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Capital #1
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1
Capital, one of Marx's major and most influential works, was the product of thirty years close study of the capitalist mode of production in England, the most advanced industrial society of his day. This new translation of Volume One, the only volume to be completed and edited by Marx himself, avoids some of the mistakes that have marred earlier versions and seeks to do justice to the literary qualities of the work. The introduction is by Ernest Mandel, author of Late Capitalism, one of the only comprehensive attempts to develop the theoretical legacy of Capital.
1152 pages, Paperback
First published September 14, 1867
About the author
Karl Marx
2,996 books5,398 followersWith the help of Friedrich Engels, German philosopher and revolutionary Karl Marx wrote
The Communist Manifesto
(1848) and
Das Kapital
(1867-1894), works, which explain historical development in terms of the interaction of contradictory economic forces, form many regimes, and profoundly influenced the social sciences.
German social theorist Friedrich Engels collaborated with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and on numerous other works.
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin in London opposed Communism of Karl Marx with his antithetical anarchy.
Works of Jacques Martin Barzun include Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941).
The Prussian kingdom introduced a prohibition on Jews, practicing law; in response, a man converted to Protestantism and shortly afterward fathered Karl Marx.
Marx began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Philosophy of Religion of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (see Democritus and Epicurus), doctoral thesis, also engaged Marx, who completed it in 1841. People described the controversial essay as "a daring and original piece... in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom." Marx decided to submit his thesis not to the particularly conservative professors at the University of Berlin but instead to the more liberal faculty of University of Jena, which for his contributed key theory awarded his Philosophiae Doctor in April 1841. Marx and Bauer, both atheists, in March 1841 began plans for a journal, entitled Archiv des Atheismus (Atheistic Archives), which never came to fruition.
Marx edited the newspaper Vorwärts! in 1844 in Paris. The urging of the Prussian government from France banished and expelled Marx in absentia; he then studied in Brussels. He joined the league in 1847 and published.
Marx participated the failure of 1848 and afterward eventually wound in London. Marx, a foreigner, corresponded for several publications of United States.
He came in three volumes. Marx organized the International and the social democratic party.
Marx in a letter to C. Schmidt once quipped, "All I know is that I am not a Marxist," as Warren Allen Smith related in Who's Who in Hell .
People describe Marx, who most figured among humans. They typically cite Marx with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, the principal modern architects.
Bertrand Russell later remarked of non-religious Marx, "His belief that there is a cosmic ... called dialectical materialism, which governs ... independently of human volitions, is mere mythology" ( Portraits from Memory , 1956).
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bi...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/...
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...
German social theorist Friedrich Engels collaborated with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and on numerous other works.
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin in London opposed Communism of Karl Marx with his antithetical anarchy.
Works of Jacques Martin Barzun include Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941).
The Prussian kingdom introduced a prohibition on Jews, practicing law; in response, a man converted to Protestantism and shortly afterward fathered Karl Marx.
Marx began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Philosophy of Religion of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (see Democritus and Epicurus), doctoral thesis, also engaged Marx, who completed it in 1841. People described the controversial essay as "a daring and original piece... in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom." Marx decided to submit his thesis not to the particularly conservative professors at the University of Berlin but instead to the more liberal faculty of University of Jena, which for his contributed key theory awarded his Philosophiae Doctor in April 1841. Marx and Bauer, both atheists, in March 1841 began plans for a journal, entitled Archiv des Atheismus (Atheistic Archives), which never came to fruition.
Marx edited the newspaper Vorwärts! in 1844 in Paris. The urging of the Prussian government from France banished and expelled Marx in absentia; he then studied in Brussels. He joined the league in 1847 and published.
Marx participated the failure of 1848 and afterward eventually wound in London. Marx, a foreigner, corresponded for several publications of United States.
He came in three volumes. Marx organized the International and the social democratic party.
Marx in a letter to C. Schmidt once quipped, "All I know is that I am not a Marxist," as Warren Allen Smith related in Who's Who in Hell .
People describe Marx, who most figured among humans. They typically cite Marx with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, the principal modern architects.
Bertrand Russell later remarked of non-religious Marx, "His belief that there is a cosmic ... called dialectical materialism, which governs ... independently of human volitions, is mere mythology" ( Portraits from Memory , 1956).
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bi...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/...
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...
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August 14, 2015
Louis Althusser wrote a preface to a French translation of Capital and in it he gives lots of advice on how to read this book – I recommend you read this book according to that advice, even if I didn’t quite do that myself. A big part of that advice is to not read in the order that Marx wrote. You see, the first few chapters on the commodity are seriously hard going. Much harder going than just about anything else in the book. In fact, Althusser was pretty well just following Marx’s on advice that the first few chapters could be skipped and then come back to later on. So, it wasn’t that he didn’t know the first bits were hard –he made them hard for a reason.
And that reason, Althusser says, is Hegel. Be that as it may, I feel that Marx pretty well has to start by explaining what a commodity is, because capitalism, which he is trying to understand, explain and criticise in this book, can’t be understood without understanding commodities. Why is that? Well, a large part of the point of capitalism is turning into commodities of more and more things that have never been commodities before. So much so that today just about everything can be a commodity – but this certainly wasn’t always the case. In fact, as Marx shows, prior to capitalism very few things were commodities.
Marx starts by stressing that a commodity needs to have a use value. This is really important, not least because often this is where people both start and end too. You know, why would you buy something if you had no use for it? But Marx makes the point that the use value of the commodity is actually the bit of the commodity that, by definition, the person selling the commodity is least interested in. If the person selling the commodity had a use for the commodity, why would they be selling it? A true commodity is something the person producing it has no use for at all. It has, instead, an exchange value for this person. And that exchange value can be expressed in money – money being a socially recognised store of value which allows for the trade of disparate things as if they were all the same thing. That is, if I make trousers I can sell those trousers for money and then use that money to buy any other kind of thing knowing that I am exchanging value for like value.
Which then begs the question, where does that value actually come from? And how can I exchange things knowing they actually do have ‘a like value’? Often you will hear that value is created by supply and demand. If there isn’t very much of something and everyone wants it, then it will have a particularly high value, if there is hardly any of it and no one wants it, or if there is lots and lots of it and everyone wants it, it will have a lower or perhaps no value at all. Everyone wants air, but air mostly ‘just is’ – and so has no exchange value, despite how essential it is – try not breathing for a while if you doubt this.
Marx argues this supply and demand idea isn’t where commodities really get their value from. In fact, he goes so far as to say that rare things (like gold and diamonds) often don’t get sold at their true value – so rather than their rarity increasing their value, it actually undermines their ‘true’ value. Instead he shows that it isn’t ‘how much of it’ that exists that decides something’s value, but rather how much ‘socially necessary labour time’ is incorporated into it that decides how expensive it is going to be. If it takes me six hours to make a pair of trousers and you two hours to catch a pound of fish, then I’m hardly going to exchange my trousers for your fish – it would make more sense for me to just spend two hours fishing myself if both have the same ‘value’. Marx says that in the end everything sells at its cost of production. That is, it sells for the price of the labour that is incorporated in it and for no more. Which then begs the question, where does profit come from. He spends quite a long time explaining that profit can’t come from ‘buying cheap and selling dear’ as that would mean the second capitalist would just be sending the first capitalist broke. Instead, Marx makes a really interesting move in showing that labour has an interesting property that makes it the essential commodity in commodity production, and therefore in capitalist production. That is, its ability to produce more than it costs to reproduce itself.
This sounds like getting money for nothing, but it is anything but that. Let’s say you are a capitalist (and like in a game of cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers, being a capitalist is by far the better option). To be a capitalist you need to buy a worker’s (or in fact, lots of workers) labour power. That is, you buy from them the only thing they have available to sell, their ability to work. But, just like you with the commodities that you well sell once the worker has finished making them, the labourer sells their labour power at its cost of production (or reproduction in this case). That means it will cost you as the capitalist a certain amount to employ the labourer their wages and that is the amount of money that it takes for the labourer to feed, clothe, house and raise their family (you’re going to need more labourers one day – and the labourer is going to provide them for you by using the money you pay them in wages to literally reproduce themselves). This amount of money is the cost of the labourer’s labour power. But the thing is that that labour power can produce more than just what it takes for it to reproduce itself. If the work day is 8 hours, the labourer might be able to produce enough product to pay for the reproduction of their labour power in only 4 hours. But they still have to work for the whole 8 hours. That means that you, the capitalist that employed the labourer, pays the labourer wages the full price of the workers first four hours of work, but after that four hours is up, the capitalist gets to keep everything the labourer produces for the next four hours and doesn’t really have to pay the labourer at all for that final four hours. And this is what Marx called ‘surplus value’: the value over and above that which is necessary to reproduce the labour of the labourer. And that is where the capitalist’s profits come from.
Sure, it isn’t all profit. The capitalist has to buy tools for the worker to work with, and raw materials for the worker to transform into commodities, but the capitalist receives whatever profit they are going to make out of the surplus labour time they get the worker to work.
The other bit to this is that capitalism is driven by the need to increasingly socialise the means of production. For instance, if I go to market with the trousers I have made, I really do need to sell them, ‘a man cannot live by trousers alone’. I need bread, meat, wine, tea, books, shirts and so on. But the whole process only works on the basis that while I’ve been making trousers everyone else has been making everything else that I need. If everyone was making trousers, we wouldn’t really get very far. It is only when the whole of society is actively engaged in producing commodities that the society can operate at all. And this socialisation goes all the way down, not only is it true that I can’t live by making trousers alone, but often I don’t even make all of the trousers anymore. Without us living in a society we could achieve literally nothing alone. This is a huge change from Feudalism, where peasant farmers mostly made everything they needed for life. Today, most of us are so specialised we hardly know what it is we actually help to ‘make’ at all. Marx calls this the alienation of labour.
Capitalism seeks to make everything as cheap as possible and it does this by finding ways to endlessly reduce the amount of labour that is needed to make any particular commodity. So, if it once took two weeks to produce a car, capitalism constantly seeks to find ways to speed up this process so that less and less actual labour will be incorporated in each car – and therefore each car will be cheaper. It does this by making each of the steps in the process of making the car isolated. This is the whole idea of a conveyor belt. One person doing one thing over and over again is more productive than that same person moving about doing many things. But doing the one thing over and over again is pretty well the definition of becoming ‘deskilled’ – and Marx stresses that if capitalism is good at anything, it is good at deskilling workers. Actually, that is exactly the point, as the less skill a labourer has the less you have to pay them. And it is worse that that, as it also means the easier it is to train someone to come in and replace them. A large part of this book looks at the horrors of 19th century workplaces, and a large part of those horrors involved the women and children that worked in those factories for very little wages. They could only do this because the processes had been made so simple literally a child could do them. Changing the laws may have taken kids out of the factories, but the same rule applied – the skill levels plummeted and with them the cost of labour continually dropped.
But this was for two reasons, one was that the labour labourers were selling was completely deskilled and so therefore much cheaper to reproduce. The second was that that labour was producing many more commodities and so it was literally costing less to reproduce that labour in the first place. I mean, if I need a loaf of bread and a t-shirt and shorts to survive and yesterday those things took two hours to produce and today they only take one hour to produce – then effectively my wages have dropped and more of my ‘labour time’ can be donated directly as surplus value into the pocket of the capitalist.
My productivity is the only thing the capitalist is interested in, but that interest is rapacious. Every means available to the capitalist to squeeze the last drop of value out of my labour will be tried. What is interesting is that once there appears to be no further ways of drawing surplus value out of me, and this is basically when my wages have been squeezed to the utmost and yet there is still not enough ‘value’ coming out of me, then the capitalist turns to machines. My understanding of this is that a machine is different from a tool in a very important respect. A tool is something a skilled worker uses in their work. A machine is something that transforms that work to do away with the skilled worker. That is, the very process of producing things is transformed by machines, not just to do what the worker and tool did previously, but to utterly transform how that process occurred. And machines then help to do away with more labour so that the cost of the commodities produced continually falls, especially the cost of that most important commodity, labour.
The other thing that Marx was able to show was that the rate of exploitation of labour was always greatest in countries with the most developed productive forces – the most machines. So, the English worker in Marx’s day was the most exploited worker in the world.
As I said, a large part of this book documents the utter horrors of lives of the working classes in Marx’s day. And it is gobsmacking. But there is a part of the modern reader that says while reading this things like, “well, things have certainly improved”. And this is definitely the case. However, like so many other things in life, it is only half of the story. As Marx points out, a large part of the reason why we are better off now than in his day is that commodities are so much cheaper to produce today. And this means that meeting the needs of large sections of the population is cheaper and easier than ever before. The problem is that so much of the wealth that is produced now gushes to the wealthiest sections of society as never before. For instance, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQ...
Marx basically said that there are two great classes in society. We like to talk about there being a 1%, a middle class (virtually everyone else) and a working class – who I guess we pretty much think are like the middle class, just with less class. This is, of course, a confusion of categories. The opposite of ‘middle class’ isn’t ‘working class’ – the opposite of ‘working class’ would have to be something like ‘leisured class’ – as someone who likes to say they are middle class, I can’t really say I’m ‘leisured’. Marx is very clear – everyone who has nothing else to sell other than their labour power is working class. Those who own the means of production and buy your labour power from you are capitalist. The other classes are those who still exist as artisans or small shop owners or intellectuals. But, before you get too smug, the whole point of capitalism is to do away with these ‘skilled’ jobs. Controlling labour and deskilling it is how profits are made and maximised. Increasingly, then, the working class will grow and the capitalist class, and all other classes will shrink.
Marx saw this as inevitably leading to a situation where a revolution would occur and the workers would take back what had been taken from them – the product of their surplus labour. But while Marx saw this as inevitable and of urgent necessity in his day, it is worth remembering that this book was written in 1867 – as close to 150 years ago as you might like – and that was a time before there was a motor car, before there were computers, moving pictures, MP3 players, flying machines, a world wide web of cat videos… I don’t need to go on, do I? The point is that capitalism has proven much more resilient than Marx envisaged. That said, a lot of what Marx had to say about capitalism still holds true today. If capitalism has become kinder, it is mostly due to it being forced kicking and screaming to do so. But even those reforms are proving anything but permanent. More and more is being clawed back by capital every day – a book I read recently suggested that perhaps 50% of Americans are at or below the poverty line, certainly America’s prison population goes some way to confirm Marx’s vision of the ‘reserve army’ and the redundant population that needs to be shifted ‘somewhere else’. And today capital, as Marx predicted, is truly international – so much so that we have seen the deindustrialisation of large parts of the ‘developed’ world with millions of jobs moved to low wage countries – low wage, low environmental controls, low health and safety regulations… Capital is just as unfriendly today as it was in the 1860s, it probably even employs just as many kids.
I tried to read this book years ago and ever since have told people it is too turgid to read. This isn’t really true, and that was because I got stuck in the first few chapters. The advice of Althusser and of Marx himself, that is, skip the hard bits and come back to them later, is probably really good advice. This is one of the most influential books of all time. That doesn’t mean you have to read it, but to have never read it does put you at a bit of a disadvantage – in much the same way that saying you’ve never read The Interpretation of Dreams or On the Origin of the Species puts you at a disadvantage. Not the end of the world, but these books are famous for pretty good reasons.
And that reason, Althusser says, is Hegel. Be that as it may, I feel that Marx pretty well has to start by explaining what a commodity is, because capitalism, which he is trying to understand, explain and criticise in this book, can’t be understood without understanding commodities. Why is that? Well, a large part of the point of capitalism is turning into commodities of more and more things that have never been commodities before. So much so that today just about everything can be a commodity – but this certainly wasn’t always the case. In fact, as Marx shows, prior to capitalism very few things were commodities.
