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.

Part 4: Chapter 12

One of the things most notable about any philosophical (or even scientific) system is the "constants" which appear initially as more-or-less unremarkable deductions, but that require a great effort to hold onto through further analysis. My favorite example is the constancy of the speed of light in Einstein's physics. Anyone can wrap their head around the simple idea that light has a constant speed. Most will not object either to the speed of light being the limit velocity--i.e. that nothing can be faster than light. However, this velocity, as regards which all other motions are relative has innumerable revolutionary effects in physics--as I understand it--as long as it is held as a constant.

The same could be said for Freud's dictum, "dreams are wish-fulfillments." Simple enough, and most would agree. It is almost a tautology (dreams being synonymous with wishes in everyday language). But if one sticks closely and makes no exceptions, the application of this constant is world-overturning.

The same can be said of Marx's treatment of labor-power as a commodity. In terms of any other commodity, VALUE is the labor-time necessary to (re)produce the commodity. In "free labor," however, that value formula counts only as "necessary labor" where the rest of the time worked is "surplus labor." (Another idea that must be strictly kept-to is the distinction between labor and labor-power. The latter is what functions as a commodity.)

The dry distinction between "absolute" and "relative" surplus-value, from which this chapter takes its name, is important because absolute surplus value (brute extension of the working day) explains the previous chapter ("The Working Day") while positive change in relative surplus value (increases in productivity, mostly) is part of the endless and less-obviously-constrained accumulation of capital. (I.e. the day can only be prolonged so far, while technology and the division of labor can be continually improved upon.)

In Marx's words:
The objective of the development of the productivity of labour within the context of capitalist production is the shortening of that part of the working day in which the worker must work for himself, and the lengthening, thereby, of the other part of the day, in which he is free to work for nothing for the capitalist.

* * * *
"We treat [the] general result as if it were the direct result and the direct purpose in each individual case... The general and necessary tendencies of capital must be distinguished from their forms of appearance."

"The real value of a commodity... is not its individual, but its social value."

It is not that Marx does not care about "the individual case"--in the first case, the immanent drive of capital as a whole is taken as though it were the individual capitalist's purpose as well. It is to be noted that the capitalist is no more "free" than the laborer who is compelled to work for demeaning wages--there is the unbearable force of the "coercive law of competition."

To explain the first quote I provide the second--the "real" is not the "individual," in a very Hegelian sense.

Part 3: Chapter 11

This chapter, "The Rate and Mass of Surplus-Value," is mostly of interest to us for this passage:

A certain stage of capitalist production necessitates that the capitalist be able to devote the whole of the time during which he functions as a capitalist, i.e. as capital personified, to the appropriation and therefore the control of that labour. The guild system of the Middle Ages therefore tried forcibly to prevent the transformation of the master of a craft into a capitalist, by limiting the number of workers a single master could employ to a very low maximum. Hence the possessor of money or commodities actually turns into a capitalist only where the minimum sum advanced for production greatly exceeds the known medieval maximum. Here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel, in his Logic, that at a certain point merely quantitative differences pass over by a dialectical inversion into qualitative distinction. (423)

Gramsci's favorite example from Capital of quantity-becoming-quality is the chapter on cooperation in industry: masses accomplish "more than the sum of their parts." One can think of several others: the amount of time demanded from workers (quantity) altering the conditions of their existence (quality). In any case, the idea that quantity becomes quality is one of the best instances in which Marx gives concrete economic form to a "theoretical" Hegelian idea.

We see here:
- "Capital developed within the production process" [my emphasis, B.P.] It is not spontaneous nor a complete break from the previous (feudal/medieval) mode of production, but (as communism is contained within the "womb" of capitalism) arises *from* it.
- how the capitalist does not require "primitive accumulation" to come into existence, but arises from existent processes
- the "personification" of capital's historical (i.e. proceeding by stages) tendencies in the "spontaneous" actions of individuals
- that capitalism's genesis is not merely a product of "technical" advancements: "At first capital subordinates labour on the basis of the technical conditions within which labour has been carried on up to that point in history. It does not therefore directly change the mode of production."

