary to the law of exchange of equivalents? The task is set clearly and clearly. Its solution, Marx continues, is possible only on condition that our "owner of money" is "lucky enough to open within the sphere of circulation, that is, on the market, such a product whose use value itself would have the original property of being a source of value - such a product, whose actual consumption would be a process of reification of labor, therefore, a process of creating value . Such a product, the consumption of which would be a creation! A thing as if impossible, "unthinkable" - because "logically contradictory." But if the owner of the money nevertheless turned into a capitalist, then this means that he nevertheless solved the insoluble problem from the point of view of the supreme law of the commodity world. He exchanged the penny in the most honest way for a penny - never blowing anyone - and still got the ruble ... And this means that he still found and bought on the market an incredibly wonderful item, goods, - cost, consumption (destruction) of which is identical to the production (creation) of value ... And the theoretician, in order to resolve the theoretical (logical) contradiction, can only trace - where did he manage to buy such a super-original product with which the unthinkable becomes “conceivable”? And what kind of a magical object is it, carrying out the unthinkable without any violation of the strict law of the commodity world? The author of Capital followed him and saw: “the owner of the money finds such a specific product on the market; it is the ability to work, or labor. This is the only product on the market with the help of which a solution to the contradiction that cannot be resolved by any terminological tricks can be achieved. This is the only subject that strictly obeys all the laws of “goods”, strictly fits all theoretical definitions of “goods”, “value” (under the very definitions and laws from the point of view of which the birth of capital is an “illegal” act, even illegal) , and at the same time - in strict accordance with the law - giving birth to this "illegal" offspring - surplus value, capital, that is, a phenomenon directly contrary to the laws of the commodity world.