Marx starts by stressing that a commodity needs to have a use value. This is really important, not least because often this is where people both start and end too. You know, why would you buy something if you had no use for it? But Marx makes the point that the use value of the commodity is actually the bit of the commodity that, by definition, the person selling the commodity is least interested in. If the person selling the commodity had a use for the commodity, why would they be selling it? A true commodity is something the person producing it has no use for at all. It has, instead, an exchange value for this person. And that exchange value can be expressed in money – money being a socially recognised store of value which allows for the trade of disparate things as if they were all the same thing. That is, if I make trousers I can sell those trousers for money and then use that money to buy any other kind of thing knowing that I am exchanging value for like value.
Which then begs the question, where does that value actually come from? And how can I exchange things knowing they actually do have ‘a like value’? Often you will hear that value is created by supply and demand. If there isn’t very much of something and everyone wants it, then it will have a particularly high value, if there is hardly any of it and no one wants it, or if there is lots and lots of it and everyone wants it, it will have a lower or perhaps no value at all. Everyone wants air, but air mostly ‘just is’ – and so has no exchange value, despite how essential it is – try not breathing for a while if you doubt this.
Marx argues this supply and demand idea isn’t where commodities really get their value from. In fact, he goes so far as to say that rare things (like gold and diamonds) often don’t get sold at their true value – so rather than their rarity increasing their value, it actually undermines their ‘true’ value. Instead he shows that it isn’t ‘how much of it’ that exists that decides something’s value, but rather how much ‘socially necessary labour time’ is incorporated into it that decides how expensive it is going to be. If it takes me six hours to make a pair of trousers and you two hours to catch a pound of fish, then I’m hardly going to exchange my trousers for your fish – it would make more sense for me to just spend two hours fishing myself if both have the same ‘value’. Marx says that in the end everything sells at its cost of production. That is, it sells for the price of the labour that is incorporated in it and for no more. Which then begs the question, where does profit come from. He spends quite a long time explaining that profit can’t come from ‘buying cheap and selling dear’ as that would mean the second capitalist would just be sending the first capitalist broke. Instead, Marx makes a really interesting move in showing that labour has an interesting property that makes it the essential commodity in commodity production, and therefore in capitalist production. That is, its ability to produce more than it costs to reproduce itself.
This sounds like getting money for nothing, but it is anything but that. Let’s say you are a capitalist (and like in a game of cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers, being a capitalist is by far the better option). To be a capitalist you need to buy a worker’s (or in fact, lots of workers) labour power. That is, you buy from them the only thing they have available to sell, their ability to work. But, just like you with the commodities that you well sell once the worker has finished making them, the labourer sells their labour power at its cost of production (or reproduction in this case). That means it will cost you as the capitalist a certain amount to employ the labourer their wages and that is the amount of money that it takes for the labourer to feed, clothe, house and raise their family (you’re going to need more labourers one day – and the labourer is going to provide them for you by using the money you pay them in wages to literally reproduce themselves). This amount of money is the cost of the labourer’s labour power. But the thing is that that labour power can produce more than just what it takes for it to reproduce itself. If the work day is 8 hours, the labourer might be able to produce enough product to pay for the reproduction of their labour power in only 4 hours. But they still have to work for the whole 8 hours. That means that you, the capitalist that employed the labourer, pays the labourer wages the full price of the workers first four hours of work, but after that four hours is up, the capitalist gets to keep everything the labourer produces for the next four hours and doesn’t really have to pay the labourer at all for that final four hours. And this is what Marx called ‘surplus value’: the value over and above that which is necessary to reproduce the labour of the labourer. And that is where the capitalist’s profits come from.
Sure, it isn’t all profit. The capitalist has to buy tools for the worker to work with, and raw materials for the worker to transform into commodities, but the capitalist receives whatever profit they are going to make out of the surplus labour time they get the worker to work.
The other bit to this is that capitalism is driven by the need to increasingly socialise the means of production. For instance, if I go to market with the trousers I have made, I really do need to sell them, ‘a man cannot live by trousers alone’. I need bread, meat, wine, tea, books, shirts and so on. But the whole process only works on the basis that while I’ve been making trousers everyone else has been making everything else that I need. If everyone was making trousers, we wouldn’t really get very far. It is only when the whole of society is actively engaged in producing commodities that the society can operate at all. And this socialisation goes all the way down, not only is it true that I can’t live by making trousers alone, but often I don’t even make all of the trousers anymore. Without us living in a society we could achieve literally nothing alone. This is a huge change from Feudalism, where peasant farmers mostly made everything they needed for life. Today, most of us are so specialised we hardly know what it is we actually help to ‘make’ at all. Marx calls this the alienation of labour.
Capitalism seeks to make everything as cheap as possible and it does this by finding ways to endlessly reduce the amount of labour that is needed to make any particular commodity. So, if it once took two weeks to produce a car, capitalism constantly seeks to find ways to speed up this process so that less and less actual labour will be incorporated in each car – and therefore each car will be cheaper. It does this by making each of the steps in the process of making the car isolated. This is the whole idea of a conveyor belt. One person doing one thing over and over again is more productive than that same person moving about doing many things. But doing the one thing over and over again is pretty well the definition of becoming ‘deskilled’ – and Marx stresses that if capitalism is good at anything, it is good at deskilling workers. Actually, that is exactly the point, as the less skill a labourer has the less you have to pay them. And it is worse that that, as it also means the easier it is to train someone to come in and replace them. A large part of this book looks at the horrors of 19th century workplaces, and a large part of those horrors involved the women and children that worked in those factories for very little wages. They could only do this because the processes had been made so simple literally a child could do them. Changing the laws may have taken kids out of the factories, but the same rule applied – the skill levels plummeted and with them the cost of labour continually dropped.
But this was for two reasons, one was that the labour labourers were selling was completely deskilled and so therefore much cheaper to reproduce. The second was that that labour was producing many more commodities and so it was literally costing less to reproduce that labour in the first place. I mean, if I need a loaf of bread and a t-shirt and shorts to survive and yesterday those things took two hours to produce and today they only take one hour to produce – then effectively my wages have dropped and more of my ‘labour time’ can be donated directly as surplus value into the pocket of the capitalist.
My productivity is the only thing the capitalist is interested in, but that interest is rapacious. Every means available to the capitalist to squeeze the last drop of value out of my labour will be tried. What is interesting is that once there appears to be no further ways of drawing surplus value out of me, and this is basically when my wages have been squeezed to the utmost and yet there is still not enough ‘value’ coming out of me, then the capitalist turns to machines. My understanding of this is that a machine is different from a tool in a very important respect. A tool is something a skilled worker uses in their work. A machine is something that transforms that work to do away with the skilled worker. That is, the very process of producing things is transformed by machines, not just to do what the worker and tool did previously, but to utterly transform how that process occurred. And machines then help to do away with more labour so that the cost of the commodities produced continually falls, especially the cost of that most important commodity, labour.
The other thing that Marx was able to show was that the rate of exploitation of labour was always greatest in countries with the most developed productive forces – the most machines. So, the English worker in Marx’s day was the most exploited worker in the world.
As I said, a large part of this book documents the utter horrors of lives of the working classes in Marx’s day. And it is gobsmacking. But there is a part of the modern reader that says while reading this things like, “well, things have certainly improved”. And this is definitely the case. However, like so many other things in life, it is only half of the story. As Marx points out, a large part of the reason why we are better off now than in his day is that commodities are so much cheaper to produce today. And this means that meeting the needs of large sections of the population is cheaper and easier than ever before. The problem is that so much of the wealth that is produced now gushes to the wealthiest sections of society as never before. For instance, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQ...
Marx basically said that there are two great classes in society. We like to talk about there being a 1%, a middle class (virtually everyone else) and a working class – who I guess we pretty much think are like the middle class, just with less class. This is, of course, a confusion of categories. The opposite of ‘middle class’ isn’t ‘working class’ – the opposite of ‘working class’ would have to be something like ‘leisured class’ – as someone who likes to say they are middle class, I can’t really say I’m ‘leisured’. Marx is very clear – everyone who has nothing else to sell other than their labour power is working class. Those who own the means of production and buy your labour power from you are capitalist. The other classes are those who still exist as artisans or small shop owners or intellectuals. But, before you get too smug, the whole point of capitalism is to do away with these ‘skilled’ jobs. Controlling labour and deskilling it is how profits are made and maximised. Increasingly, then, the working class will grow and the capitalist class, and all other classes will shrink.
Marx saw this as inevitably leading to a situation where a revolution would occur and the workers would take back what had been taken from them – the product of their surplus labour. But while Marx saw this as inevitable and of urgent necessity in his day, it is worth remembering that this book was written in 1867 – as close to 150 years ago as you might like – and that was a time before there was a motor car, before there were computers, moving pictures, MP3 players, flying machines, a world wide web of cat videos… I don’t need to go on, do I? The point is that capitalism has proven much more resilient than Marx envisaged. That said, a lot of what Marx had to say about capitalism still holds true today. If capitalism has become kinder, it is mostly due to it being forced kicking and screaming to do so. But even those reforms are proving anything but permanent. More and more is being clawed back by capital every day – a book I read recently suggested that perhaps 50% of Americans are at or below the poverty line, certainly America’s prison population goes some way to confirm Marx’s vision of the ‘reserve army’ and the redundant population that needs to be shifted ‘somewhere else’. And today capital, as Marx predicted, is truly international – so much so that we have seen the deindustrialisation of large parts of the ‘developed’ world with millions of jobs moved to low wage countries – low wage, low environmental controls, low health and safety regulations… Capital is just as unfriendly today as it was in the 1860s, it probably even employs just as many kids.
I tried to read this book years ago and ever since have told people it is too turgid to read. This isn’t really true, and that was because I got stuck in the first few chapters. The advice of Althusser and of Marx himself, that is, skip the hard bits and come back to them later, is probably really good advice. This is one of the most influential books of all time. That doesn’t mean you have to read it, but to have never read it does put you at a bit of a disadvantage – in much the same way that saying you’ve never read The Interpretation of Dreams or On the Origin of the Species puts you at a disadvantage. Not the end of the world, but these books are famous for pretty good reasons.
April 19, 2020
I remember seeing a review on here for this book from a guy who said he bought two copies of this book, one for himself and one for his girlfriend and that he didn't have a girlfriend anymore. I'm bringing this up because actually my boyfriend got me this book, as one of my birthday gifts none the less, and I have to say for the first three hundred pages it felt like I could really empathize with the other man's girlfriend.
This was really really annoying to read I'm going to be honest. I personally feel like a lot of my own politics align with the left and I think a lot of the ideas Marx brings up are important and good, especially surplus value. But like there's probably a reason people hate reading theory.
I think that if I have been reading this in the 1860s I would've liked it a lot more because all of the things being discussed would be contemporaneous but now I know all this stuff about industrial UK in the late 1800s and I don't know what I would do with that information?
I think the foreword was really useful and good once again though, and it did suggest not necessarily reading everything in order. It also gave some context that made things easier to understand. I do think some of the chapters were better than others and are much more useful for the context of understanding capitalism today. I also get why it was organized and structured the way it was originally to build up to the ideas Marx thought were important and wanted to juxtapose with the ideas of the economists of the day.
I think I could've gotten more out of this if I knew more about economics honestly, like the whole thing about monetary theory probably went straight over my head.
Honestly just glad I made it through it and I would just once again like to say that I still think reading source material is overrated and boring, I think we can usually get the best main ideas from older writing in better contemporary formats.
This was really really annoying to read I'm going to be honest. I personally feel like a lot of my own politics align with the left and I think a lot of the ideas Marx brings up are important and good, especially surplus value. But like there's probably a reason people hate reading theory.
I think that if I have been reading this in the 1860s I would've liked it a lot more because all of the things being discussed would be contemporaneous but now I know all this stuff about industrial UK in the late 1800s and I don't know what I would do with that information?
I think the foreword was really useful and good once again though, and it did suggest not necessarily reading everything in order. It also gave some context that made things easier to understand. I do think some of the chapters were better than others and are much more useful for the context of understanding capitalism today. I also get why it was organized and structured the way it was originally to build up to the ideas Marx thought were important and wanted to juxtapose with the ideas of the economists of the day.
I think I could've gotten more out of this if I knew more about economics honestly, like the whole thing about monetary theory probably went straight over my head.
Honestly just glad I made it through it and I would just once again like to say that I still think reading source material is overrated and boring, I think we can usually get the best main ideas from older writing in better contemporary formats.
July 6, 2024
De-mystifying the Left’s Bible:
Preamble:
--When COVID shutdowns started, my “Economic Development” class with Jim Glassman was in its last weeks. Foreseeing that I would really miss the campus group-learning environment, I decided to start a Goodreads study group. I’ve always been disappointed with how little engagement there is on Goodreads for critical nonfiction compared with fiction. Where else can you find folks from all over the world reading the same obscure books?! Members who read critical nonfiction tend to just track their reading, while the few extended discussions are often siloed in one-on-one messaging.
--So, I really wanted a project for us to work on together, in depth, and what better book than Marx’s infamous Capital Volume 1 to bring us together? We ended up dividing into 3 meeting groups for different time-zones and reading paces, and each group has provided rewarding experiences. Check out Carlos Martinez’s interviews to inspire our efforts:
-with Vijay Prashad: https://youtu.be/BgiKOlMjUoo
-with Radhika Desai: https://youtu.be/8EkpdYH0Bhg
--Many leftists only read the The Communist Manifesto (indeed, same goes for the opposition, at least those who bother to read), a political pamphlet Marx/Engels wrote when they were age 29/27 in the wake of the Revolutions of 1848 (“A specter is haunting Europe”… “you have nothing to lose but your chains!”); after the revolutions were co-opted by the bourgeoisie, Marx/Engels’ later preface explains how they left the Manifesto unaltered as a historical record.
--Marx’s Capital project, on the other hand, was a sober, lifelong academic pursuit. Marx had planned some 5-6 “books”, each with multiple volumes. He only finished Volume 1 (1,000+ pages) of the 1st book, with Engels piecing together Volume 2, 3, and 4(?) from Marx’s mountain of notes. The minority who make it through Volume 1 really drop off for the subsequent volumes, which are fragmented and dominated by Marx’s dry accounting style (whereas Volume 1 also features Marx’s literary depth and biting critique).
--Academic: which opposition has taken Classical political economy idols Adam Smith/David Ricardo etc. more seriously/extensively than Marx? …Certainly not today’s “mainstream Economics”, i.e. Neoclassical (“anti-Classical” according to Michael Hudson/Anwar Shaikh), where status quo shilling devolves into simply quoting the “Invisible Hand” passage without context (Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, not to mention capitalism evolving beyond petty shopkeepers of butchers/bakers/brewers, face-palm) while deliberately rejecting Classical foundations (class distinctions/struggle, labour theory of value, economic rent, historical change, turbulent competition, etc.).
Highlights:
--I ended up splitting Volume 1 into 2 halves: Market Circulation and Production. Throughout, Marx is particularly interested in uncovering capitalism’s:
(i) Abstractions: historical social relations (i.e. power relations, interactions for social needs) that are hidden, where the surface appears as natural (physical/human nature) thus inevitable (crucial for social consent!).
(ii) Contradictions: potential sources of crises.
