The Story // The Argument

I think Ben's last longer post is really intriguing, especially since I've been reading the Eighteenth Brumaire on the side. Some quick questions before a longer post this weekend.

* If he's telling a story, is Marx doing "serious" history, developing a typological narrative of modern exchange, which [as I think you're suggesting, Ben] lays waste to its precursors as it moves forward?

* Or is he proceeding from first principles--like Hobbes in Leviathan--and writing an implicit polemic [raising and devastating arguments without stooping to the naming of names], while mitigating his broadside by allowing it to take the structure of a story?

* Or is he after something in between linear storytelling and arborescent argumentation?

The Socius

Adorno, Prisms, in the essay "Cultural Criticism and Society":

The notion of the free expression of opinion, indeed, that of intellectual freedom itself in bourgeois society, upon which cultural criticism is founded, has its own dialectic. For while the mind extricated itself from a theological-feudal tutelage, it has fallen increasingly under the sway of the status quo. This regimentation, the result of the progressive societalization of all human relations, did not simply confront the mind from without; it immigrated into its immanent consistency. It imposes itself as relentlessly on the autonomous mind as heteronomous orders were formerly imposed on the mind which was bound. Not only does the mind mold itself for the sake of its marketability, and thus reproduce the socially prevalent categories. Rather, it grows to resemble ever more closely the status quo even where it subjectively refrains from making a commodity of itself. The network of the whole is drawn ever tighter, modelled after the act of exchange. [20-21]

_______________

Deleuze and Guattari, from Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus, in the section "The Body without Organs":

The forms of social production, like those of desiring-production, involve an unengendered nonproductive attitude, an element of antiproduction coupled with the process, a full body that functions as a socius. This socius may be the body of the earth, that of the tyrant, or capital. This is the body that Marx is referring to when he says that it is not the product of labor, but rather appears as its natural or divine presupposition. In fact, it does not restrict itself merely to opposing productive forces in and of themselves. It falls back on all production, constituting a surface over which the forces and agents of production are distributed. . ." [10]

Beyond Europe

Forgiveness for the out-of-the-orderly post; I’ve been reading Arendt and figured I’d go back to good old Marx and see how he develops colonialism. Of course, this is maybe one of the most troubling—and therefore the least-talked-about—moments in Marx: his stance on Europe’s modern colonizing project from the late 19^th to late 20^th centuries.

On the one hand, it seems almost like a done deal before you start thinking about it: projects ranging from anti-imperialism and radical democratism through to posthegemony studies, etc. all owe at least a procedural debt to Marx, in that their methods develop the concepts we’ve been discussing here [the relative surplus value, the symbolic character of the commodity viz. its paradoxically stubborn materiality] to address fluidities, breakdowns, and multitudes [thanks to H/N for that last one] responsive to global economy. On the other, though, the comparative dearth of explicitly anticolonial writing by Marx himself, coupled with a certain overlap between his stagist-materialist historiography and the more messianic moments in The Philosophy of History, has at times facilitated Marx’ inclusion, however fatuous, among the more disgraced European theorists of what I’ll crudely term the “European / non-European ‘relation’” [ex: Spengler, with all the melancholy organicism]. George Steinmetz has written critically on Marx with respect to the Blowback; I’ll take it off the world-historical circuit, here, by reading Marx’ exegetic chapter on E.G. Wakefield's systematic colonization.

The chapter begins with an assault on method: though one has the sense the Wakefield test wouldn't withstand many sallies--regardless of their specifics--Marx' are particularly damning:

1) Addressing Wakefield's utterly absurd suggestion that the division of economy into wage-labor and capital occurs as a collective, conscious hypostasis of an ideal accumulative impulse [the society wills and effects the antagonization of its productive relations],

2) Marx sarcastically and negatively reiterates not only a well-worn point re: the material root of capitalist production by mocking Wakefield's risible pronouncement that "Mit einem Wort: die Masse der Menschheit enteignet sich selbst" ["At a word: the mass of humanity expropriates itself"], but also highlights the permanence of its intolerance of economies exterior to its own, not once but twice paraphrasing what I presume is Wakefield's pathologization of intransigently precapitalist productive modes as Krebsschaden: as cancer.

