Key Arguments

• Market participants "are primarily not persons but producers of products" and display products, not themselves or even skills.
• The impulse is desire for products, not for people.
• The market’s cohesion is a combined "power of exchange" (Adam Smith) each acquires alone, not the power that arises between people acting in concert.

Source Quotes

Marx’s contention that economic laws are like natural laws, that they are not made by man to regulate the free acts of exchange but are functions of the productive conditions of society as a whole, is correct only in a laboring society, where all activities are leveled down to the human body’s metabolism with nature and where no exchange exists but only consumption. However, the people who meet on the exchange market are primarily not persons but producers of products, and what they show there is never themselves, not even their skills and qualities as in the “conspicuous production” of the Middle Ages, but their products. The impulse that drives the fabricator to the public market place is the desire for products, not for people, and the power that holds this market together and in existence is not the potentiality which springs up between people when they come together in action and speech, but a combined “power of exchange” (Adam Smith) which each of the participants acquired in isolation.

However, the people who meet on the exchange market are primarily not persons but producers of products, and what they show there is never themselves, not even their skills and qualities as in the “conspicuous production” of the Middle Ages, but their products. The impulse that drives the fabricator to the public market place is the desire for products, not for people, and the power that holds this market together and in existence is not the potentiality which springs up between people when they come together in action and speech, but a combined “power of exchange” (Adam Smith) which each of the participants acquired in isolation. It is this lack of relatedness to others and this primary concern with exchangeable commodities which Marx denounced as the dehumanization and self-alienation of commercial society, which indeed excludes men men and demands, in striking reversal of the ancient relationship between private and public, that men show themselves only in the privacy of their families or the intimacy of their friends.

Key Concepts

• the people who meet on the exchange market are primarily not persons but producers of products, and what they show there is never themselves, not even their skills and qualities as in the “conspicuous production” of the Middle Ages, but their products.
• The impulse that drives the fabricator to the public market place is the desire for products, not for people
• the power that holds this market together and in existence is not the potentiality which springs up between people when they come together in action and speech, but a combined “power of exchange” (Adam Smith) which each of the participants acquired in isolation.

Context

Section 29; contrasts market appearance with political appearance and distinguishes market cohesion from political power.