1) Capitalism’s Value system; Market Circulation of Capital:
--With the first sentences, we immediately get a sense that we’re reading the interaction between a science textbook (chemistry’s Periodic Table) and philosophical treatise (theory of value): “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.”
--Note: Marx mimics scientific reductionism where simplifying assumptions are made to “turn off” certain parts in order to isolate and discover other parts (see The New Economics: A Manifesto for a useful distinction between this vs. the “constructionism” of utopic mainstream economics making “domain assumptions”). Thus, it’s a crucial challenge to keep track of what assumptions are at play throughout the book (and the entire Capital project).
…Starting with the commodity, Marx distinguishes its:
(i) Use-value: satisfies human wants/needs; a quality.
(ii) Exchange-value: the economic gain from selling something on the market, represented by price; a quantity.
…How these contradicting natures manifest in various scenarios is carefully unraveled, where market exchange prioritizes exchange-value while abstracting use-value (it’s difficult to compare heterogeneous qualities).
--Given the heterogeneous qualities of the commodities exchanged, the (general) commonality between commodities is both are products of labour; thus, Marx starts with the Classical Smith/Ricardo “labour theory of value”. However, Marx emphasizes that labour here must also be abstracted (heterogeneous labour becomes homogeneous; Marx calls the result “value”).
--We can theoretically measure “value” as “socially necessary labour-time” (the normal labour-time the society requires to produce the commodity), foreshadowing another contradiction: increase productivity = increase use-value produced (more commodities) but decrease “value” (shorter socially necessary labour-time needed, thus labour-power and the commodity are cheapened; see later).
--Private labour becomes social labour since it is now producing for social use (sold on ever-expanding market), but this social labour is contradicted by the relation only being via market exchange, thus indirect (sold to strangers). This stranger-to-stranger relation is mediated by the commodity sold/bought, resulting in “commodity fetishism” where social labour is concealed/objectified in the commodity itself. Just think of how visible the commodity/its price are, compared to all the labour relations/conditions throughout the commodity chain (let alone environmental conditions)!
--Let’s add some anthropology: despite economists trying to naturalize market exchange (esp. convenient thought-experiments of how human social relations started with barter), the actual mechanisms of market exchange (instantaneous exchange between strangers competing to maximize their own gain) is clearly not what built human sociability (families/tribes/communities). Not stopping to realize this shows how close our social assumptions are to anti-social Randian zealots; to dispel Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? and revive social imagination, see Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
…This abstraction of labour (“value”) involves the Great Transformation from a “society with markets” (precapitalist, where markets were on the periphery) to a “market society” (capitalism); here I’m referring to the accessible intro Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails, channeling The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, on how capitalism required State violence during the Enclosures' privatization of the Commons to create the land market (to grow wool for the rising global market) and thus the labour market (from those dispossessed of land thus forced to sell their own labour).
...Marx describes how precapitalist personal landed property (“no land without its master”) became capitalist impersonal property (“money has no master”). Marx returns to this in the last part of the book, critiquing Smith’s so-called “primitive accumulation” (convenient assumption that capitalists got their capital from savings/hard work, thus the idyllic original accumulation) by describing the top-down violent dispossession of the domestic Enclosures (The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation) and even colonial enclosures (Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital).
--Another way to conceptualize the Great Transformation:
(i) C-M-C: precapitalist exchange of Commodity-for-Commodity (facilitated by Money). This is “selling in order to buy” because the end goal is the consumption of the Commodity (consuming its use-value). This end goal means the circulation stops, thus the inherent limits.
(ii) M-C-M’: “General Formula of Capital” where Money is invested for more Money (via producing and selling Commodity). This is “buying in order to sell” (speculation!) where the end is exchange-value (more Money), which starts another circulation of capital if re-invested. As David Harvey stresses, capital is a process that must be endless to survive (endless accumulation). Thus, the endless growth driving our existential ecological crises is at the heart of capitalism’s logic; economic growth = economic health under capitalism, even when the growth is viral/cancerous/self-destructive (must-read: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World).
…speaking of speculation, M-M’ is also mentioned in the context of interest-bearing capital, and the contradictions of money fetishism: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and [the capitalist] might just as well have intended to make money without producing at all” (see: Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present and The Bubble and Beyond).
...Note: the contradictions of money as means-of-exchange vs. store-of-wealth are surprisingly central in the Patnaiks’ Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present.
--Capitalism’s value system treats the environment as a free gift (see The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power on capitalism externalizing costs by dumping it onto the environment). During Marx’s time, soil depletion was a major concern, where England was forced to import guano (seabird droppings from colonized islands) as fertilizer; Marx also mentions the disturbance of the metabolic relationship between humans and the environment from capitalist urbanization, spurring Ecological Marxism (Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System).
…see the comments below for the 2nd half of the review (Volume 1’s focus on Capitalist Production)!
Preamble:
--When COVID shutdowns started, my “Economic Development” class with Jim Glassman was in its last weeks. Foreseeing that I would really miss the campus group-learning environment, I decided to start a Goodreads study group. I’ve always been disappointed with how little engagement there is on Goodreads for critical nonfiction compared with fiction. Where else can you find folks from all over the world reading the same obscure books?! Members who read critical nonfiction tend to just track their reading, while the few extended discussions are often siloed in one-on-one messaging.
--So, I really wanted a project for us to work on together, in depth, and what better book than Marx’s infamous Capital Volume 1 to bring us together? We ended up dividing into 3 meeting groups for different time-zones and reading paces, and each group has provided rewarding experiences. Check out Carlos Martinez’s interviews to inspire our efforts:
-with Vijay Prashad: https://youtu.be/BgiKOlMjUoo
-with Radhika Desai: https://youtu.be/8EkpdYH0Bhg
--Many leftists only read the The Communist Manifesto (indeed, same goes for the opposition, at least those who bother to read), a political pamphlet Marx/Engels wrote when they were age 29/27 in the wake of the Revolutions of 1848 (“A specter is haunting Europe”… “you have nothing to lose but your chains!”); after the revolutions were co-opted by the bourgeoisie, Marx/Engels’ later preface explains how they left the Manifesto unaltered as a historical record.
--Marx’s Capital project, on the other hand, was a sober, lifelong academic pursuit. Marx had planned some 5-6 “books”, each with multiple volumes. He only finished Volume 1 (1,000+ pages) of the 1st book, with Engels piecing together Volume 2, 3, and 4(?) from Marx’s mountain of notes. The minority who make it through Volume 1 really drop off for the subsequent volumes, which are fragmented and dominated by Marx’s dry accounting style (whereas Volume 1 also features Marx’s literary depth and biting critique).
--Academic: which opposition has taken Classical political economy idols Adam Smith/David Ricardo etc. more seriously/extensively than Marx? …Certainly not today’s “mainstream Economics”, i.e. Neoclassical (“anti-Classical” according to Michael Hudson/Anwar Shaikh), where status quo shilling devolves into simply quoting the “Invisible Hand” passage without context (Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, not to mention capitalism evolving beyond petty shopkeepers of butchers/bakers/brewers, face-palm) while deliberately rejecting Classical foundations (class distinctions/struggle, labour theory of value, economic rent, historical change, turbulent competition, etc.).
Highlights:
--I ended up splitting Volume 1 into 2 halves: Market Circulation and Production. Throughout, Marx is particularly interested in uncovering capitalism’s:
(i) Abstractions: historical social relations (i.e. power relations, interactions for social needs) that are hidden, where the surface appears as natural (physical/human nature) thus inevitable (crucial for social consent!).
(ii) Contradictions: potential sources of crises.
1) Capitalism’s Value system; Market Circulation of Capital:
--With the first sentences, we immediately get a sense that we’re reading the interaction between a science textbook (chemistry’s Periodic Table) and philosophical treatise (theory of value): “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.”
--Note: Marx mimics scientific reductionism where simplifying assumptions are made to “turn off” certain parts in order to isolate and discover other parts (see The New Economics: A Manifesto for a useful distinction between this vs. the “constructionism” of utopic mainstream economics making “domain assumptions”). Thus, it’s a crucial challenge to keep track of what assumptions are at play throughout the book (and the entire Capital project).
…Starting with the commodity, Marx distinguishes its:
(i) Use-value: satisfies human wants/needs; a quality.
(ii) Exchange-value: the economic gain from selling something on the market, represented by price; a quantity.
…How these contradicting natures manifest in various scenarios is carefully unraveled, where market exchange prioritizes exchange-value while abstracting use-value (it’s difficult to compare heterogeneous qualities).
--Given the heterogeneous qualities of the commodities exchanged, the (general) commonality between commodities is both are products of labour; thus, Marx starts with the Classical Smith/Ricardo “labour theory of value”. However, Marx emphasizes that labour here must also be abstracted (heterogeneous labour becomes homogeneous; Marx calls the result “value”).
--We can theoretically measure “value” as “socially necessary labour-time” (the normal labour-time the society requires to produce the commodity), foreshadowing another contradiction: increase productivity = increase use-value produced (more commodities) but decrease “value” (shorter socially necessary labour-time needed, thus labour-power and the commodity are cheapened; see later).
--Private labour becomes social labour since it is now producing for social use (sold on ever-expanding market), but this social labour is contradicted by the relation only being via market exchange, thus indirect (sold to strangers). This stranger-to-stranger relation is mediated by the commodity sold/bought, resulting in “commodity fetishism” where social labour is concealed/objectified in the commodity itself. Just think of how visible the commodity/its price are, compared to all the labour relations/conditions throughout the commodity chain (let alone environmental conditions)!
--Let’s add some anthropology: despite economists trying to naturalize market exchange (esp. convenient thought-experiments of how human social relations started with barter), the actual mechanisms of market exchange (instantaneous exchange between strangers competing to maximize their own gain) is clearly not what built human sociability (families/tribes/communities). Not stopping to realize this shows how close our social assumptions are to anti-social Randian zealots; to dispel Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? and revive social imagination, see Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
…This abstraction of labour (“value”) involves the Great Transformation from a “society with markets” (precapitalist, where markets were on the periphery) to a “market society” (capitalism); here I’m referring to the accessible intro Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails, channeling The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, on how capitalism required State violence during the Enclosures' privatization of the Commons to create the land market (to grow wool for the rising global market) and thus the labour market (from those dispossessed of land thus forced to sell their own labour).
...Marx describes how precapitalist personal landed property (“no land without its master”) became capitalist impersonal property (“money has no master”). Marx returns to this in the last part of the book, critiquing Smith’s so-called “primitive accumulation” (convenient assumption that capitalists got their capital from savings/hard work, thus the idyllic original accumulation) by describing the top-down violent dispossession of the domestic Enclosures (The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation) and even colonial enclosures (Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital).
--Another way to conceptualize the Great Transformation:
(i) C-M-C: precapitalist exchange of Commodity-for-Commodity (facilitated by Money). This is “selling in order to buy” because the end goal is the consumption of the Commodity (consuming its use-value). This end goal means the circulation stops, thus the inherent limits.
(ii) M-C-M’: “General Formula of Capital” where Money is invested for more Money (via producing and selling Commodity). This is “buying in order to sell” (speculation!) where the end is exchange-value (more Money), which starts another circulation of capital if re-invested. As David Harvey stresses, capital is a process that must be endless to survive (endless accumulation). Thus, the endless growth driving our existential ecological crises is at the heart of capitalism’s logic; economic growth = economic health under capitalism, even when the growth is viral/cancerous/self-destructive (must-read: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World).
…speaking of speculation, M-M’ is also mentioned in the context of interest-bearing capital, and the contradictions of money fetishism: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and [the capitalist] might just as well have intended to make money without producing at all” (see: Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present and The Bubble and Beyond).
...Note: the contradictions of money as means-of-exchange vs. store-of-wealth are surprisingly central in the Patnaiks’ Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present.
--Capitalism’s value system treats the environment as a free gift (see The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power on capitalism externalizing costs by dumping it onto the environment). During Marx’s time, soil depletion was a major concern, where England was forced to import guano (seabird droppings from colonized islands) as fertilizer; Marx also mentions the disturbance of the metabolic relationship between humans and the environment from capitalist urbanization, spurring Ecological Marxism (Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System).
…see the comments below for the 2nd half of the review (Volume 1’s focus on Capitalist Production)!
March 27, 2007
Do you know how many pages this is? 1152. And worth every leaf on the tree. A must read for anyone willing or wanting to wax grand about capitalism.
Picture it: My first semester in graduate school. Day two. My professor goes over the syllabus, week one: Das Kapital (Marx)/ chps. 1 - 15, 22, 27 etc. I cry for three days lamenting the decision to pursue higher education. Then I read that shit and my little world changes.
Picture it: My first semester in graduate school. Day two. My professor goes over the syllabus, week one: Das Kapital (Marx)/ chps. 1 - 15, 22, 27 etc. I cry for three days lamenting the decision to pursue higher education. Then I read that shit and my little world changes.
November 13, 2022
So my adventure of three years finally comes to an end and I find myself to be so much more wiser with it. For the last year or so I've been annoying and asking capitalist npcs if they know of the labour theory of value (hint:they don't.)
I had several setbacks and there were times when I thought of entirely giving it up. But my perseverance (which is not a trait that comes naturally to me, I'm a very lazy person) finally seems to have yielded something. Despite the difficult nature of the text, a patient reading of it (of even just the first four chapters really) will induce a long epiphany. I realise now how stupid I was before I read the book. Maybe I'll write a longer review some day, when I feel qualified enough to do so. For now, I am so glad to have finished it and I'm gonna flex for a decade at least.
Edit: I found the math (which I've been told is intimidating) fairly easy to follow. It maybe because I am physics grad student or it may be because I never thought of it as intimidating and it really wasn't, so my lack of fear helped. I think trying to approach this book fearlessly is the first step. Nevertheless here are some tips and suggestions:
1) Establish a reading circle/ study group: This was a key contributor to my perseverance. Just as I started reading Capital, I was fortunate enough to find this study group here on Goodreads. Although it eventually became inactive, the initial biweekly meetings helped me get through the most difficult chapters, and the interactions with others from different parts of the world helped me stay connected to the text. So my advice would be to find a reading circle or start one on your own if you're ambitious enough. Either way, Capital is very difficult to read all on your own.
2) David Harvey lectures: These are easily available on YouTube and help a great deal. Also, if you play the videos at a speed of 1.25 or 1.5, they're almost thrilling.
3) Secondary reading/supplementary texts: Although I have referred to fragments from different books, there are easily available texts and written notes online that are very helpful. Even a simple google search will yield at least a few good results. I must have scoured the internet for commodity fetishism because even though there isn't much about it volume 1, it's a key Marxian concept.
4) Podcasts: This must have been my most important resource after the reading group. And this is the simplest because you can listen to them even while doing chores, it might even almost be like a meditation. My favorite podcasts were Marx madness, Reading Capital with comrades and Introduction to Marx/Marxism.
Remember to not get too intimidated. Trust me, the math isn't really all that hard, especially if you use the right, easily available resources. Happy reading!
I had several setbacks and there were times when I thought of entirely giving it up. But my perseverance (which is not a trait that comes naturally to me, I'm a very lazy person) finally seems to have yielded something. Despite the difficult nature of the text, a patient reading of it (of even just the first four chapters really) will induce a long epiphany. I realise now how stupid I was before I read the book. Maybe I'll write a longer review some day, when I feel qualified enough to do so. For now, I am so glad to have finished it and I'm gonna flex for a decade at least.