3) To his credit, though, Marx tugs at this argument--rather than dismissing it outright, or relegating Wakefield [and modern colonialism with him] to the been-there, seen-that class of analytic apologists, he offers a diagnosis of modern colonialism's dominative mode in the face of entrenched pre- and anti-capitalist strata:

Wie nun den antikapitalistischen Krebsschaden der Kolonien heilen? Wollte man allen Grund und Boden mit einem Schlag aus Volkseigentum in Privateigentum verwandeln, so zerstörte man zwar die Wurzel des Übels, aber auch--die Kolonie. [715]

But how to heal the anticapitalist cancer of the colonies? If one turned all the earth and turf from general possession to private property in one fell swoop, one would indeed destroy the root of the evil, but also: the colony.

The real-political prescription is more insidious, of course; it is with the transformation of general possession into the stake of an arbitrary debt that an economy of recompense, i.e. an economy with 1) the capacity for the generation of surplus, and therefore with 2) the potential to antagonize its elements into labor and capital can emerge. But we must be more specific. It is not just an incorporation of colonial territory into the productive behaviors of the metropole which is taking place here, though this would be bad enough. Beyond this: systematic colonization is set in motion by the fixing of an original price, simultaneously and contradictorily very ideal ["künstlich" / "artificial"] -and- very material [it must be paid], whereby the population of colonial territory, what the Berlin Conference would later codify as "effective occupation," succeeded only upon the recognition of its agents' indebtedness, an acknowledgement which of course points up the "necessity" of the individual colonizer's 1) relation to metropolitan [or colonial-administrative] authority as a pre-propertied perspective, and 2) entrance into productive practices which can generate surplus toward the alleviation of debt.

Even reading just the sardonic barbs of the Wakefield analysis against Marx' normative anticapitalist economics yields a vehement, pre-Berlin Conference anticolonialism. Beyond this, though, we have with the original-debt complex an analysis which, when placed into the context of the man's [and the book's] arguments as a whole, describes a simultaneous incorporation and subordination of colonial territory in terms of antagonistic productive relations, in terms of expedience -- 75 years before Aimé Césaire, who hardly did it first, but arguably did it best, cut through the civilizing and got right to the matter-at-hand:

I am talking about natural economies that have been disrupted--harmonious and viable economies adapted to the indigenous population--about food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries; about the looting of products, the looting of raw materials. [...] They were societies that were not only ante-capitalist, as has been said, but also anti-capitalist. [43-44]

Part 1: Chapters 2 & 3

Having proceeded a little way into Capital, I think we can begin to ask, but not yet answer, the question, What problem was Marx attempting to solve by this "critique of political economy"? And, once having set about to solve this problem, why was this approach, this order, this example, seen as the best one? That is, if we see Capital as an inevitable event, or a tautological outgrowth of something called "Marxism", then we miss its engagement in a field of forces and problems. A glance at The Poverty of Philosophy or The German Ideology shows Marx taking on, with extreme rigor, important and/or contemporary figures of political economy and socialism. Capital is not obviously such a work, which gives it a more accessible character-- one does not have to read Ricardo to make sense of it. And this was necessary for it to become the "Bible" of the revolutionary working class, or indeed for it to become a book worth blogging 140 years later. And while I am not the person to elucidate the impressions or inflections made by "classical" political economy and nineteenth century socialism on the form of Capital, the presentation is not at all "argumentative". That is to say, Marx is telling a story of development in the early chapters, rather than refuting (in a polemical way) Ricardo, Smith, etc. These figures mostly receive their fatal blows in the footnotes.

A word about that "story", though. Althusser argues that there can be no "one-to-one correspondence between the terms of the two orders" [the historical order of development, and the "logical order" of presentation] (Section 13, Reading Capital). To summarize Althusser's reading of Rancière's reading of Marx's concept of "inversion", the presentation of this story is precisely the undoing of ideology. Thus stated, it becomes very important to us. Ideology, defined by Marx, is, "They do not know it, but they are doing it." Capital begins by demystifying the most common, everyday, unreflective social actions: treating objects and things to be bought and sold, having money, using money, etc. The famous difficulty of the early chapters can be thought of, in Heideggerian terms, simply as "that which is closest to us being the farthest away."

Thus, at the conclusion of the chapter "The Commodity," Marx asks:

Where did the illusions of the Monetary System come from? The adherents of the Monetary System did not see gold and silver as representing money as a social relation of production, but in the form of natural objects with social properties. And what of modern political economy, which looks down so disdainfully on the Monetary System? Does not its fetishism become quite palpable when it deals with capital? How long is it since the Physiocratic illusion that ground rent grows out of soil, not out of society? (176).