Marx stresses the simple but difficult-to-keep-in-mind point that the means of production be thought of *as* capital themselves. That is, machines/tools are not just involved in producing commodities, but represent capital and are means of reproducing capital: "It is different as soon as we view the production process as a process of valorization. The means of production are at once changed into means for the absorption of labour of others. It is no longer the worker who employs the means of production, but the means of production which employ the labour" (425).

That is, the production process becomes organized around keeping MACHINES busy, of preventing their being idle, of instituting multiple shifts, of extending hours, etc.

"There is no text in which 'the technical instrument' is turned into the unique and supreme cause of economic development. [Marx] never reduces [stages of technical development] to the mere 'metamorphoses of the technical instrument."--Gramsci

"Philosophy of Praxis"

This is not Capital-related, strictly speaking, although one could certainly say a great deal about why *that* is.

In Gramsci's prison notebooks, most of the proper names of Bolsheviks as well as terms like "Marxism" and "proletariat" are suppressed, so that it is written in a kind of code. "Marxism" therefore becomes "the philosophy of praxis." Now, this is reasonable enough, and after a while you don't really notice, and just read (or translate in) the intended concept for the euphemism. 

My point is, of course it's *not* a euphemism, and it is almost the key concept of Gramsci that Marxism IS the philosophy of praxis.

This can be thought about in two ways. One is the Leninist sense: why in the Russian Revolution did the Bolsheviks, the most extreme and doctrinaire party, triumph over the more palatable and compromising Mensheviks and social democratic parties? The Bolshevik answer would be that the question is tautological. That is, "correct" doctrine BY DEFINITION aligns itself with the "winning" team of history, the proletariat. To be doctrinaire in a revolutionary situation is irreducibly tactical. 

The second sense is expressed by Rosa Luxembourg: academic debates about socialism are anything *but* academic; socialism is a weapon or tool of the proletariat. To water socialism down "in theory" is a real attack on the working class: "It is their skin which is being brought to market." 

In other words, Marxism does not have a set of aims distinct from the plan for accomplishing them; it does not say "We believe this, but we should settle for this." (i.e. we believe that capitalism is bad, but really we can work within it for improvement and leave it standing).

We should read the cliched criticism of leftist intellectuals backwards then: instead of "that's all well and good in theory, but what about practice," Marxism insists that we ask, "that's all well and good in practice, but what about in theory??

Cf. The German Ideology, Critique of the Gotha Programme, and the final section of the Communist Manifesto for Marx's vicious attacks on compromised versions of socialism.

Which brings us back to Capital, which is not at all a "tactical manual" for revolution. There is a great deal to say about this, and I will say it, in the posts covering the final 2/3 of the book.

Part 3: Chapter 10

This chapter, “The Working Day,” is probably the greatest in the book, because it depicts so thoroughly the workings of the capitalist system of production: the role of individuals therein, the opposition of the classes, the lack of autonomy of all parties, and the tendency of exploitation.

There are a few take-away additions to the system and the terminology in this chapter:

*The Capitalist*
The capitalist, we are told repeatedly, “is only capital personified.” Thus, the often-seen formation, “capital seizes upon…” The “driving force” of capital is “the drive to valorize itself,” and so the individual capitalist has no ability to reverse or mitigate this drive. Thus, “capital” itself becomes the subject of all these descriptions, rather than “the capitalist” or “industry.” The capitalist is a dead thing, which “vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor,” and who confronts the worker as a “thing…with no heart in its breast. What seems to throb there is [the worker’s] heartbeat.”

*The Length of the Working Day*
The length of the working day is a site of class struggle. "In the history of capitalist production, the establishment of a norm for the working day presents itself as a struggle over the limits of that day, a struggle between collective capital, i.e. the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e. the working class."

*Surplus labor*
Capital, Marx says, did not invent surplus labor: the Athenian aristocrat, the Etruscan theocrat, the civis romanus, the Norman baron, the American slave-owner, etc.--all of these exploit the worker beyond the amount of labor necessary for his maintenance. So there is a pre-history to surplus labor prior to capitalism.