Edit: I found the math (which I've been told is intimidating) fairly easy to follow. It maybe because I am physics grad student or it may be because I never thought of it as intimidating and it really wasn't, so my lack of fear helped. I think trying to approach this book fearlessly is the first step. Nevertheless here are some tips and suggestions:
1) Establish a reading circle/ study group: This was a key contributor to my perseverance. Just as I started reading Capital, I was fortunate enough to find this study group here on Goodreads. Although it eventually became inactive, the initial biweekly meetings helped me get through the most difficult chapters, and the interactions with others from different parts of the world helped me stay connected to the text. So my advice would be to find a reading circle or start one on your own if you're ambitious enough. Either way, Capital is very difficult to read all on your own.
2) David Harvey lectures: These are easily available on YouTube and help a great deal. Also, if you play the videos at a speed of 1.25 or 1.5, they're almost thrilling.
3) Secondary reading/supplementary texts: Although I have referred to fragments from different books, there are easily available texts and written notes online that are very helpful. Even a simple google search will yield at least a few good results. I must have scoured the internet for commodity fetishism because even though there isn't much about it volume 1, it's a key Marxian concept.
4) Podcasts: This must have been my most important resource after the reading group. And this is the simplest because you can listen to them even while doing chores, it might even almost be like a meditation. My favorite podcasts were Marx madness, Reading Capital with comrades and Introduction to Marx/Marxism.
Remember to not get too intimidated. Trust me, the math isn't really all that hard, especially if you use the right, easily available resources. Happy reading!
August 17, 2015
Marx was a man badly in need of an editor. For all of the financial, amiable, and intellectual support provided by Engels, one wishes that Engels had only he had been more ruthless is cutting the fat from his partner's work. This would have been easy enough at the time, but by now Marx’s writing has acquired a sacred aura.
The main meat of this bloated tome is all in the first few hundred pages. Marx actually lays out his ideas in a very pleasing and pithy manner. I wish the rest of the book was like this. By chapter 3, Marx has descended fully into prolix pedantry. By the middle of the book, the reader is lost in a sea of irrelevant information. Part of this is due to a general lack of integration of Marx’s interests.
Marx’s intellect was broad. He could write skillfully about philosophy, economics, history, and current events. He could write in an ultra-precise, actuarial style, or in beautiful literary prose. In short, Marx was a rare genius. But unlike other rare geniuses who possessed these sweeping talents, Marx seems incapable of making these interests fit under one roof. He dons different hats for different chapters, creating abrupt shifts in tone and substance. One moment, you are reading sublime, abstract philosophy; another moment, the tabloids.
In some ways, this book is similar to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason . Like Kant, Marx is trying to overcome all of human knowledge in one grand sweep. Also like Kant, Marx is trying to integrate previously separate and antagonistic traditions. Most notably, Marx tries to wed German idealistic philosophy with English political-economy. But the marriage is strange and unhappy.
An underlying tension that runs through Capital is between a metaphysical/rationalist way of viewing the world, and a materialist/empiricist one. Of course, Marx is now famous for being a materialist; and he did everything in his power to create this impression. But one finds traces of his German penchant for metaphysics in his love of theory, which involves examining problems at the highest possible level of abstraction. Another continental quality is Marx’s use of dialectical reasoning throughout the work. The result is that some chapters are just as far from observable fact as anything Hegel could have written.
But then there’s the English side. All at once, Marx will set off on his charts and figures and statistics. He will include quote after quote from reports, newspapers, speeches, and addresses. He will examine specific historical and geographic cases in great detail. And when this happens, gone is the abstraction and ideation and dialectic.
So the text is disorganized. But what of the ideas? I had high hopes for this book. Marx is treated like a religious figure in many circles, and this book is held to be his greatest. I was expecting some serious and profound reflections on capitalism.
But Capital didn’t pay. This, in my opinion, is almost entirely due to his reliance on the “labour theory of value”. (For those who don’t know, Marx did not originate this idea; one can find the basic form as far back as John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government.) Let me explain. Roughly, the idea is that all the value in an economy is ultimately derived from labour. This is why cars are worth more than toy cars, and those fancy drinks at Starbucks are worth more than a cup of coffee.
At first glance, this seems to hold. But the more I thought about it, the less it made sense. For one, the amount of labour involved in making a cup of coffee at Starbucks is standard. Yet, getting a cup in Manhattan is about twenty cents more expensive than getting a cup in Queens. Moreover, the price of a cup of coffee varies over time, yet the steps involved in making a cup of coffee have been standard for years. So clearly there must be more to it than labor.
Marx responds that he is not interested in superficial fluctuations in price. The value he is interested in is the natural price to which fluctuations return. So to speak, the ‘signal’ behind the ‘noise’.
Again, this seems to satisfy. But let’s think about it a little more. Take diamonds. Diamonds are now egregiously expensive. But the reason for this is not that producing a cut diamond requires an enormous amount of labour. It is because a single company controls the supply of diamonds, tightening it to make them artificially rare. And at the same time, advertising for diamond rings has substantially increased the demand. The price of diamonds has been high for years. So where is the ‘signal’ to the ‘noise’?
The truth is, the labour theory of value is untenable as a theory. A commodity’s price is determined by (A) effective demand (i.e. people who want it that have the resources to get it); and (B) how rare it is. This is economics 101, but Marxists would disagree. Take this quote from Ernest Mandel’s introduction, where he defends the labour theory of value with orthodox vigor:
It is true. People are starving every day, yet the price of food shows no sign of approaching the price of jet planes. But when people are starving, this is not demand in the economic sense—it is not effective demand. If they had the resources to get food, then they wouldn’t be starving. So this defense is fallacious. I can sit in my room and profoundly hope for a supermodel to walk in the door. But this is not demand on the economic sense.
Let’s take a more banal example. Say you have a horrendous, intolerable headache. You wander into the nearest drug store. You are in the touristy part of town, and everything is seriously overpriced. You look at the price tag of headache medicine and hesitate. But another second and your mind is made up—your head hurts so much, you’ll pay any price.
Here’s another example. Let’s say I came into possession of the handwritten manuscript of Marx’s Capital. I sell it at auction for three million dollars. Is that manuscript worth so much because there is three million dollar’s worth of labour congealed in it? Or because (A) there’s only one, and (B) people really want it. Supply and demand.
I know I’m belaboring this point. But I’m doing so because the entirety of Marx’s analysis rests on this faulty premise. Once you reject this theory of value, the entire edifice collapses and you’re left with nothing. Therefore, I feel confident in saying that I learned nothing about capitalism from this book.
I would even go so far as to say that accepting this theory of value blinds you to actual problems with capitalism. Here’s a real contradiction. Competition between owners will lead them to competitively cut their worker’s pay, in order to maximize profits. But if every owner, system-wide, is cutting pay, then you have a problem—a lack of effective demand. And if nobody is buying anything, business will stagnate. This demand problem can be temporary circumvented by giving people credit, but then you eventually get yourself into a debt trap, which is what just happened to our economy.
This is simple enough. But even this thought would have been impossible had I accepted the labour theory of value.
There is another serious flaw in Marx’s thinking. True to his reputation, this book is about the exploitation of one class by another. And it should be said, this class dynamic is integral to capitalism. But concentrating exclusively on inter-class struggles blinds Marx to the equally important intra-class struggles. In fact, capitalism is driven by competition between equals. Workers compete with workers, bosses with bosses, owners with owners. Instead of the homogenized blocks of people that Marx imagines, the economy is heterogenous, filled with individuals who are all employing different strategies. So this makes Marx’s analysis simplistic.
So I think there are systematic and serious problems with Marx’s thinking. He almost completely misses the ball. Yet whenever there’s an economic crisis in the future, the Marxists will all come out brandishing their copies of Capital and screaming that Marx predicted it. (By the way, isn’t there some sort of statute of limitations on predictions? At some point, we have to admit that Marx was wrong…). Yes, yes, and every time there’s a food shortage, we’ll have to go screaming back to Malthus.
I’m being very hard on the guy. But that’s only because I fear some people still take him at his word. Please, for the love of Marx, don’t get your economic information solely from him and his followers. You will get an extraordinarily warped picture of things.
But there is something charming about Marx’s writing. Maybe it’s his dorkiness. Reading through these pages often felt like hearing about the latest conspiracy theory about the Pixar movies. It is set forth in such an urgent tone, and such an elaborate argument is built up, that one cannot but help be dazzled. I also like Marx’s prose. It’s hard to put your finger on just what’s so good about it. At first glance it looks ordinary enough. But there’s always an unexpected turn, a satisfying cadence, or a captivating idea lurking around the corner. The man could write.
I also believe it is valuable to work yourself through an intellectual system such as this. If he is mistaken, Marx is at least wonderfully consistent, and builds an impressive theoretical apparatus. You can spend hours wandering its recesses, and applying it to new materials. It’s satisfying intellectual play. This book is also a fascinating historical document. During its bloated middle section, Marx includes some mind-blowing information about the working class in England. Conditions were truly horrible, which makes you understand why the man was convinced that capitalism was evil.
In regards to communism (hardly touched upon in this book), I have some frustrations with Marxists. I have yet to hear, in any substantial detail, how their perfect utopian system would work. All I am told is that it will be utopia. But the coup de grâce is that they use this imagined society, empty of suffering and full of brotherly love, to make our current society look bad. But this makes no sense. This is to compare an actual state of things with a phantasm of the imagination. Even if it is worked out in glorious detail in your mind, it still remains a thought. And no communist would point to its failed and horrifying manifestations in history as an example. This leaves them groundless.
I have gone on for far too long. I am also a man badly in need of an editor. I’m both very glad I read this book, and very disappointed with it. I am glad because Marx is a charming writer and an original thinker, and because his analysis was so influential. But I am disappointed that is is so bankrupt of ideas, and seems to be just as “scientific” (to use a favorite word of his) as L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics.
The main meat of this bloated tome is all in the first few hundred pages. Marx actually lays out his ideas in a very pleasing and pithy manner. I wish the rest of the book was like this. By chapter 3, Marx has descended fully into prolix pedantry. By the middle of the book, the reader is lost in a sea of irrelevant information. Part of this is due to a general lack of integration of Marx’s interests.
Marx’s intellect was broad. He could write skillfully about philosophy, economics, history, and current events. He could write in an ultra-precise, actuarial style, or in beautiful literary prose. In short, Marx was a rare genius. But unlike other rare geniuses who possessed these sweeping talents, Marx seems incapable of making these interests fit under one roof. He dons different hats for different chapters, creating abrupt shifts in tone and substance. One moment, you are reading sublime, abstract philosophy; another moment, the tabloids.
In some ways, this book is similar to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason . Like Kant, Marx is trying to overcome all of human knowledge in one grand sweep. Also like Kant, Marx is trying to integrate previously separate and antagonistic traditions. Most notably, Marx tries to wed German idealistic philosophy with English political-economy. But the marriage is strange and unhappy.
An underlying tension that runs through Capital is between a metaphysical/rationalist way of viewing the world, and a materialist/empiricist one. Of course, Marx is now famous for being a materialist; and he did everything in his power to create this impression. But one finds traces of his German penchant for metaphysics in his love of theory, which involves examining problems at the highest possible level of abstraction. Another continental quality is Marx’s use of dialectical reasoning throughout the work. The result is that some chapters are just as far from observable fact as anything Hegel could have written.
But then there’s the English side. All at once, Marx will set off on his charts and figures and statistics. He will include quote after quote from reports, newspapers, speeches, and addresses. He will examine specific historical and geographic cases in great detail. And when this happens, gone is the abstraction and ideation and dialectic.
So the text is disorganized. But what of the ideas? I had high hopes for this book. Marx is treated like a religious figure in many circles, and this book is held to be his greatest. I was expecting some serious and profound reflections on capitalism.
But Capital didn’t pay. This, in my opinion, is almost entirely due to his reliance on the “labour theory of value”. (For those who don’t know, Marx did not originate this idea; one can find the basic form as far back as John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government.) Let me explain. Roughly, the idea is that all the value in an economy is ultimately derived from labour. This is why cars are worth more than toy cars, and those fancy drinks at Starbucks are worth more than a cup of coffee.
At first glance, this seems to hold. But the more I thought about it, the less it made sense. For one, the amount of labour involved in making a cup of coffee at Starbucks is standard. Yet, getting a cup in Manhattan is about twenty cents more expensive than getting a cup in Queens. Moreover, the price of a cup of coffee varies over time, yet the steps involved in making a cup of coffee have been standard for years. So clearly there must be more to it than labor.
Marx responds that he is not interested in superficial fluctuations in price. The value he is interested in is the natural price to which fluctuations return. So to speak, the ‘signal’ behind the ‘noise’.
Again, this seems to satisfy. But let’s think about it a little more. Take diamonds. Diamonds are now egregiously expensive. But the reason for this is not that producing a cut diamond requires an enormous amount of labour. It is because a single company controls the supply of diamonds, tightening it to make them artificially rare. And at the same time, advertising for diamond rings has substantially increased the demand. The price of diamonds has been high for years. So where is the ‘signal’ to the ‘noise’?
The truth is, the labour theory of value is untenable as a theory. A commodity’s price is determined by (A) effective demand (i.e. people who want it that have the resources to get it); and (B) how rare it is. This is economics 101, but Marxists would disagree. Take this quote from Ernest Mandel’s introduction, where he defends the labour theory of value with orthodox vigor:
Even when thousands of people are dying of hunger, and the ‘intensity of need’ for bread is certainly a thousand times greater than the ‘intensity of need’ for aeroplanes, the first commodity will remain immensely cheaper than the second, because much less socially necessary labour has been spent on its production.
It is true. People are starving every day, yet the price of food shows no sign of approaching the price of jet planes. But when people are starving, this is not demand in the economic sense—it is not effective demand. If they had the resources to get food, then they wouldn’t be starving. So this defense is fallacious. I can sit in my room and profoundly hope for a supermodel to walk in the door. But this is not demand on the economic sense.
Let’s take a more banal example. Say you have a horrendous, intolerable headache. You wander into the nearest drug store. You are in the touristy part of town, and everything is seriously overpriced. You look at the price tag of headache medicine and hesitate. But another second and your mind is made up—your head hurts so much, you’ll pay any price.
Here’s another example. Let’s say I came into possession of the handwritten manuscript of Marx’s Capital. I sell it at auction for three million dollars. Is that manuscript worth so much because there is three million dollar’s worth of labour congealed in it? Or because (A) there’s only one, and (B) people really want it. Supply and demand.
I know I’m belaboring this point. But I’m doing so because the entirety of Marx’s analysis rests on this faulty premise. Once you reject this theory of value, the entire edifice collapses and you’re left with nothing. Therefore, I feel confident in saying that I learned nothing about capitalism from this book.
I would even go so far as to say that accepting this theory of value blinds you to actual problems with capitalism. Here’s a real contradiction. Competition between owners will lead them to competitively cut their worker’s pay, in order to maximize profits. But if every owner, system-wide, is cutting pay, then you have a problem—a lack of effective demand. And if nobody is buying anything, business will stagnate. This demand problem can be temporary circumvented by giving people credit, but then you eventually get yourself into a debt trap, which is what just happened to our economy.
This is simple enough. But even this thought would have been impossible had I accepted the labour theory of value.
There is another serious flaw in Marx’s thinking. True to his reputation, this book is about the exploitation of one class by another. And it should be said, this class dynamic is integral to capitalism. But concentrating exclusively on inter-class struggles blinds Marx to the equally important intra-class struggles. In fact, capitalism is driven by competition between equals. Workers compete with workers, bosses with bosses, owners with owners. Instead of the homogenized blocks of people that Marx imagines, the economy is heterogenous, filled with individuals who are all employing different strategies. So this makes Marx’s analysis simplistic.