The short second chapter, "The Process of Exchange," contains such a pulling-back-of-the-veil-of-ideology:

The fact that money can, in certain functions, be replaced by mere symbols of itself, gave rise to another mistaken notion, that it is itself a mere symbol. Nevertheless, this error did contain the suspicion that the money-form of the thing is external to the thing itself, being simply the form of appearance of human relations hidden behind it. In this sense, every commodity is a symbol, since, as value, it is only the material shell of the human labour expended on it. (185, my emphasis)

The chapter "Money, or the Circulation of Commodities," continues the story told in the chapter on commodities about the origin of money. This story, from the first, is one of increasing detachment of value from money. That is, from ancient Rome to medieval times to the modern nation, the coin (and then paper) form of money represents less and less actual gold somewhere. This, of course, we had already learned from Die Hard 3: that the value of all the gold in, say, Fort Knox is not equivalent to the amount of dollars in circulation. Currency is not "backed up" in gold. (This, I believe, is different from the "gold standard," and can be seen in the weight-names of currency: pounds, pesos, etc.) Marx, however, has a surprising revelation awaiting the reader who expects to see in this "detachment" the "alienation" of capitalism or even a lesson about "floating signifiers".

If the paper money exceeds its proper limit, i.e. the amount in gold coins of the same denomination which could have been in circulation, then, quite apart from the danger of becoming universally discredited, it will still represent within the world of commodities only that quantity of gold which is fixed by immanent laws. No greater quantity is capable of being represented. (225)

That is to say, whatever is "in the bank" *is* adequately represented by the amount of money circulating, even if that money claims to represent a greater amount of gold. Marx's example is, if there were twice as much money circulating as gold to back it up, there merely would have been inflation of 100%, and prices would have doubled. In a real crisis, Marx says, "the antithesis between commodities and their value-form, money, is raised to the level of an absolute contradiction." (236). That is, money, far from being "worthless," as the naive bourgeois imagines in his prosperity, in a crisis when rents/debts still have to be paid, becomes the only commodity, even in its symbolic form, the bank-note. Every other commodity must be then turned into money in order for the system of payments/credit/wages/mortgages to be kept up in a monetary crisis. Put another way, commodities cease functioning as bearers of value with regard to other commodities; they only can express their value through money in such a crisis. The antithesis between commodities and money thus is also expressed in the difference between "hoarding," discussed in this chapter, and capital---the subject of Part 2.

Leinwandwert als Rockgleiches

In his last derivation before proceeding to the foundation of the money-form argument, Marx abandons purely mathematical manipulations tied to the canvas / relation's quantitative equivalencies, and really lets fly with a tangled, crucial clustered metaphor:

Im Wertverhältnis, worin der Rock das Äquivalent der Leinwand bildet, gilt also die Rockform als Wertform. Der Wert der Ware Leinwand wird daher ausgedrückt im Körper der Ware Rock, der Wert einer Ware im Gebrauchswert der andren. [65]

In the value relation in which the coat constitutes the equivalent of the Canvas, the form-of-the-Coat [functions as]/[is said to be]/[shall be considered] the form-of-value. The value of the ware Canvas is therefore articulated in the body of the commodity coat, the value of a commodity in the use-value of another.

Value [Wert] is a complexly doubled figure. Beyond acknowledging its parsing as exchange-value [Tauschwert, which has slipped into disuse as his vocabulary evolved] and use-value [Gebrauchswert, still truckin’ at this point], it’s instructive to look at the way Marx is using Wert to play with standard idealist pairs, as well. Let’s push on this shorthand a bit: articulation or expression [Ausdruck] is the procedure by which the conceptual [Wert, formally defined] sees embodiment in the objective-discrete [the Körper]. So far, so good; this is canon Cartesian s/o dualism.

But wait: Wert is only relationally embodied; that is, the character of either commodity’s exchange-value only emerges from an objective discontinuity of the form Leinwand/Rock, which when considered in its turn unfolds a rematerialization [a return of use-value as body-articulated quantum against which one judges]. This discontinuity persists, despite Marx’ emphasis on the abstractibility of all value to a common quality, unspecified human labor. It’s thus false to suggest either of the following:

a) That the equivalence formula for value emerges from "pure" [i.e. conceptual -or- material] relationality between terms or properties of terms
[rather, the arrangement of the being-in-respect-of that characterizes the exchange proportion oscillates according to deseridatum but necessarily adhere to the complex holism of Marx' argument, in all respects: while its elements play musical chairs, the worth-against-which-and-only-against-which-value
-is-thrown-into-relief {the incorporated use-value understood as coat-form} anchors any conceptual consideration of the formula's first term]
b) That societal [Gesellschaft] structures of value are inessentializable, i.e. immaterial
[This is merely to point out that regardless of the procedure by which he approaches it, or his insistence upon the abstractable/general/comparative property "human work" {"menschlicher Arbeit"}, Marx' eventual establishment of communal, i.e. mobile/portable structures for appraising value, and the complication {and opacity} this notion brings with it will not and cannot successfully throw off the anchor-chain of materiality. In a separate post, at some point, I will address the exchange relation's materiality as an anchor for considerations of society generally {and not in the strict metaphorical sense Marx is relying on here}.]

The brilliance of this procession from first principles is its care. There are components central to the judgement of value [e.g. the pervasion of "average" productivity, and the commonly abstractable unspecial work] which one can elevate to a conceptual level allowing for the qualitative comparison to emerge before being [quantitatively] balanced. But there is never an entirely disembodied, amaterial Gleichung [equation].

Te de fabula narratur!

Before I write my full-length contribution to "Chapter One: the Commodity" I'd like to offer comment on a set of considerations on method offered by Marx himself, in the introduction attached to Kapital's 1867 publication, and in his preface to "Critique of Political Economy" [1859]. I find Ben's question on "literature" gets right at the heart of something we need to deal with as we descend into Kapital's vortex; while we may not end up playing by those interpretative rules toward the end which we'd drafted in the beginning, it's definitely of the essence to at least initiate an internal conversation as to what, precisely, Marx is doing -- and what, precisely, we're going to have to do in order to read it.

Without further ado, then, I quote from the 1867 introduction:

Der Physiker beobachtet Naturprozesse entweder dort, wo sie in der prägnantesten Form und von störenden Einflüssen mindest getrübt erscheinen, oder, wo möglich, macht er Experimente unter Bedingungen, welche den reinen Vorgang des Prozesses sichern. Was ich in diesem Werk zu erforschen habe, ist die kapitalistische Produktionsweise und die ihr entsprechenden Produktions- und Verkehrsverhältnisse. Ihre klassische Stätte ist bis jetzt England. Dies der Grund, warum es zur Hauptillustration meiner theoretischen Entwicklung dient. [35]

The physicist observes natural processes either there, where they appear in the most incisive form and least diluted by disruptive influences, or, where possible, he conducts experiments under conditions which secure the purity of the procedure. What I have set before me to investigate in this work, is the capitalist mode of production and its concomitant productive and intercursive-circulatory-communicative relations. [This mode's] classical case is, to this point, England. This is the reason why it will serve as the primary illustration of my theoretical argumentation.

While what follows may be a bit Hegel-dented, please bear with me. The first word is the best. It is Marx, of course, whom we presume to be the physicist on "our" side of the analogy: the physicist as the investigative personality, the one who conducts the experiments. Beyond this, though, in his next sentence, he establishes two options for the physical sciences: either observation under apparently uncontaminated conditions [erscheinen, to appear, is operative] -or- the establishment of a controlled environment where imposed "conditions" guarantee processional "purity" [the adjective rein]. When Marx pulls the Physiker's card, then, what's seemed at first to look like a bid for ensconcement among the positive sciences [Smith, Newton?] has turned into a subtle troubling of these science's models for inquiry: the questionable appearance of an ideal condition, and the false imposition of ideal conditions. He knows it himself, though he returns to the rather prosaic epistemological dualism [theoretical approach vindicated by "illustration" that emerges from its application to the already-there test case] one might well know and love from [among other things] Hegel's style in the History of Philosophy, by which the "cunning of reason" is vindicated and embodied by Alexander the Great. But in Marx the dialectical turn, the laying-bare under analysis of an irresolvable agonism, comes with the next sentence [with an acknowledgement of the theory-application model's impossibility]:

Sollte jedoch der deutsche Leser pharisäisch die Achseln zucken über die Zustände der englischen Industrie- und Ackerbauarbeiter, oder sich optimistisch dabei beruhigen, daß in Deutschland die Sachen noch lange nicht so schlimm stehn, so muß ich ihm zurufen: de te fabula narratur! [35]

Should, however, the German reader shrug his shoulders Pharaisically regarding the affairs of the English industrial and agricultural workers, or comfort himself optimistically that things aren't nearly so bad in Germany, I must assure him: the story is being told about you!