***
This long chapter demonstrates a few things: 1) the mystification of the bourgeois economists as to the source of value, at the same time 2) as capital unconsciously perfects the extraction of that value from workers' labor, 3) an extended catalog of the worst horrors of this exploitation and the capitalists' success in evading legislation to restrict the work day, 4) the substitutions (of child labor, women's labor, machines) for the time lost to legislative restrictions, 5) the disregard of capital for the health of the worker, a dialectical inversion whereby productivity and vigor of labor change from beneficial to production into their opposite, something to be undermined by capital, 6) the helplessness of the "free" citizen-laborer under this system, i.e. his compulsion to sell his labor-power and inability to negotiate the price of this commodity, 7) the beginning of the organization of the class struggle and the need for protection of the workers as a class.

***
I have been thinking a lot about this (Das Kapital, dialectics) in the shower lately, and of course the "insight" I had one day was a mundane repetition of a gem from the Communist Manifesto, but here goes anyways. I have been trying to come up with a great example of Marxian dialectics. This is not the best one [which is, by the way, the self-consciousness of the worker *as* commodity], but it's nice and succinct. The idea of the left, of revolution, or even of liberal reformism, is everywhere opposed in vulgar thought to "conservatism" and the rule of the market. So, extreme fiscal conservatives are seen as "reactionary," as advocates of stability, etc. What Marxism teaches us is the complete folly of this picture. It is rather the case that the forces of capitalism, the necessities of the market, of technology, of the upheavals and crises of the world economy, of the denigration and exploitation of a global class, are the most radical and persistent change of all, in fact, the "static laws" of the free market, of finance, create a constant revolution of the forms of life.

Of course, I am not so original--what I think is clever while showering, Marx has already said much better (in the Communist Manifesto):

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Finished!

Hey gang,

I finished Volume One today, so it will now be possible for me to go back and "blog out" the remaining 700 pages. I should say, reading Capital was one of the most exhilarating intellectual tasks I have ever undertaken, and the 7 months of reading were--and I say this without embarrassment--transformative. I recommend the effort, without reserve, to anyone. Although no book could have a higher reputation, I have been endlessly impressed and persuaded while reading--if the gist and general aim are well known to everyone, the mass of evidence and clarity of argument Marx lends his argument are invaluable. Unlike, say, reading Nietzsche, an experience of finding an entirely-new person behind the familiar characterizations, reading Marx indeed finds the Marx we "already know"--his concerns are those we suspected, his insights are still active, etc.--but with the difference that this "set of concerns" and array of "Marxist" insights no longer seem like a knowledge to be filed under the heading, Philosophers; German; 19th Century; Marx & Engels, but insist on being taken up as our own, and still as deeply *his*. What can I say? I loved it.

"He is a necessary and integral part of our human spirit."- Gramsci, Our Marx

Part 3: Chapter 9

The "rate of surplus value" is "an exact expression of the degree of exploitation of labor-power by capital, or of the worker by the capitalist."

What anyone will remember about this chapter is the seemingly-arbitrary nature of the time "necessary" to produce the worker's means of subsistence, "if instead of working for the capitalist, he worked independent on his own account." For Marx, without advancing much evidence, this is usually assumed to be ~ six hours. (This, we must of course add, is nationally/historically contingent, but we wonder if it is so contingent in these examples as to be random.) I think we will get far by asking, "How do we know that the worker is not being paid fairly?"

If we flip back to chapter 7, we see that machinery and materials, sitting by themselves, or being worked on, do not create value, but can merely have their own values change shape. And, if the commodity of labor-power were treated only as the time necessary to reproduce itself (i.e. the way that other commodities operate as exchange-values), all values would be quantitatively equal when C was sold and became M again. The first and second M would be the same; capital would not accumulate but would be merely tautological.