So I think there are systematic and serious problems with Marx’s thinking. He almost completely misses the ball. Yet whenever there’s an economic crisis in the future, the Marxists will all come out brandishing their copies of Capital and screaming that Marx predicted it. (By the way, isn’t there some sort of statute of limitations on predictions? At some point, we have to admit that Marx was wrong…). Yes, yes, and every time there’s a food shortage, we’ll have to go screaming back to Malthus.
I’m being very hard on the guy. But that’s only because I fear some people still take him at his word. Please, for the love of Marx, don’t get your economic information solely from him and his followers. You will get an extraordinarily warped picture of things.
But there is something charming about Marx’s writing. Maybe it’s his dorkiness. Reading through these pages often felt like hearing about the latest conspiracy theory about the Pixar movies. It is set forth in such an urgent tone, and such an elaborate argument is built up, that one cannot but help be dazzled. I also like Marx’s prose. It’s hard to put your finger on just what’s so good about it. At first glance it looks ordinary enough. But there’s always an unexpected turn, a satisfying cadence, or a captivating idea lurking around the corner. The man could write.
I also believe it is valuable to work yourself through an intellectual system such as this. If he is mistaken, Marx is at least wonderfully consistent, and builds an impressive theoretical apparatus. You can spend hours wandering its recesses, and applying it to new materials. It’s satisfying intellectual play. This book is also a fascinating historical document. During its bloated middle section, Marx includes some mind-blowing information about the working class in England. Conditions were truly horrible, which makes you understand why the man was convinced that capitalism was evil.
In regards to communism (hardly touched upon in this book), I have some frustrations with Marxists. I have yet to hear, in any substantial detail, how their perfect utopian system would work. All I am told is that it will be utopia. But the coup de grâce is that they use this imagined society, empty of suffering and full of brotherly love, to make our current society look bad. But this makes no sense. This is to compare an actual state of things with a phantasm of the imagination. Even if it is worked out in glorious detail in your mind, it still remains a thought. And no communist would point to its failed and horrifying manifestations in history as an example. This leaves them groundless.
I have gone on for far too long. I am also a man badly in need of an editor. I’m both very glad I read this book, and very disappointed with it. I am glad because Marx is a charming writer and an original thinker, and because his analysis was so influential. But I am disappointed that is is so bankrupt of ideas, and seems to be just as “scientific” (to use a favorite word of his) as L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics.
January 12, 2024
How do you criticize a classic? It's better than a classic, a pillar of modern capitalism.
As a result, no mistake, Marx is, by turn, a sociologist, historian, philosopher, and classical economist. However, it does not question the foundations of classical theories. Instead, he adds his vision, his critique of the workings of society, and the exploitation of man by man, but we are at the very heart of the classical theory.
Capital reads like Zola, for the most part. However, lifestyle and consumption habits are described with realism. In particular, the descriptions of the habitats or the bread are highlights.
Of course, the book has cost a wrinkle: one or a few. But the inequalities are still there, and some ideas are surprisingly modern (or desperate, it depends).
As a result, no mistake, Marx is, by turn, a sociologist, historian, philosopher, and classical economist. However, it does not question the foundations of classical theories. Instead, he adds his vision, his critique of the workings of society, and the exploitation of man by man, but we are at the very heart of the classical theory.
Capital reads like Zola, for the most part. However, lifestyle and consumption habits are described with realism. In particular, the descriptions of the habitats or the bread are highlights.
Of course, the book has cost a wrinkle: one or a few. But the inequalities are still there, and some ideas are surprisingly modern (or desperate, it depends).
June 30, 2012
READ THE SHIT OUT OF THIS FKN DOORSTOP. LONG LIVE SOCIALISM.
December 29, 2014
I had long avoided reading Das Kapital because I thought it would be too mathematically advanced for me. Taking courses with the Marxist philosopher and mathematician, David Schweickart, induced me to make the effort since his assignments and my own readings of Marx had already become pretty extensive and the avoidance of his most important text seemed silly. So, on my own now, I began carrying the tome about in my backpack, reading most of it at Jim's Deli across Sheridan Road from the Lake Shore Campus of Loyola University Chicago.
To my great surprise, the first volume of Capital was actually a rather quick and easy read, none of the formulations requiring more than the most elementary understanding of arithmetic. (I learned later that Marx himself only got as far as the calculus later in life.) Additionally, it made sense as an explanation of economic behavior, adding a dimension, that of class, not much appearing in Adam Smith, the only other classical economist I'd studied seriously previously. Indeed, the section on Primitive Accumulation was, for me, emotionally powerful stuff.
Getting over Capital and finding it not only illuminating but fun helped me overcome my fear of economics. I went on to read quite a bit more in the field and began purchasing and reading the International Publishers fifty volume set of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels as they became available--ultimately finishing about half of it before becoming bogged down in his notes of the mid 1860s.
To my great surprise, the first volume of Capital was actually a rather quick and easy read, none of the formulations requiring more than the most elementary understanding of arithmetic. (I learned later that Marx himself only got as far as the calculus later in life.) Additionally, it made sense as an explanation of economic behavior, adding a dimension, that of class, not much appearing in Adam Smith, the only other classical economist I'd studied seriously previously. Indeed, the section on Primitive Accumulation was, for me, emotionally powerful stuff.
Getting over Capital and finding it not only illuminating but fun helped me overcome my fear of economics. I went on to read quite a bit more in the field and began purchasing and reading the International Publishers fifty volume set of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels as they became available--ultimately finishing about half of it before becoming bogged down in his notes of the mid 1860s.
March 31, 2020
��بابام در عوضِ اینکه کتابِ 'سرمایه'ی کارل مارکس رو برام بفرسته، کتاب 'چگونه بدون تلاش کردن موفق شوید' رو واسم فرستاده! دیگه خودتون ببینید چه خریه!»
Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971)
February 23, 2018
An eye-opener
July 5, 2020
در این “مرور” بیشتر تلاش میکنم تا تجربه خودم را به عنوان یک کتابخوان نیمهحرفهای از خواندن کتاب "سرمایه" شرح دهم. در مورد این کتاب شرح و تفسیر و نقد از جانب اندیشمندان بزرگ بسیار است و این کار را برای کسی چون من بسیار سخت میکند. به همین خاطر ترجیح میدهم در مورد محتوای کتاب کمتر نظر بدهم. دوباره میگویم این مرور بیشتر به درد کتابخوانهای نیمهحرفهای میخورد، کسی که در فلسفهخوانی و یا سایر حوزههای علوم انسانی خود را صاحبنظر میداند، ممکن است این مرور را حتی شاید مبتذل بداند؛
خب برای خواندن کتاب (مخصوصا برای کلنجار رفتن با سه فصل نخست) باید کمی بیشتر از حد معمول حوصله و اراده داشته باشید. به نظر من کسی که میخواهد این کتاب را بخواند باید انگیزهی بیشتری از "فقط کتاب خواندن" داشته باشد. سه فصل ابتدایی، در حالی که هنوز با ادبیات مارکس خو نگرفتهاید میتواند به راحتی باعث شود کتاب را رها کنید. اما اگر از سه فصل اول عبور کردید، امکان این که کتاب را رها کنید کمتر میشود. علاوه بر این که با ادبیات کتاب آشنا شدهاید، چارچوب مفهومی کتاب هم ساخته شده است و از این به بعد خواندن کتاب روانتر پیش خواهد رفت.
خواندن کتاب حداقل سه پیشنیاز دارد:
یک. کتاب "نقد پیشفرضهای اصلی اقتصاد سیاسی کلاسیک" است. مارکس تلاش میکند انگارههای اصلی اقتصاددانان کلاسیک در مورد جامعه اتوپیایی آنها را نقد کند. مارکس حتی در خیلی از سطرهای کتاب میگوید "من فعلا به سراغ واقعیت واقعا موجود نمیروم (بنا به گفته هاروی، یکی از شارحان مارکس، "واقعیت واقعا موجود" بیشتر موضوع جلد دوم سرمایه است) و تنها پیشفرضها و درک اقتصاد��انان کلاسیک را از وضعیت اتوپیایی نقد میکنم." به همین علت اگر با اقتصاد سیاسی کلاسیک آشنایی داشته باشید بسیار به فهم بهتر کتاب کمک خواهد کرد. مشخصا آدام اسمیت، مالتوس، ریکاردو و جیمز استورات میل.
دو. اگر با تاریخ اروپا به طور ویژه اروپای قرون وسطی، مبانی فئودالیسم و الغای نظام سرفداری آشنایی (قطعا بیشتر از آشنایی ویکیپدیایی) داشته باشید، بسیار به درک مباحث کتاب کمک خواهد کرد.
سه. د�� مورد نسبت اندیشه هگل و مارکس هم بسیار گفتهاند. آشنایی خواننده با هگل و روش دیالکتیکی او هم بسیار به درک عمیق روش مارکس در این کتاب کمک خواهد کرد.
اما اگر خیلی هم به این پیشنیازها تسلط ندارید، باز هم خواندن کتاب خیلی خیلی بهتر و مفیدتر از نخواندن آن است. همچنین در طی زمانی که کتاب را میخوانید میتوانید اطلاعات خود را در مورد سه پیشنیاز قبلی از منابع مختلف بالا ببرید.
من کتاب را همراه با "راهنمای سرمایه مارکس" نوشتهی دیوید هاروی و ترجمه عارف اقوامی مقدم خواندم. اگر خیلی درگیر "ترجمهی خوب و بد" هستید، ترجمه کتاب هاروی میتواند به غایت آزارتان دهد. اما به نظر من کتاب هاروی بسیار به فهم بهتر کتاب کمک میکند. خب ویدئوی کلاسهای هاروی روی یوتیوب هم هست.
اما دو نکته که دوست دارم اینجا ار آنها بگویم:
یک. مارکس فروپاشی سرمایهداری و ظهور جامعهای بیطبقه را نوید میدهد. جامعهای که در آن بهرهکشی کارگران، استثمار، سرکوب و شکافهای طبقاتی از بین میرود. من هر چقدر که با روایت مارکس از سرمایهداری موافق باشم، با "امید او به آیندهای بی طبقه" همراه نیستم. من تضادها و سیاهیهای تاریخ را بخش ضروری زندگی انسانی میدانم و معتقدم تنها شکل تضادها است که در تکامل زندگی انسانی تغییر میکند. "جامعهی بی طبقه" بیشتر امری اسطورهای است که اگر چه خیالی است اما تخیلش لازم است. درکی از جامعهی اسطورهای و اتوپیایی است که کمک میکند فرم زندگی امروز خودمان را به عنوان "تنها فرم طبیعی و ضروری و راستین زندگی" ندانیم. تخیل است که ما را به "سمت چیزی بهتر" سوق میدهد، وسوسهمان میکند و رانهای است تا "وضعیت موجود" را در هر شکل و فریبی که هست نقد کنیم و از آن فراتر برویم. حرکت به سمت "چیزی بهتر" که قطعا "چیزی بهتر" از آن نیز وجود دارد و این مسیر تاریخ باید باشد.
دو. کتاب میتواند شما را هم غمگین و هم خشمگین کند. مخصوصا اگر کارگر و کارمند (چه به معنای کلاسیک و چه به معنای امروزیاش) باشید. جزئیات روایتی که مارکس از استثمار کار کارگران{و البته کارمندان} میگوید را میتوانید در زندگی روزمرهتان و محیط کار (خصوصا در این نظام سرمایهدارانهی خشن و تعدیلنشدهی امروز ایران) لمس کنید. کتاب شما را به شدت به جو محیط کاری و آن چه واقعا در جریان است حساس میکند. تراکم حس غم و خشم در سینهی آدمی، میتواند به کینهی انقلابی ختم شود. بگذارید حداقل "تخیل" کنیم.
اردیبهشت ۹۹
خب برای خواندن کتاب (مخصوصا برای کلنجار رفتن با سه فصل نخست) باید کمی بیشتر از حد معمول حوصله و اراده داشته باشید. به نظر من کسی که میخواهد این کتاب را بخواند باید انگیزهی بیشتری از "فقط کتاب خواندن" داشته باشد. سه فصل ابتدایی، در حالی که هنوز با ادبیات مارکس خو نگرفتهاید میتواند به راحتی باعث شود کتاب را رها کنید. اما اگر از سه فصل اول عبور کردید، امکان این که کتاب را رها کنید کمتر میشود. علاوه بر این که با ادبیات کتاب آشنا شدهاید، چارچوب مفهومی کتاب هم ساخته شده است و از این به بعد خواندن کتاب روانتر پیش خواهد رفت.
خواندن کتاب حداقل سه پیشنیاز دارد:
یک. کتاب "نقد پیشفرضهای اصلی اقتصاد سیاسی کلاسیک" است. مارکس تلاش میکند انگارههای اصلی اقتصاددانان کلاسیک در مورد جامعه اتوپیایی آنها را نقد کند. مارکس حتی در خیلی از سطرهای کتاب میگوید "من فعلا به سراغ واقعیت واقعا موجود نمیروم (بنا به گفته هاروی، یکی از شارحان مارکس، "واقعیت واقعا موجود" بیشتر موضوع جلد دوم سرمایه است) و تنها پیشفرضها و درک اقتصاد��انان کلاسیک را از وضعیت اتوپیایی نقد میکنم." به همین علت اگر با اقتصاد سیاسی کلاسیک آشنایی داشته باشید بسیار به فهم بهتر کتاب کمک خواهد کرد. مشخصا آدام اسمیت، مالتوس، ریکاردو و جیمز استورات میل.
دو. اگر با تاریخ اروپا به طور ویژه اروپای قرون وسطی، مبانی فئودالیسم و الغای نظام سرفداری آشنایی (قطعا بیشتر از آشنایی ویکیپدیایی) داشته باشید، بسیار به درک مباحث کتاب کمک خواهد کرد.
سه. د�� مورد نسبت اندیشه هگل و مارکس هم بسیار گفتهاند. آشنایی خواننده با هگل و روش دیالکتیکی او هم بسیار به درک عمیق روش مارکس در این کتاب کمک خواهد کرد.
اما اگر خیلی هم به این پیشنیازها تسلط ندارید، باز هم خواندن کتاب خیلی خیلی بهتر و مفیدتر از نخواندن آن است. همچنین در طی زمانی که کتاب را میخوانید میتوانید اطلاعات خود را در مورد سه پیشنیاز قبلی از منابع مختلف بالا ببرید.
من کتاب را همراه با "راهنمای سرمایه مارکس" نوشتهی دیوید هاروی و ترجمه عارف اقوامی مقدم خواندم. اگر خیلی درگیر "ترجمهی خوب و بد" هستید، ترجمه کتاب هاروی میتواند به غایت آزارتان دهد. اما به نظر من کتاب هاروی بسیار به فهم بهتر کتاب کمک میکند. خب ویدئوی کلاسهای هاروی روی یوتیوب هم هست.