Regardless of the English example's "classical" status, Marx is arguing, a critique of political economy -- and the new theories of knowledge, of history, and of politics that accompany it -- can be no more limited to the national stage [in 1867, a peculiar stage in Germany, but surely one comfort available to the particularist he's singling out here] than its object: the historical development, the locus on the time-axis of stagist history, that England [far from exhibiting uniquely] merely shows best. The national perspective would allow an external analytic position, which [on the European stage, at least] has to remain unthinkable. I think this is a particularly strategic/tactical intervention, on Marx' part: while I don't think we'll ever be satisfied with any resolution of the [non-]literariness question Ben's opened, I think there's one thing with regard to which I'll be looking to satisfy myself: the development of a radically immanent science that Marx is hinting at here. The story is told not only about dir, the German PolyAnna: it's told about everybody -- and the old sciences, the ancien régime méthodologique-épistémologique, cannot be fit to investigate its narration [which takes the form of systems evolution in the sphere of Produktions- and Verkehrsverhältnisse] unless they seriously acknowledge their position within it, that is, acknowledge the impossibility of [themselves as] classical investigatory models. Being free to do science, it seems, involves an initial acknowledgment of the impossibility of any freedom from the processes one looks to subject to science.

I now quote from the foreword to the 1859 "Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie":

Bei dem Eingang in die Wissenschaft aber, wie beim Eingang in die Hölle, muß die Forderung gestellt werden:
Qui si convien lasciare ogni sospetto
Ogni viltá convien che qui sia morta
{Hier ziemt es, jeden Argwohn fahren lassen
Und jede Niedrigkeit muß hier ersterben} [722]

Entering into Science, like entering into Hell, requires the challenge:
Qui si convien lasciare ogni sospetto
Ogni viltá convien che qui sia morta
{It is appropriate here, to dismiss all suspicion
And all lowliness must die here}

Irony? Maybe. I wonder.

Part One: Chapter I

In my last post, I wrote that I did not intend to approach Capital as "literature." What then to approach it as? Certainly I have no idea how to write about a work of political economy, which Capital undoubtedly is. As a "historical document," there may be much to say, but this would be completely inappropriate for a blog. As philosophy, Capital is eccentric to say the least. Marx's own watchword seems to be "science." And yet this work of science includes so many quotes of Goethe and Shakespeare, so much playing with Hegel, and so many jabs at Christianity, that it can hardly be just that, either.

The first chapter answers the question, "What is the value of a commodity?", and clears away the illusions commonly held concerning value. That is the economic concern of the chapter.

The most-discussed aspect of Capital is probably the section, "The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret," which I will leave aside, except for pointing out that "It is precisely the finished form of the world of commodities-- the money form--which conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly." (169) That is, as money is not just one commodity among others, neither does the fetishism (repression of the determination of value by human labour-time, and the seeming-to-belong-to-things-themselves of their exchange-values) of commodities stop at the money form. It is "precisely" the money form which "conceals" and distorts these relations. I mention this only because the famous passage about a table beginning to dance (164) tends to overshadow, in our collective mis-remembering of the chapter, that money is just such a fetishized commodity; even *the* fetishized commodity. Fetishism here always having the connotation of something-being-repressed (labor time).

The money form is the "universal equivalent" of exchange by which the value of commodities is represented to other commodities--but is there not another "universal equivalent," albeit in a different sense, in the chapter? Aristotle, Marx says, was prevented from seeing that "all labour is expressed as equal human labour...because Greek society was founded on the labour of slaves, hence had as its basis the inequality of men and of their labour-powers" (152). Labour, then, is both "equivalent" to itself--average and self-same in a given society--and "universal."* What will be a shock to no one is the conclusion to be drawn from this---that money and labour are commensurate; both are universal equivalents. Obviously Capital comes to this conclusion by another route, but the identity of value with labor and the immediate non-recognition of that identity within material exchange, is contained linguistically here in the "equivalency" of all human labour. This concept is barely comprehensible to me. Why average human labour?

In the next post I will be looking at the discussion of how the "forms" of the commodity "confront each other" (140) and then "recognize" each other (143), as well as the Gayatri Spivak article, "Scattered Speculations on Value."


*=  "The labour that forms the substance of value is equal human labour, the expenditure of identical human labour-power" (129). In a particular society, "simple average labour ...is given" (135).