This begs the question of all of Marx's previous definitions, however. Whence six hours, then? On one hand, we have to take this on the faith of its continuity with the already-demonstrated part of the system, and on the other, every demonstrated motive of capital as Marx later shows it. And, indeed, as "variable" capital, Marx concedes that there should be nothing fixed about this number, which comes under examination later and at great length. *That* there must be such a number (of hours of strictly "necessary" labor) we must concede, but its exact number is only (here) exemplary or (elsewhere) scrutinized.

Marx's overarching point here is that exploitation must be measured, not absolutely (as in the naive belief that, because overhead is cleared only in the "last hour" of work, that adding every additional hour would double, triple profit), but relatively, in proportion to necessary labor (a variable quantity).

Part 3: Chapter 8

"Constant capital" is the means of productions, the part of capital which maintains its quantity of value throughout the process of production. Now, crucially this value changes *form* in production, i.e. cotton becomes yarn, or a spindle "transfers" all of its use-value into yarn. Marx calls this transformation "a metempsychosis." Value "deserts the consumed body to occupy the newly create one. But this transmigration takes place, as it were, behind the back of the actual labor in progress."

So much of Capital is about machinery. Sometimes I imagine that the book could have been titled The Conditions of the Working Class in England, but in these chapters on constant capital, I wonder why it wasn't titled The Question Concerning Technology. It is important for us here to distinguish between "past labor" and "the means of production"—i.e. value and its embodiment. What is transferred in production is value, i.e. the value of past labor expressed in embodied-time: in use-values which we call means of production. Machinery contains the labor which made it, and over the course of its mechanical exhaustion, transfers 1/Xth of that labor into the product (having a life of X repetitions). But the raw materials also contain past labor (cotton does not fall out of the sky), and the form of these materials is "destroyed" while their value "reappears" in the new product.

We cannot be more specific than Marx here, so a quote will suffice: "As regards the means of production, what is really consumed is their use-value, and the consumption of this use-value by labor results in the product. There is in fact no consumption of their value and it would therefore be inaccurate to say that it is re-produced. It is rather preserved." What is produced in the product "is a new use-value in which the old exchange-value re-appears." If we are astonished to see exchange-value, our old friend, reappearing here, it shows how easily capital stops looking like capital.

The accumulation of capital, as we recall, follows the formula M-C-M. In other words, exchange-value, use-value, exchange-value. The production of the commodity to be sold consumes the use-value of the means of production purchased by the capitalist (constant capital)—the exchange value which reappears as money when the commodity is sold.

The whole point of this chapter is not only to draw the titular distinction (constant and variable capital), but also to defeat the perception that machinery "creates" value: "Once engaged in this process [of production], the machine cannot transfer more value than it possesses independently of the process."

Part 3: Chapter 7

Perhaps Hegel's most marked influence on Marx is stylistic—not in terms of the "difficulty" of their prose, but in the disingenuousness required by the dialectical method. Flipping back in Capital hundreds of pages, the reader comes across many statements which give him pause. A given sentence about the labor process is always from the viewpoint available at that point in our consciousness of it, which is inevitably simplified. For instance, "In a successful product, the role played by past labor in mediating its useful properties has been extinguished" (289). Much later, however, we are to hear that "past labor always disguises itself as capital" (757)! If anyone needs a good example of dialectical thought, here is a perfect example, spread out over half of the book. What appears to be extinguished—objectified in the final product, is not only in fact preserved (as assets), but is also raised up: as the means of production, past labor eventually dominates living labor, "as the rule of the past, dead labor over the living" (988).

Let us say we wanted to embark upon a hackneyed reading-together of the commodity fetish section in Marx and the lordship-bondage section in Hegel's Phenomenology. The only reasonable thing to pursue here would not be analogous details, or parallelism in dialectical language, but the place of these sections in relation to the entire argument (where there is, in fact, a great deal to say).

This is all to say, blogging "as-we-go" in Marx is rather self-defeating. Everything we learn is later exposed to revision; though we were never "mistaken," we don't get to hold fast to the material and definitions we memorized in the introductory chapters.

