“Like classical economists, Marx, too, claimed that commodity was use-value and value at the same time; the difference was that he grasped it as a synthesis that might happen in the future. He saw it ex ante facto. Seen in this way, there is no guarantee as to whether the synthesis is realized. What does this difference—ex post facto and ex ante facto—really mean? We should scrutinize this by returning to Kant.”

Kojin Karatani

Q: What is capital’s synthetic unity of apperception?

A:

“While the concepts of natural science are thought abstractions, the economic concept of value is a real one. It exists nowhere other than in the human mind but it does not spring from it. Rather it is purely social in character, arising in the spatial-temporal sphere of human interactions. It is not people who originate these abstractions but their actions”

—Alfred Sohn-Rethel