WHAT IS HINDUISM?
or ‘market value’. Conversely ‘exchange value’ itself begins
as the mere abstract idea of ‘equivalence’ between particular
quantities of commodities with quite different material
qualities and uses. Yet this abstract idea then itself takes on
material form in the form of money – firstly in the form of
precious metals such as silver or gold which retain their
own use-value, and later in the form of mere materialized
signifiers of exchange-value – ‘paper money’ with no
inherent use-value of its own. With the increasing
dominance of finance capital made possible through
technologies of instantaneous global investments and
divestments, exchange-value once again loses all material
form and becomes a ‘mercurial’ quantity in the
metaphorical sense – one whose sole reality is an ever-ex-
changing ‘virtual’ reality flickering on the screens of stock
analysts and traders in the world’s great stock exchanges.
The new formula of the inner relation of use-value in the
form of the Commodity and exchange-value in the form of
Money is now ‘M-M-M’ – for with the dominance of
finance capital, exchange value in the form of monetary
currencies and stock values itself become the principal
Commodity, one whose sole use-value is its own increase
and accumulation through financial speculation.
The deep historical dynamics revealed by such
dialectical analyses however, is precisely the one which
‘post-modernism’ seeks to deny, arguing instead that it is
not history but language as such – those very sets of binary