So, in this chapter, the means of production (objectified "past labor") must be seized upon by living labor, be "awakened from the dead." Later, this will be reversed—the machine (esp. its technological development) will seize upon the laborer and alter him as it sees fit. But at this early stage, Marx presents… what shall we call it? Here we are discussing "the simple elements of the labor process"—thus, as distinguished from animal labor, or from whittling a stick; and foremost as labor embodies value and becomes a use-value.

In the selling of the worker's labor-power, however, the particular use-value produced becomes irrelevant—more important is the product's containing surplus-value. "Use value is certainly not la chose qu'on aime pour lui-même in the production of commodities"… "Value is independent of the particular use-value by which it is borne." As always (I suggest) we must read this talk about commodities with a double-vision, with one eye towards shoes, Bibles, belts, and with the other eye directed towards the sell of labor-power as a commodity. So, Marx discusses the (essential) value embodied in a (contingent) use-value above, but then turns this logic around upon the worker who sells his labor-power and the capitalist who purchases it: "the use-value of labor-power, in other words labor, belongs as little to its seller as the use-value of oil after it has been sold belongs to the dealer who sold it." With full irony, then, we learn that the worker's having-sold his labor for twice the time necessary to reproduce it is, "a piece of good luck for the buyer!"

It is precisely this "good luck," the worker's having to sell an entire day of his time for the exchange-value necessary to reproduce himself (i.e. live another 24 hours), which creates surplus value. This "trick" "both takes place and does not take place in the sphere of circulation. It takes place through the mediation of circulation because it is conditioned by the purchase of the labor-power in the market; it does not take place in circulation because what happens there is only an introduction to the valorization process, which is entirely confined to the sphere of production. And so 'everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.'"

The separation of these two spheres here functions as an alibi. We should not be surprised if we later see that this phenomenon is anything but a trick, a piece of luck, or if the laws of exchange (here unviolated) turn out to have been a stacked deck.

Part 2: Chapters 5 and 6

Marx concludes Part 2 by reflecting on the change "in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae" as we leave the "sphere of simple circulation" for that of production.

He who was previously the money-owner now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his worker. The one smirks self-importantly and is intent on business; the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but--a tanning.

What has happened in these chapters is that the buyer-seller relationship stops being one of equals. In the exchange of bibles, coats, linen, corn, etc., we were in "a very Eden of the innate rights of man." In the exchange of commodities, one serves oneself and one's advantage, and only concludes the best deal to mutual advantage. However, no money can be made this way. "Circulation, or the exchange of commodities, creates no value." This is the thesis of chapter 5. 

Why does Marx call the worker "the possessor of labour-power"? [In German, Arbeitskraft or its sister concept, "capacity for labour", Arbeitsvermögen.] Labour-power is a commodity. Like other commodities, its value is the amount of socially-average labor necessary to have made it and to reproduce it. Thus, its value "is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner." In every thought we have about labour-power, we should be able to check it against our knowledge of commodities from Part 1. This will help us when we get to the question of wages.

For example, there is a certain average labor time necessary to make a coat. Just so, "in a given country at a given period, the average amount of the means of subsistence for the worker is a known datum." Feigning the cold detachment of the capitalist, Marx says that this subsistence must take into account "the worker's replacements, i.e. his children," so that these commodity owners "may perpetuate their presence on the market."

To keep our terms straight, the "use-value" of "labour-power" is... labour, the exercise of the worker's labour-power. This use-value is "consumed" by the capitalist. And here is the crucial point. Labour-power is "a commodity whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption is therefore itself an objectification of labour, hence a creation of value."

To return to where we began this post, we are leaving the sphere of circulation, because capital cannot arise in that sphere. We are following "the owner of money and the owner of labour-power" "into the hidden abode of production." To restate: in commodity-circulation, there are owners of corn and owners of bibles, looking to convert one into the other (with the intermediary stage of money). But as we enter production, the commodities are different and their owners have new names: the owner of money is the capitalist, and the owner of labour-power is the worker.

Part 2: Chapter 4

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.

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.

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.