اما دو نکته که دوست دارم اینجا ار آنها بگویم:
یک. مارکس فروپاشی سرمایهداری و ظهور جامعهای بیطبقه را نوید میدهد. جامعهای که در آن بهرهکشی کارگران، استثمار، سرکوب و شکافهای طبقاتی از بین میرود. من هر چقدر که با روایت مارکس از سرمایهداری موافق باشم، با "امید او به آیندهای بی طبقه" همراه نیستم. من تضادها و سیاهیهای تاریخ را بخش ضروری زندگی انسانی میدانم و معتقدم تنها شکل تضادها است که در تکامل زندگی انسانی تغییر میکند. "جامعهی بی طبقه" بیشتر امری اسطورهای است که اگر چه خیالی است اما تخیلش لازم است. درکی از جامعهی اسطورهای و اتوپیایی است که کمک میکند فرم زندگی امروز خودمان را به عنوان "تنها فرم طبیعی و ضروری و راستین زندگی" ندانیم. تخیل است که ما را به "سمت چیزی بهتر" سوق میدهد، وسوسهمان میکند و رانهای است تا "وضعیت موجود" را در هر شکل و فریبی که هست نقد کنیم و از آن فراتر برویم. حرکت به سمت "چیزی بهتر" که قطعا "چیزی بهتر" از آن نیز وجود دارد و این مسیر تاریخ باید باشد.
دو. کتاب میتواند شما را هم غمگین و هم خشمگین کند. مخصوصا اگر کارگر و کارمند (چه به معنای کلاسیک و چه به معنای امروزیاش) باشید. جزئیات روایتی که مارکس از استثمار کار کارگران{و البته کارمندان} میگوید را میتوانید در زندگی روزمرهتان و محیط کار (خصوصا در این نظام سرمایهدارانهی خشن و تعدیلنشدهی امروز ایران) لمس کنید. کتاب شما را به شدت به جو محیط کاری و آن چه واقعا در جریان است حساس میکند. تراکم حس غم و خشم در سینهی آدمی، میتواند به کینهی انقلابی ختم شود. بگذارید حداقل "تخیل" کنیم.
اردیبهشت ۹۹
February 8, 2021
Well that was a journey. Finally reached the end after two months of trudging through 10-15 pages a day. I'll write a proper review once I've finished going through my notes, but the thought I'll leave here for now is: read Capital! It's not impossible. A few chapters are tough going, and you should just go slowly (and accept that it's fine if you don't quite understand a few ideas - come back to them next time). But the core concepts are so insightful and profound, and the writing is powerful, poetic and funny. A strange thing to say about a book that came out 150 years ago, but it's indispensable for understanding modern society. And yes it's long, but as Radhika Desai says, show me any reading list and I'll happily remove three average-length books in order to make way for Capital Volume 1.
January 27, 2008
I have to say, this joint is bangin'. I find it useful when I'm in the club. P.S. Check out the total or expanded form of value. It's defective!
May 4, 2010
Vampires, monsters, fetishes! Stick with Marx through the saga of the coat and the M-C-M' and the rewards are so rich. When he guides you from the realm of exchange into the realm of production, I dare you not to feel like you are involved in cracking an incredible mystery. Because you are.
May 22, 2017
you will never see 20 yards of linen or one coat the same way again
March 28, 2021
"The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at. This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-values, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser."
You could probably fill a library with insightful reviews, responses, commentary, and reflections on Marx's Capital, and many of the reviews on this site do add colour to the illustrious picture. However, since I don't feel that I would be able to add much, I won't waste anybody's time trying to add my own views or commentary.
Instead, I'll offer brief pointers on reading Capital:
*Read the book! Obvious, I know, but if you're like me you've probably expended a great deal of energy reading everything but the book itself, as a kind of countertransference, to escape getting the book read.
*Be wary of guidebooks and guidance. Sure Louis Althusser, Michael Heinrich, Ben Fine, and David Harvey all may have a great understanding and reading of Capital, but getting to read Capital on your own terms should be the first step towards understanding it, and focusing on somebody's else's perspective (and all of the digressions involved in that) will likely distract you. Also, not all advice is good advice ... except mine of course ;).
*Analyse the text, don't be a passive reader. Engage with the text, scribble on it, make notes, highlight it, put sticky notes on it, underline etc. Don't simply scan it passively like a newspaper article. Remember, this is one of the most important and influential texts in the social science canon, regardless of your individual view on its contents and style.
*Try and have a basic grasp of some of the context(s) of Marx's work. This means getting an idea of who Adam Smith is, who the Physiocrats were, why the Poor Laws existed etc, and having a basic knowledge of Marx's philosophy. Don't distract yourself by trying to get an expansive view of everything around Marx's life and context, but a brief read on Marxism like Karl Marx: His Life and Environment or this, may be helpful, provided that it doesn't distract you from the book.
*Read the footnotes and endnotes, most of them are pretty useful.
*Break the book up into chunks. Reading a 750-1100 page book (depending on edition) will obviously seem like a mammoth challenge. But reading a chapter/subchapter, or say 10, 20, or 40 pages a day, is nothing. Doing this will help you understand the book a lot better, since you can review what you have read, and will ensure that you don't just gloss over the words in huge stretches. It should also seem like less of a commitment, so you can keep gaming or whatever you nonsense you get up to.
*READ THE BOOK!
*If all else fails, there's always the abridged version Das Kapital
You could probably fill a library with insightful reviews, responses, commentary, and reflections on Marx's Capital, and many of the reviews on this site do add colour to the illustrious picture. However, since I don't feel that I would be able to add much, I won't waste anybody's time trying to add my own views or commentary.
Instead, I'll offer brief pointers on reading Capital:
*Read the book! Obvious, I know, but if you're like me you've probably expended a great deal of energy reading everything but the book itself, as a kind of countertransference, to escape getting the book read.
*Be wary of guidebooks and guidance. Sure Louis Althusser, Michael Heinrich, Ben Fine, and David Harvey all may have a great understanding and reading of Capital, but getting to read Capital on your own terms should be the first step towards understanding it, and focusing on somebody's else's perspective (and all of the digressions involved in that) will likely distract you. Also, not all advice is good advice ... except mine of course ;).
*Analyse the text, don't be a passive reader. Engage with the text, scribble on it, make notes, highlight it, put sticky notes on it, underline etc. Don't simply scan it passively like a newspaper article. Remember, this is one of the most important and influential texts in the social science canon, regardless of your individual view on its contents and style.
*Try and have a basic grasp of some of the context(s) of Marx's work. This means getting an idea of who Adam Smith is, who the Physiocrats were, why the Poor Laws existed etc, and having a basic knowledge of Marx's philosophy. Don't distract yourself by trying to get an expansive view of everything around Marx's life and context, but a brief read on Marxism like Karl Marx: His Life and Environment or this, may be helpful, provided that it doesn't distract you from the book.
*Read the footnotes and endnotes, most of them are pretty useful.
*Break the book up into chunks. Reading a 750-1100 page book (depending on edition) will obviously seem like a mammoth challenge. But reading a chapter/subchapter, or say 10, 20, or 40 pages a day, is nothing. Doing this will help you understand the book a lot better, since you can review what you have read, and will ensure that you don't just gloss over the words in huge stretches. It should also seem like less of a commitment, so you can keep gaming or whatever you nonsense you get up to.
*READ THE BOOK!
*If all else fails, there's always the abridged version Das Kapital
Read
April 30, 2021"If money...comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek, capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt."
Simultaneously one of the most difficult and rewarding books I have ever read, Karl Marx's Capital, Vol. 1 is rightfully held in high esteem. In many ways, it defies categorization. Is it a critique of bourgeois economics? A history of capitalism? An analysis of the degradations of industrial life in mid-1800s Britain? It is all of these things in part, and Marx executes all of these varied tasks really well. As a whole, those constituent parts form what is one of the most influential books in modern history, and still perhaps the most incisive critique of the socio-economic system that looms large over us all.
I'm not really qualified to judge the finer details of Marx's economic theories, and I'm still new to political economy as a whole. (That, and the length of time I took to read this book is why I haven't given it a star rating, but rest assured it would be a high one.) However, I found his analysis incredibly enlightening. When he described the laws that govern capitalist production and the tendencies of the capitalist class, I couldn't help but see it all at work around me. If Capital feels timeless, it is because Marx identified key aspects of capitalism that are still extant, sometimes in modified forms, today. As he writes, "the intimate connection between the pangs of hunger suffered by the most industrious layers of the working class, and the extravagant consumption, coarse or refined, of the rich, for which capitalist accumulation is the basis, is only uncovered when the economic laws are known."
One of the most important contributions here, in my view, is the fact that Marx shows the historically contingent nature of the capitalist mode of production. There was a world before capitalism and, surely, there will be a world after it; Marx seeks to remind the reader, over and over, that things were not always this way. They don't have to continue to be this way, either.
This book is a towering achievement, and has influenced the world in so many ways since it was first published. Long may it continue.
Simultaneously one of the most difficult and rewarding books I have ever read, Karl Marx's Capital, Vol. 1 is rightfully held in high esteem. In many ways, it defies categorization. Is it a critique of bourgeois economics? A history of capitalism? An analysis of the degradations of industrial life in mid-1800s Britain? It is all of these things in part, and Marx executes all of these varied tasks really well. As a whole, those constituent parts form what is one of the most influential books in modern history, and still perhaps the most incisive critique of the socio-economic system that looms large over us all.
I'm not really qualified to judge the finer details of Marx's economic theories, and I'm still new to political economy as a whole. (That, and the length of time I took to read this book is why I haven't given it a star rating, but rest assured it would be a high one.) However, I found his analysis incredibly enlightening. When he described the laws that govern capitalist production and the tendencies of the capitalist class, I couldn't help but see it all at work around me. If Capital feels timeless, it is because Marx identified key aspects of capitalism that are still extant, sometimes in modified forms, today. As he writes, "the intimate connection between the pangs of hunger suffered by the most industrious layers of the working class, and the extravagant consumption, coarse or refined, of the rich, for which capitalist accumulation is the basis, is only uncovered when the economic laws are known."
One of the most important contributions here, in my view, is the fact that Marx shows the historically contingent nature of the capitalist mode of production. There was a world before capitalism and, surely, there will be a world after it; Marx seeks to remind the reader, over and over, that things were not always this way. They don't have to continue to be this way, either.
This book is a towering achievement, and has influenced the world in so many ways since it was first published. Long may it continue.
September 26, 2023
call me an uneducated Marxist now. No but fr this monstrosity of a book is worth the many headaches. It truly is, as Engels says, "the bible of the working class".
December 27, 2020
Oh boy, this review is dated. In the interest of encouraging people to share their thoughts about Capital, and put words to paper generally, I'll leave this review up. Once I've gotten through it a second time though, I'm tidying all this up.
March 28, 2019
Quando ouço falar de política, não sei bem do que estão a falar, mas sei que sou contra; quando ouço falar de economia, fujo.
Não tenho maneira de verificar se a análise de Marx é correcta, mas é interessante: tenta examinar como pura convenção passa a ser parte da Lei Natural.
O estilo varia entre o subtil e o incivil; depois uma subtil análise hegeliana vem sempre uma nota de rodapé com vários pontos exclamação sarcásticos e citações com piadas parentéticas. A erudição (com citações de obras gregas, latinas, alemãs, inglesas, francesas, italianas) remata um todo artístico competente, que é muito prejudicado pela minha falta de interesse no tópico.
Não tenho maneira de verificar se a análise de Marx é correcta, mas é interessante: tenta examinar como pura convenção passa a ser parte da Lei Natural.
O estilo varia entre o subtil e o incivil; depois uma subtil análise hegeliana vem sempre uma nota de rodapé com vários pontos exclamação sarcásticos e citações com piadas parentéticas. A erudição (com citações de obras gregas, latinas, alemãs, inglesas, francesas, italianas) remata um todo artístico competente, que é muito prejudicado pela minha falta de interesse no tópico.
March 5, 2015
"First you get the primitive accumulation then you get the Linen, Then you get the Coats, Then you get the Capital, Then you Get the Labour, Then you get The Surplus Value, then you get the mechanization, then you get more Surplus Value" - Tony Montana
October 1, 2009
El problema con El Capital no es tanto lo pesada que puede resultar su lectura - que lo es -, sino el hecho de que la teoría marxista, a la luz de la realidad, y como lo demostraran varias generaciones de economistas austríacos, tales como Menger, Böhm-Bawerk y Mises, resulta un error teórico. No sólo su análisis sobre la dinámica capitalista es malo - partiendo del equívoco de una teoría del valor-trabajo que ha sido demostrada falsa -, sino que sus ideas conducen a un entendimiento pobre de lo que se vive.
June 23, 2023
ENGLISH
Karl Marx’s Book I of “The Capital: Critique of Political Economy” is such an acclaimed, interpreted and reviewed book, object of so many controversies over the centuries, and has motivated so many revolutions around the world, that it is impossible to review it without feeling intimidated or thinking you are committing blasphemy.
The best strategy, in this case, is to be succinct, go straight to the point, avoid clichés and third-party interpretations, including analyzes of the author's philosophical background, and avoid controversy.
But is it feasible to deviate from polemics when it comes to Marx? It is definitely not the case. Marx's ideas, presented vigorously in this work, touch on feelings that go far beyond indifference or neutrality. Marx gives these sentiments a scientific guise; he conducts a rigorous investigation, relying on solid method (which does not mean immune to well-founded criticism), and exposes it in an amazingly and surprisingly clear way.
Living in a time of great development of the capitalist system in post-Industrial Revolution England, Marx observes the profound social transformations of society and presents an economic and social theory that seeks to take into account the great complexity of the new economic system and succeeds in giving it impressive cohesion and coherence — even though it has been considered superseded by many. The fact, however, that there are still followers of his theory around the world who consider it valid gives an idea of the power of his ideas.
Book I of The Capital deals with three major themes, in a very tight summary: (1) commodity; (2) surplus value; and (3) social denunciation.
Marx sees the commodity as the fundamental unit of the capitalist phenomenon. It is the starting point of his investigation. It is responsible for the way capitalist society moves. The commodity plays a fundamental role in the structuring and stratification of this society, determines people's lives, and translates economic power relations in society.
For Marx, people's permanent search for commodities determines the movement of capitalist society. The commodity is the object of desire of all people; its idea represents the individual's ideal of achievement and determines her/his social position. Commodity, for Marx, is the product of human labor, although human labor itself is also a commodity. The functioning of society is motivated, therefore, by the desire to have commodities. People see a characteristic in the commodity as if it were intrinsically present in it, but which in fact it is not as it is something socially constructed, which is its exchange value and the ability to express itself in money. People’s quest for commodities, motivated by a characteristic of value that in fact is not in it, is the “commodity fetishism”.
In capitalist society, money fetish is even greater than commodity fetish, due to the clearer and more present perception of the intrinsic exchange value that people have about money. Money is therefore the real, material expression of an abstraction, which is the perception of value about an apparently simple thing (a piece of paper or a unit of metal).
This is an idea that should be analyzed along with another concept previously developed by Marx. In his “Paris Manuscripts”, Marx had developed the idea of “estrangement” or “alienation” of the worker. According to my review of this work (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), in capitalist societies, people live according to their work, which is an activity carried out to produce for others. The worker lives to work, which is an activity not necessarily in correspondence with her/his essence, and which produces something that is not for her/himself; an activity that is itself a commodity, and the worker does so to acquire commodities and thus realize this alienated essence.
Based on this idea, another fundamental concept in the work is that of “surplus value”. For Marx, the capitalist production system necessarily implies the exploitation of the worker by the capitalist. Marx notes that work transforms different commodities into other commodities, and it is this work that makes the new commodity have a value greater than the sum of the values of the other commodities that entered into the composition of this new commodity. This is where “surplus value” comes in: in the incessant quest to increase the value of the commodities sold, the capitalist seeks to make the worker work more than the value of the salary paid for the work. The result is the appreciation of the commodity and the impoverishment of the worker.
This is an idea that is born directly from the observation of reality and especially the living conditions of workers in Europe at the time, particularly in England. Here comes the point of social denunciation, incessantly well illustrated especially after the first third of the book with reports of official investigations carried out at the time.
