for a future article

Why read Karl Marx "as literature"? At first glance, this is not an especially promising pursuit--as literature, it's not much. There are large swaths of Capital's three volumes than which it is difficult to imagine anything more boring. And, from a Marxist perspective, subjecting Capital to close-readings seems like a death-knell for the book's political relevance, its furthest removal from practical engagement in the world. To declare Capital a "literary" artifact is to neutralize "the working man's Bible" by installing it in the same canon as "Pippa Passes" and "What Maisie Knew." Lastly, reading something "as literature" is very close to reading it as fiction, which Capital assuredly is not. In fact, I undertake these brief remarks rather to insist upon the vitality of Marx's economic writings than to bury them in a filigreed formalism. For one thing, to speak about the literary aspects of a work at least implies that one is discussing the entire work. No one would write about Anna Karenina without having read to the last page; nonetheless, very few people read Capital to its last page. I will make a case for doing so in this study. Secondly, any "return" to Capital seems apropos at this political moment, for this book is not just a toolbox for cultural critique in the sense fashionable after the Frankfurt School. Capital is a line drawn in the sand, asking: will capitalism overcome its internal contradictions and survive until the end of time, or (as Marx argues) is another world possible, and our historical task to make that world? These are implicitly questions of narrative, of temporality. Without this time-element, Capital would just be a piece of Hegelian muck-raking, a static and somewhat abstract picture of Victorian industry. But the nihilating force of time is at once our entry into academic "narratology" and the locus of Marx's explosively revolutionary thought: that capitalism has an expiration date. Needless to say, to abolish the factor of time, intellectually, then as now is to apotheosize capitalism in the eternal order of things, with all of its appalling brutalities and indecencies.

Sartre's existentialism is not now in vogue, but it is a truism from that philosophy that every project is constituted by its projection of a future state of affairs. What is projected in Capital is the overcoming of capitalism--a project which is not without temporal, futural significance for us today. And so it is in anything but the spirit of withdrawn aesthetic contemplation that one should attend to these narratological questions in reading Capital.

On Immediacy and Abstraction

The Grundrisse

In the Grundrisse, Marx explains how the commodity form contains in-itself all the elements necessary for advanced capitalist crisis: namely, 1) the separation of exchange into acts removed in time and space; 2) the possibility, in this gap, of reversing C-M-C (exchange) into M-C-M (capital accumulation), and 3) the parallax between the "fleeting moment" of money in C-M-C and its "hard form" as wealth, as the universal commodity (and not just the universal equivalent, as in exchange).

And certainly one can unfold everything from this simple to the complex (capitalist crisis) in this way. This, by the way, is the Grundrisse en résumé.

Capital

Das Kapital works rather differently. It's extremely important to coordinate the "real" from the conceptual, and one might say that the book alternates between these two.

For instance: the chapter on the working day. Obviously the working day itself could have been the starting point for an analysis of capitalism's exploitative nature, as in Engels' study of British labor conditions. But in Das Kapital, the immediate, really existing working day only follows from the (concept of) rate of surplus-value.

And this is true all along the line. Wages, which we all can point to in real life, follow from the (concept of) value of labor-power. Prices, which are by no means a rare phenomenon, follow from (the concept of) exchange-value.

The most important of these determinations is that of profit (in the bookkeeping sense) by surplus-value. So, for Marx, conceptual determinations have ontological priority over their reflected appearances--but at the same time, unlike Hegel (!), Marx always stresses that history is not *itself* the unfolding of these determinations; and, in turn, these abstractions are not intuited from nowhere (as "eternal laws") but are themselves arrived at from an analysis of real processes.

[As Lukács writes: On one hand, it is impossible to consider social being ontologically without beginning from the most basic facts of man's daily life... On the other hand, reality presents itself in a quite deformed character... It is necessary to start from quotidian life, but also to overcome it..."]

So, just as profit from the capitalist's perspective *precedes* the larger-scale "departments" of the reproduction of the aggregate social capital, CONCEPTUALLY it is the reverse: it is necessary to show how all of social capital turns over (volume 2) in order to establish the real existence of profit determined by the "average rate of profit" (volume 3). (And that is those volumes en résumé).

And I think this is why Das Kapital begins the way it does, with the commodity form: it is in the object of labor that value (the primordial concept) makes its first appearance, and in bourgeois society this object of labor is ONLY a commodity, QED.