Commercial Circulation and Abstract Domination

Abstract

oishe taught me Marx. As was his wont, this was a rigorous training. His graduate seminar on Capital began with the 1844 manuscripts, the “Theses on Feuerbach,” The Grundrisse, and after many weeks continued from chapter 1 to chapter 2 of Capital, volume 1. The slow pace and thorough exegesis of the texts was both by design and a product of Moishe’s temperamental commitment to relating parts to the whole. My interest in Marx was at the time and still is somewhat unorthodox. Working in the field of Chinese history, I am more interested in applying Marx’s insights to commodity circulation than commodity production. This being the case, Moishe might seem an equally unorthodox teacher. His reading of Capital centers on labor and value as a historically particular form of wealth and social mediation. That is to say, Moishe emphasized value production (with particular stress on what value was), whereas I have been interested in what happened when value, inhering in commodities, traveled. My work in Chinese history concerns foreign trade during the nineteenth century. I examine trade regulations, statecraft, and how capitalism, in the form of global and local commodity trades, intersected with and even reshaped these. I was initially trained in cultural history, discourse analysis, and postcolonial studies, and Moishe’s unintentional intervention into this project was the possibility—which surfaced at some point between reading chapter 1 and chapter 4—that discourse was part of structure. The British complaints about trading conditions in China, which were the immediate focus of my research at the time, were perhaps not only about oriental difference but also about what it meant to be a commodity owner. This seemingly small intervention was in fact a paradigm shift.