As I wrote in my review of the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” by Marx and Engels (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), given the way society was developing at the time, it seemed inevitable that some intellectual would begin to look at reality from the perspective of the poor and the worker. The appalling living conditions of the poor and factory-working population in England seem unimaginable by today's standards in the developed world — although in many countries, notably in the so-called developing world, similar conditions still exist. Is the idea of children between 4 and 12 years old working for 12 hours or more in filthy factories, very poorly fed and paid, often maimed by accidents at work and breathing toxic gases conceivable? This was the shocking reality of early capitalism, which Marx denounces in detail.
Near the end of the book, Marx resorts to the origins of capitalism to point out that what he calls the process of “primitive accumulation” already began to exist at the moment when some appropriated public lands, and on the other hand small landowners or even slaves became wage workers. Capitalist relations, thus, are necessarily based on the extraction of surplus value from the workers at its origins, which necessarily implies capital accumulation by capitalists by means of the exploitation and impoverishment of the worker.
Some authors defend that Marx is not properly a supporter or follower of the labor theory of value, like his predecessors Adam Smith and David Ricardo. In fact, according to these authors, the predecessors start from the premise that all value originates from work; while Marx analyzes every economic relation in the capitalist system to reach the conclusion that value originates from work. This difference in “method” would lead to a superior explanation in Marx's theory of the relationship between money and work, since money sometimes seems to multiply without any base on work. In my opinion, Marx nevertheless can still be considered an adept of the labor theory of value due to the centrality of the labor as the provider of value in his theory.
Although many criticisms have been made of Marx's economic theory, it seems indisputable that the book at least has great value in its social theory aspect. Whatever side of the political spectrum the reader is on, it is impossible to remain indifferent to “The Capital”. It also seems impossible to come out of this experience the same way you entered it.
PORTUGUÊS
O Livro I de “O Capital: Crítica da Economia Política” de Karl Marx é uma obra tão aclamada, interpretada e resenhada, objeto de tantas polêmicas ao longo dos séculos, e motivou tantas revoluções mundo afora, que é impossível resenha-la sem se sentir intimidado ou pensando se estar cometendo uma blasfêmia.
A melhor estratégia, nesse caso, é ser sucinto, ir direto ao ponto, evitar clichês e interpretações de terceiros, incluindo análises sobre o background filosófico do autor. E evitar polêmicas.
Mas é factível evitar polêmicas quando se trata de Marx? Definitivamente não é o caso. O ideário de Marx, apresentado de modo alentado nesta obra, toca em sentimentos que passam longe da indiferença ou neutralidade. Marx dá a esses sentimentos uma roupagem científica; realiza uma investigação rigorosa, embasando-se em método sólido (o que não significa imune a críticas fundamentadas) e exposta de uma maneira incrível e surpreendentemente clara.
Vivendo em uma época de grande desenvolvimento do sistema capitalista na Inglaterra, em sua fase pós-Revolução Industrial, Marx observa as transformações sociais profundas da sociedade e apresenta uma teoria econômica e social que procura levar em conta a grande complexidade do novo sistema econômico e consegue conferir a ela coesão e coerência impressionantes — ainda que considerada por muitos ultrapassada. O fato, porém, de existirem seguidores de sua teoria até hoje mundo afora, reputando-a como válida, dá a noção do poder de suas ideias.
O Livro I de O Capital trata, em apertada síntese, de três grandes temas: (1) mercadoria; (2) mais-valor; e (3) denúncia social.
Marx vê na mercadoria a unidade fundamental do fenômeno capitalista. É o ponto de partida de sua investigação. É responsável pelo modo como a sociedade capitalista se move. A mercadoria marca presença fundamental na estruturação e estratificação dessa sociedade, determina a vida das pessoas e traduz as relações de poder econômico.
Para Marx, a busca permanente das pessoas por mercadorias determina o movimento da sociedade capitalista. A mercadoria é o objeto de desejo de todas as pessoas; sua ideia representa o ideal de realização do indivíduo e determina sua posição social. Mercadoria, para Marx, é o produto do trabalho humano, embora o próprio trabalho humano também seja mercadoria. O funcionamento da sociedade é motivado, portanto, pelo desejo de se ter mercadorias. As pessoas veem na mercadoria uma característica como se estivesse presente intrinsecamente nela, mas que na verdade não está, mas é algo socialmente construído, que é o seu valor de troca e a capacidade de se expressar em dinheiro. Essa busca das pessoas por mercadorias, por enxergarem uma característica de valor que à rigor não está nela, portanto, é o “fetiche da mercadoria”.
Na sociedade capitalista, o fetiche do dinheiro é ainda maior do que o fetiche da mercadoria, pela percepção mais clara e presente de valor de troca intrínseco que as pessoas têm sobre o dinheiro. O dinheiro é, portanto, a expressão real, material. de uma abstração, que é a percepção de valor sobre uma coisa aparentemente simples (um pedaço de papel ou uma unidade de metal).
Essa é uma ideia que cabe ser analisada em conjunto com outro conceito desenvolvido anteriormente por Marx. Em seus “Manuscritos de Paris”, Marx havia desenvolvido a ideia de “estranhamento” ou “alienação” do trabalhador. Conforme minha resenha a essa obra (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), na sociedade capitalista, as pessoas vivem em função de seu trabalho, que é uma atividade realizada para produzir para outros. Assim, o trabalhador na sociedade capitalista vive para trabalhar, que é uma atividade não necessariamente em correspondência com sua essência humana, e que produz algo que não é para ele; atividade essa ela própria uma mercadoria, e o trabalhador a realiza para adquirir mercadorias e assim realizar essa essência alienada.
Partindo dessa ideia, outro conceito fundamental na obra é o de “mais-valia”, ou “mais-valor”. Para Marx, o sistema de produção capitalista necessariamente implica a exploração do trabalhador pelo capitalista. Marx nota que o trabalho transforma mercadorias diversas em outras mercadorias, e é esse trabalho que faz com que a nova mercadoria tenha um valor superior à soma dos valores das mercadorias que entraram na composição dessa nova mercadoria. É aí onde entra o “mais-valor”: na busca incessante por aumentar o valor das mercadorias vendidas, o capitalista procura fazer o trabalhador trabalhar mais do que o valor do salário pago pelo trabalho. O resultado é a valorização da mercadoria e o empobrecimento do trabalhador.
Essa é uma ideia que nasce diretamente da observação da realidade e especialmente das condições de vida dos trabalhadores da Europa à época, particularmente da Inglaterra. Aqui entra o ponto da denúncia social, incessantemente bem ilustrado especialmente após o primeiro terço do livro com relatórios de investigações oficiais realizados à época.
Como escrevi na minha resenha do “Manifesto do Partido Comunista” de Marx e Engels (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), do modo como a sociedade se desenvolvia na época, parecia inevitável que algum intelectual passasse a observar a realidade da perspectiva do pobre e do trabalhador. As condições chocantes de vida da população pobre e que trabalhava nas fábricas inglesas parecem inimagináveis para os padrões de hoje do mundo desenvolvido — embora em muitos países, notadamente do chamado mundo em desenvolvimento, ainda existam condições semelhantes. É concebível a ideia de crianças entre 4 e 12 anos de idade trabalhando por 12 horas ou mais em fábricas imundas, com alimentação paupérrima e mal pagas, frequentemente mutiladas por acidentes de trabalho e respirando gases tóxicos? Essa era a chocante realidade do capitalismo inicial, que Marx denuncia em detalhes.
Perto do final do livro, Marx recorre às origens do capitalismo para apontar que o que ele chama de processo de “acumulação primitiva” já começou a existir no momento em que alguns se apropriaram de terras públicas e, de outra parte, pequenos proprietários ou mesmo escravos se tornaram trabalhadores assalariados. As relações capitalistas, portanto, são necessariamente baseadas na extração de mais-valia dos trabalhadores desde suas origens, o que implica necessariamente a acumulação de capital pelos capitalistas por meio da exploração e empobrecimento do trabalhador.
Alguns autores defendem que Marx não é propriamente um adepto da teoria do valor-trabalho, como seus predecessores Adam Smith e David Ricardo. Na verdade, segundo tais autores, os predecessores partem da premissa de que todo valor origina-se do trabalho; enquanto Marx analisa cada relação econômica no sistema capitalista para chegar na conclusão de que o valor se origina do trabalho. Essa diferença de “método” levaria a uma explicação superior na teoria de Marx da relação entre dinheiro e trabalho, já que o dinheiro às vezes parece se multiplicar sem lastro no trabalho. Na minha opinião, devido à centralidade do trabalho como provedor de valor na teoria de Marx, ele ainda pode ser considerado como um adepto da teoria do valor trabalho.
Ainda que muitas críticas tenham sido feitas à teoria econômica de Marx, parece indiscutível que o livro ao menos tem grande valor em seu aspecto de teoria social. Seja de que lado do espectro político o leitor for, é impossível permanecer indiferente a “O Capital”. Parece impossível também se sair dessa experiência igual a como se entrou.
Karl Marx’s Book I of “The Capital: Critique of Political Economy” is such an acclaimed, interpreted and reviewed book, object of so many controversies over the centuries, and has motivated so many revolutions around the world, that it is impossible to review it without feeling intimidated or thinking you are committing blasphemy.
The best strategy, in this case, is to be succinct, go straight to the point, avoid clichés and third-party interpretations, including analyzes of the author's philosophical background, and avoid controversy.
But is it feasible to deviate from polemics when it comes to Marx? It is definitely not the case. Marx's ideas, presented vigorously in this work, touch on feelings that go far beyond indifference or neutrality. Marx gives these sentiments a scientific guise; he conducts a rigorous investigation, relying on solid method (which does not mean immune to well-founded criticism), and exposes it in an amazingly and surprisingly clear way.
Living in a time of great development of the capitalist system in post-Industrial Revolution England, Marx observes the profound social transformations of society and presents an economic and social theory that seeks to take into account the great complexity of the new economic system and succeeds in giving it impressive cohesion and coherence — even though it has been considered superseded by many. The fact, however, that there are still followers of his theory around the world who consider it valid gives an idea of the power of his ideas.
Book I of The Capital deals with three major themes, in a very tight summary: (1) commodity; (2) surplus value; and (3) social denunciation.
Marx sees the commodity as the fundamental unit of the capitalist phenomenon. It is the starting point of his investigation. It is responsible for the way capitalist society moves. The commodity plays a fundamental role in the structuring and stratification of this society, determines people's lives, and translates economic power relations in society.
For Marx, people's permanent search for commodities determines the movement of capitalist society. The commodity is the object of desire of all people; its idea represents the individual's ideal of achievement and determines her/his social position. Commodity, for Marx, is the product of human labor, although human labor itself is also a commodity. The functioning of society is motivated, therefore, by the desire to have commodities. People see a characteristic in the commodity as if it were intrinsically present in it, but which in fact it is not as it is something socially constructed, which is its exchange value and the ability to express itself in money. People’s quest for commodities, motivated by a characteristic of value that in fact is not in it, is the “commodity fetishism”.
In capitalist society, money fetish is even greater than commodity fetish, due to the clearer and more present perception of the intrinsic exchange value that people have about money. Money is therefore the real, material expression of an abstraction, which is the perception of value about an apparently simple thing (a piece of paper or a unit of metal).
This is an idea that should be analyzed along with another concept previously developed by Marx. In his “Paris Manuscripts”, Marx had developed the idea of “estrangement” or “alienation” of the worker. According to my review of this work (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), in capitalist societies, people live according to their work, which is an activity carried out to produce for others. The worker lives to work, which is an activity not necessarily in correspondence with her/his essence, and which produces something that is not for her/himself; an activity that is itself a commodity, and the worker does so to acquire commodities and thus realize this alienated essence.
Based on this idea, another fundamental concept in the work is that of “surplus value”. For Marx, the capitalist production system necessarily implies the exploitation of the worker by the capitalist. Marx notes that work transforms different commodities into other commodities, and it is this work that makes the new commodity have a value greater than the sum of the values of the other commodities that entered into the composition of this new commodity. This is where “surplus value” comes in: in the incessant quest to increase the value of the commodities sold, the capitalist seeks to make the worker work more than the value of the salary paid for the work. The result is the appreciation of the commodity and the impoverishment of the worker.
This is an idea that is born directly from the observation of reality and especially the living conditions of workers in Europe at the time, particularly in England. Here comes the point of social denunciation, incessantly well illustrated especially after the first third of the book with reports of official investigations carried out at the time.
As I wrote in my review of the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” by Marx and Engels (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), given the way society was developing at the time, it seemed inevitable that some intellectual would begin to look at reality from the perspective of the poor and the worker. The appalling living conditions of the poor and factory-working population in England seem unimaginable by today's standards in the developed world — although in many countries, notably in the so-called developing world, similar conditions still exist. Is the idea of children between 4 and 12 years old working for 12 hours or more in filthy factories, very poorly fed and paid, often maimed by accidents at work and breathing toxic gases conceivable? This was the shocking reality of early capitalism, which Marx denounces in detail.
Near the end of the book, Marx resorts to the origins of capitalism to point out that what he calls the process of “primitive accumulation” already began to exist at the moment when some appropriated public lands, and on the other hand small landowners or even slaves became wage workers. Capitalist relations, thus, are necessarily based on the extraction of surplus value from the workers at its origins, which necessarily implies capital accumulation by capitalists by means of the exploitation and impoverishment of the worker.
Some authors defend that Marx is not properly a supporter or follower of the labor theory of value, like his predecessors Adam Smith and David Ricardo. In fact, according to these authors, the predecessors start from the premise that all value originates from work; while Marx analyzes every economic relation in the capitalist system to reach the conclusion that value originates from work. This difference in “method” would lead to a superior explanation in Marx's theory of the relationship between money and work, since money sometimes seems to multiply without any base on work. In my opinion, Marx nevertheless can still be considered an adept of the labor theory of value due to the centrality of the labor as the provider of value in his theory.
Although many criticisms have been made of Marx's economic theory, it seems indisputable that the book at least has great value in its social theory aspect. Whatever side of the political spectrum the reader is on, it is impossible to remain indifferent to “The Capital”. It also seems impossible to come out of this experience the same way you entered it.
PORTUGUÊS
O Livro I de “O Capital: Crítica da Economia Política” de Karl Marx é uma obra tão aclamada, interpretada e resenhada, objeto de tantas polêmicas ao longo dos séculos, e motivou tantas revoluções mundo afora, que é impossível resenha-la sem se sentir intimidado ou pensando se estar cometendo uma blasfêmia.
A melhor estratégia, nesse caso, é ser sucinto, ir direto ao ponto, evitar clichês e interpretações de terceiros, incluindo análises sobre o background filosófico do autor. E evitar polêmicas.
Mas é factível evitar polêmicas quando se trata de Marx? Definitivamente não é o caso. O ideário de Marx, apresentado de modo alentado nesta obra, toca em sentimentos que passam longe da indiferença ou neutralidade. Marx dá a esses sentimentos uma roupagem científica; realiza uma investigação rigorosa, embasando-se em método sólido (o que não significa imune a críticas fundamentadas) e exposta de uma maneira incrível e surpreendentemente clara.
Vivendo em uma época de grande desenvolvimento do sistema capitalista na Inglaterra, em sua fase pós-Revolução Industrial, Marx observa as transformações sociais profundas da sociedade e apresenta uma teoria econômica e social que procura levar em conta a grande complexidade do novo sistema econômico e consegue conferir a ela coesão e coerência impressionantes — ainda que considerada por muitos ultrapassada. O fato, porém, de existirem seguidores de sua teoria até hoje mundo afora, reputando-a como válida, dá a noção do poder de suas ideias.
