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 As a "historical document," there may be much to say, but this would be completely inappropriate for a blog.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).

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.