Well, this now appears as the "project," in every sense, that it ought to be. My real apologies (to whom, I don't know) for the halting nature of this reading. Responding to Seth's last post, which was responding to my last post, I think we can suggest something a bit further about what this work is after--now that capital has been raised as a topic. Is it wrong to assume that a book called "Capital" will really be about capital? Wrong, or naive?
If the argument of the first chapters appeared as a "progression" in which more complicated forms of exchange "arise"--starting with barter and ending with paper currency--"The General Formula for Capital" is exactly that: general, formulaic. How can there be a narrative with a logical formula--indeed, with a tautology? The formula is M-C-M, but "the result, in which the whole process vanishes, is the exchange of money for money, M-M."
As I was arguing before, following the structuralists, the "logical order" of presentation and the "historical development" do not correspond. Here we may say that I was only following Marx, who refers to "the appearance of capital" in two senses. Logically, money, "the ultimate product of the circulation of commodities, is the first form of appearance of capital." And historically, the first "form of appearance" of capital is when it "confronts landed property in the form of money; in the form of monetary wealth, merchant' capital and usurers' capital." But this historical development is disregarded:
However, we do not need to look back at the history of capital's origins in order to recognize that money is its first form of appearance. Every day the same story is played out before our eyes.
Here the two registers are disjoined. What is "historical" is not past, but is happening "every day." Capital first appeared as money in the 16th century, but it also will first appear as money in every case: today and tomorrow.
* * *
The tautology M-M, however, has much more "going on" than just "money which begets money" (the Mercantilist description).
* M-M is not self-contained, but must be constantly renewed. The surplus value cannot be withdrawn from circulation, but has to be put back: "the final result of each separate cycle... forms of itself the starting point for a new cycle."
* Thus M-->C-->M is an endless movement. Rather than a tautology, one gets... well, we shall see how we want to describe this. An ascending line? A Möbius strip? I don't know that I can get into the "topology" of this infinite movement, but it is at the least not a ping-pong match.
* Valorization, Marx says, is "self-valorization," of which money is only the "independent form by means of which its identity (as value) may be asserted." In valorization, unlike in hoarding, "there is no antagonism" between money and commodity--capital has to take the form of a commodity in order to "throw off surplus-value from itself." But the subject of this process is value. It is to value that the "occult ability" of self-valorization belongs.
* Marx likens this occult ability to another famous tautology: the identity of God the Father and God the Son. Although they are differentiated and take disguised forms and can be "thrown off" from one another, their difference can also "vanish again, and both become one." [We recall the strange scene in Paradise Lost where God and Jesus have a conversation in Heaven, before Man has even been created.]
* Not only the commodity, but the capitalist himself is the "bearer" of this movement of value. I should ask Seth here if the commodity (or money) is referred to by this same word, Träger. [Seth?] And perhaps later on we will pull out the Hegelianisms or their inversions here.
I've read a bit further than this, but I wanted to get the ball rolling again. I also read Derrida's Specters of Marx in the interim, so perhaps I will have something to say about that, too.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Saturday, October 6, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
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).
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).
Friday, September 14, 2007
Introductions
As I hope is evident from the title "Reading Capital," this blog will consist of Seth's and my simultaneous readings of Karl Marx's Capital over the coming weeks. My name is Ben, I am an English PhD student, and this will be my first time all the way through the book.
The original premise of this blog is that it would be fun to collectively read a difficult book on the internet; a similar project is imaginable for Finnegan's Wake , The Arcades Project, Clarissa, the Cantos, etc. Exclusively long works, you see, because my aim is not a "close reading," as in a seminar that very slowly parses out a text. It is more along the lines of, "How does this work?" And the specific genesis of this project, in my mind, is that Capital is something that we all "know" as a great work, as a reference point, and of Marxism as a school, as an -ism, as a political affiliation, as a pose, an inflection, etc., without having read it or really even being able to talk about it. Marx has so many great shorter works-- The Communist Manifesto, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Theses on Feuerbach--that any "overview" of the subject is afforded the luxury of skipping Capital altogether.
I am coming to this from an English "background," but I should immediately disavow the possible implications of that. I am not overly interested in reading Capital "as literature." As literature, it ain't much. I would even go so far as to feign ignorance of what "as literature" means. Certainly Capital is in a different class than Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Republic , or Fear and Trembling in terms of the literary (readable) merit of philosophical texts. And if the phrase only connotes a naive-deconstructive idea that the divide between philosophical and literary readings is blurry or non-existent, well, that need hardly be brought up.
I have a busy semester already without this 900 page book thrown on top, but I will try and also look into some other texts (Althusser, Lenin, Lukacs, Derrida) when I have time, although obviously the secondary literature on the subject is overwhelming. Needless to say, the aim of this endeavor is to learn something and to clarify Marx's thought, even if only for ourselves.
I will be reading the Vintage edition of the Ben Fowkes translation.
The original premise of this blog is that it would be fun to collectively read a difficult book on the internet; a similar project is imaginable for Finnegan's Wake , The Arcades Project, Clarissa, the Cantos, etc. Exclusively long works, you see, because my aim is not a "close reading," as in a seminar that very slowly parses out a text. It is more along the lines of, "How does this work?" And the specific genesis of this project, in my mind, is that Capital is something that we all "know" as a great work, as a reference point, and of Marxism as a school, as an -ism, as a political affiliation, as a pose, an inflection, etc., without having read it or really even being able to talk about it. Marx has so many great shorter works-- The Communist Manifesto, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Theses on Feuerbach--that any "overview" of the subject is afforded the luxury of skipping Capital altogether.
I am coming to this from an English "background," but I should immediately disavow the possible implications of that. I am not overly interested in reading Capital "as literature." As literature, it ain't much. I would even go so far as to feign ignorance of what "as literature" means. Certainly Capital is in a different class than Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Republic , or Fear and Trembling in terms of the literary (readable) merit of philosophical texts. And if the phrase only connotes a naive-deconstructive idea that the divide between philosophical and literary readings is blurry or non-existent, well, that need hardly be brought up.
I have a busy semester already without this 900 page book thrown on top, but I will try and also look into some other texts (Althusser, Lenin, Lukacs, Derrida) when I have time, although obviously the secondary literature on the subject is overwhelming. Needless to say, the aim of this endeavor is to learn something and to clarify Marx's thought, even if only for ourselves.
I will be reading the Vintage edition of the Ben Fowkes translation.
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