O Livro I de O Capital trata, em apertada síntese, de três grandes temas: (1) mercadoria; (2) mais-valor; e (3) denúncia social.
Marx vê na mercadoria a unidade fundamental do fenômeno capitalista. É o ponto de partida de sua investigação. É responsável pelo modo como a sociedade capitalista se move. A mercadoria marca presença fundamental na estruturação e estratificação dessa sociedade, determina a vida das pessoas e traduz as relações de poder econômico.
Para Marx, a busca permanente das pessoas por mercadorias determina o movimento da sociedade capitalista. A mercadoria é o objeto de desejo de todas as pessoas; sua ideia representa o ideal de realização do indivíduo e determina sua posição social. Mercadoria, para Marx, é o produto do trabalho humano, embora o próprio trabalho humano também seja mercadoria. O funcionamento da sociedade é motivado, portanto, pelo desejo de se ter mercadorias. As pessoas veem na mercadoria uma característica como se estivesse presente intrinsecamente nela, mas que na verdade não está, mas é algo socialmente construído, que é o seu valor de troca e a capacidade de se expressar em dinheiro. Essa busca das pessoas por mercadorias, por enxergarem uma característica de valor que à rigor não está nela, portanto, é o “fetiche da mercadoria”.
Na sociedade capitalista, o fetiche do dinheiro é ainda maior do que o fetiche da mercadoria, pela percepção mais clara e presente de valor de troca intrínseco que as pessoas têm sobre o dinheiro. O dinheiro é, portanto, a expressão real, material. de uma abstração, que é a percepção de valor sobre uma coisa aparentemente simples (um pedaço de papel ou uma unidade de metal).
Essa é uma ideia que cabe ser analisada em conjunto com outro conceito desenvolvido anteriormente por Marx. Em seus “Manuscritos de Paris”, Marx havia desenvolvido a ideia de “estranhamento” ou “alienação” do trabalhador. Conforme minha resenha a essa obra (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), na sociedade capitalista, as pessoas vivem em função de seu trabalho, que é uma atividade realizada para produzir para outros. Assim, o trabalhador na sociedade capitalista vive para trabalhar, que é uma atividade não necessariamente em correspondência com sua essência humana, e que produz algo que não é para ele; atividade essa ela própria uma mercadoria, e o trabalhador a realiza para adquirir mercadorias e assim realizar essa essência alienada.
Partindo dessa ideia, outro conceito fundamental na obra é o de “mais-valia”, ou “mais-valor”. Para Marx, o sistema de produção capitalista necessariamente implica a exploração do trabalhador pelo capitalista. Marx nota que o trabalho transforma mercadorias diversas em outras mercadorias, e é esse trabalho que faz com que a nova mercadoria tenha um valor superior à soma dos valores das mercadorias que entraram na composição dessa nova mercadoria. É aí onde entra o “mais-valor”: na busca incessante por aumentar o valor das mercadorias vendidas, o capitalista procura fazer o trabalhador trabalhar mais do que o valor do salário pago pelo trabalho. O resultado é a valorização da mercadoria e o empobrecimento do trabalhador.
Essa é uma ideia que nasce diretamente da observação da realidade e especialmente das condições de vida dos trabalhadores da Europa à época, particularmente da Inglaterra. Aqui entra o ponto da denúncia social, incessantemente bem ilustrado especialmente após o primeiro terço do livro com relatórios de investigações oficiais realizados à época.
Como escrevi na minha resenha do “Manifesto do Partido Comunista” de Marx e Engels (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), do modo como a sociedade se desenvolvia na época, parecia inevitável que algum intelectual passasse a observar a realidade da perspectiva do pobre e do trabalhador. As condições chocantes de vida da população pobre e que trabalhava nas fábricas inglesas parecem inimagináveis para os padrões de hoje do mundo desenvolvido — embora em muitos países, notadamente do chamado mundo em desenvolvimento, ainda existam condições semelhantes. É concebível a ideia de crianças entre 4 e 12 anos de idade trabalhando por 12 horas ou mais em fábricas imundas, com alimentação paupérrima e mal pagas, frequentemente mutiladas por acidentes de trabalho e respirando gases tóxicos? Essa era a chocante realidade do capitalismo inicial, que Marx denuncia em detalhes.
Perto do final do livro, Marx recorre às origens do capitalismo para apontar que o que ele chama de processo de “acumulação primitiva” já começou a existir no momento em que alguns se apropriaram de terras públicas e, de outra parte, pequenos proprietários ou mesmo escravos se tornaram trabalhadores assalariados. As relações capitalistas, portanto, são necessariamente baseadas na extração de mais-valia dos trabalhadores desde suas origens, o que implica necessariamente a acumulação de capital pelos capitalistas por meio da exploração e empobrecimento do trabalhador.
Alguns autores defendem que Marx não é propriamente um adepto da teoria do valor-trabalho, como seus predecessores Adam Smith e David Ricardo. Na verdade, segundo tais autores, os predecessores partem da premissa de que todo valor origina-se do trabalho; enquanto Marx analisa cada relação econômica no sistema capitalista para chegar na conclusão de que o valor se origina do trabalho. Essa diferença de “método” levaria a uma explicação superior na teoria de Marx da relação entre dinheiro e trabalho, já que o dinheiro às vezes parece se multiplicar sem lastro no trabalho. Na minha opinião, devido à centralidade do trabalho como provedor de valor na teoria de Marx, ele ainda pode ser considerado como um adepto da teoria do valor trabalho.
Ainda que muitas críticas tenham sido feitas à teoria econômica de Marx, parece indiscutível que o livro ao menos tem grande valor em seu aspecto de teoria social. Seja de que lado do espectro político o leitor for, é impossível permanecer indiferente a “O Capital”. Parece impossível também se sair dessa experiência igual a como se entrou.
January 25, 2021
The book is an excoriation of capitalism based on a vast accumulation of data. In it, he prophesied with scientific authority a class struggle terminating in a proletarian victory and the establishment of a collectivist society. Though often inaccurate historically and feeble stylistically, it has become a kind of bible for communists. It is ironical that Marx, who sought scientific justification for his theories, should have stimulated his followers a pseudo-mystical veneration.
November 19, 2010
I have been reading this book for way too long. However, it has been a worthwhile experience, revealing the provenance of many leftist values that I may have had sympathy for, but admittedly did not fully understand because I lacked an understanding of origin. Not saying I'm a doctrinaire Marxist now, but that is exactly the whole point of reading Marx at this juncture in the state of leftist social theory/politics... To read it from an non-dogmatic perspective. I think if you do this, Marx has a lot of compelling things to say about how a capitalist system works, but perhaps the way societies change is not fully understood. I agree with some, (e.g., David Harvey), that capitalism is at, or will reach very soon, an inflection point, caused mostly by an environmental limitation to economic growth... bascially, China can't keep growing at 8% annually without serious environmental and social consequences. But Capital offers I think only suggestions about how to go about changing society from something more exploitative and profligate to something more socially necessary, just, and progressive. Class struggle could mean violent revolution--a laughable concept, i think-- or it could mean non violent resistance and pragmatic negotiation for real power. Worth the read if you can commit the time to it. I would recommend David Harvey's free lectures on his website davidharvey.org. They definitely helped keep me interested.
October 11, 2013
I have not read this book, but am familiar with the gist of it. Until recently, even though I share Marx's aversion of Big Capital in the hands of a Few Individuals, I had not appreciated the real impact.
Every product has two values: the intrinsic value of the product, created by the poor labourer, and the exchange value, which the capitalist sells it for: usually much higher than the intrinsic value. The capitalist pockets the difference, and grows fat like a leech on the life-blood of the poor labourer, who lives and dies in penury.
Amazon is the CAPITALIST. Big time. Grown fat and bloated. Now it has swallowed GoodReads, and is growing fat on the reviews of us poor book-slaves.
THE TIME FOR THE BLOODY REVOLUTION IS AT HAND.
Reviewers of the cyber-world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your GR account!
FUCK AMAZON!
Every product has two values: the intrinsic value of the product, created by the poor labourer, and the exchange value, which the capitalist sells it for: usually much higher than the intrinsic value. The capitalist pockets the difference, and grows fat like a leech on the life-blood of the poor labourer, who lives and dies in penury.
Amazon is the CAPITALIST. Big time. Grown fat and bloated. Now it has swallowed GoodReads, and is growing fat on the reviews of us poor book-slaves.
THE TIME FOR THE BLOODY REVOLUTION IS AT HAND.
Reviewers of the cyber-world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your GR account!
FUCK AMAZON!
December 24, 2020
پایان سفری سه ماهه با مارکس در دل تاریخ تاریک سرمایهداری.
امیدوارم جلدهای دوم و سوم رو هم بخونم و بنویسم راجع بهش.
پ.ن : در خواندن سرمایه شک نکنید.
امیدوارم جلدهای دوم و سوم رو هم بخونم و بنویسم راجع بهش.
پ.ن : در خواندن سرمایه شک نکنید.
August 25, 2020
Kapital is a response to Adam Smith and David Ricardo (with deepcut insults to John Stuart Mill). One project of elemental economics was to explain the source of value. The prevailing theory (soon abandoned) was that value only comes from labor - it’s the Labour Theory of Value.
This theory had appeal. It abstracts from currency and from ‘random’ price fluctuations. It’s robust to coercive production schemes like slavery or feudalism. And, it links up with Locke’s conception of the right to property. But, with the benefit of our contemporary understanding, there are obvious flaws. Off the bat - how does the theory handle pointless work, like moving rocks from here to there without purpose?
Marx builds up the Labour Theory of Value, then expands it. He amends the irreducible unit of value from ‘labour-time’ to ‘socially necessary labour time’. This shadowy concept has a panacean effect, ostensibly correcting for all sorts of deficiencies, including the question above. He then applies the Theory to capitalism and asks, what value does the capitalist provide?
Shock: Once you’ve defined value as labour-time, it follows by tautology that the capitalist creates no value. And, so the first ~400 pages of Kapital proceed as an ultra-slow motion fallacy. Marx explains basic, irrelevant lemmas and corollaries with tedious, faux-positivism.
It all leads up to his section on Surplus Value, value created beyond what is necessary to sustain the life and family of the labourer. Comparing capital and capitalists to vampires, leeches, slave-drivers, Marx explains how the capitalist’s drive to capture surplus value is the impetus behind over-work and exploitation of labour. It is also the basis for technological progress and global trade - which Marx acknowledges.
His understanding is that capitalism causes development but purely via exploitation and, unless otherwise required by the state, no growth is shared by labour. The capitalist squeezes as much out of the labourer as possible during the workday. Marx forwards a bizarre and silly conception of the workday where the capitalist need only pay for the value necessary to reproduce labour (i.e. the culturally accepted necessities of life and family) and the remainder is found money. He hand-waves over skilled labour, supply and demand (lol), the effect of intra-capitalist competition on the demand for labour, etc. etc.
Suffice it to say, we should have stopped at the implication that the capitalist creates no value. That’s clearly wrong, and proves the Labour Theory of Value wrong by contradiction. At the foundation, our economic theory must explain the value of efficient allocation of scarce resources.
So, what’s missing?
First, gains from trade. If you need food and I need water, and you have a well and I have a farm, then we both benefit from trading. Marx’s conception is that in an open market this would just be a trade of like exchange value, with no value created. But, to have a clear economic benefit and not call it value, that’s a problem.
Second, and as a corollary, the Theory can’t explain how supply and demand impact value. Kapital has few mentions of supply and demand because Marx sees those forces as causing mere fluctuations in price around an exogenously determined natural value. Here he relies on ‘socially necessary’, and this reveals the flaw in that concept - how is what is ‘socially necessary’ determined if not by an iterated social process of negotiation and development? if not by discovery through repeated market dynamics? In other words, supply and demand.
Third, and most egregiously, Marx has no understanding of savings, investment, and risk. He transmutes savings into ‘hoarding’ because he is unable to see how saving (of any type) is an investment in the future. Once you understand that abstraction, the question is what determines the investment payoff? You can keep your savings as a hoard of depreciating commodities, like a squirrel hoarding acorns. Or, you could invest in something productive, like a tool you use in your work. If the financial system is better developed, you can invest in a CD (that ultimately finances a bank loan) or even a share of company stock.
Critically, a. every saver is an investor, however attenuated, and b. every investment can go down in value, every investment carries risk. By contrast, Marx starts from the standpoint that a. the capitalist class captures all surplus value (savings), and b. the capitalist class ensures surplus value extraction as a condition of production. He has no conception of labourers saving and what that means. And, he never reckons with the implications of the fact that a capital investment can lose value. That’s because acknowledgement that an investment can go up or down in value requires acknowledgement that the capitalist takes risk and that their decisions impact value creation (greatly), which contradicts Marx’s tautology.
Fast-forwarding, we now understand utility as the source of value and any intro Econ course would quickly build from there to explain these elementary concepts.
The best that can be said of the theory portion of Kapital is that Marx unwittingly teased out obvious flaws in the Labour Theory of Value. There is mild intrigue in reading back the intellectual history of this now irrelevant dispute.
[As an aside, David Harvey’s podcast is a helpful companion to reading Kapital. Harvey’s knowledge of Economics is frequently laughable. He gets excited about Marx’s rebuttals as if all of Adam Smith and Ricardo’s original ideas are still canon and accepted today. But, the side effect of his uncritical perspective is that he can explain the text for what it is since he is, more or less, cosplaying as a 19th century commentarian.]
The history portion of Kapital still has some relevance, as a kind of People’s History of the period. In particular, the very last section on Primitive Accumulation - the transition to capitalism - makes a lot of sense and finally explains Marx’s ill-considered affection for feudalism and subsistence farming, a strange motif.
A lot more could be said, I have never more vigorously annotated a book. I had fun with this. It took me back to being a debate coach, reading broken (yet sophisticated) student cases and having to pierce through to succinctly grok the fundamental errors.
This theory had appeal. It abstracts from currency and from ‘random’ price fluctuations. It’s robust to coercive production schemes like slavery or feudalism. And, it links up with Locke’s conception of the right to property. But, with the benefit of our contemporary understanding, there are obvious flaws. Off the bat - how does the theory handle pointless work, like moving rocks from here to there without purpose?
Marx builds up the Labour Theory of Value, then expands it. He amends the irreducible unit of value from ‘labour-time’ to ‘socially necessary labour time’. This shadowy concept has a panacean effect, ostensibly correcting for all sorts of deficiencies, including the question above. He then applies the Theory to capitalism and asks, what value does the capitalist provide?
Shock: Once you’ve defined value as labour-time, it follows by tautology that the capitalist creates no value. And, so the first ~400 pages of Kapital proceed as an ultra-slow motion fallacy. Marx explains basic, irrelevant lemmas and corollaries with tedious, faux-positivism.
It all leads up to his section on Surplus Value, value created beyond what is necessary to sustain the life and family of the labourer. Comparing capital and capitalists to vampires, leeches, slave-drivers, Marx explains how the capitalist’s drive to capture surplus value is the impetus behind over-work and exploitation of labour. It is also the basis for technological progress and global trade - which Marx acknowledges.
His understanding is that capitalism causes development but purely via exploitation and, unless otherwise required by the state, no growth is shared by labour. The capitalist squeezes as much out of the labourer as possible during the workday. Marx forwards a bizarre and silly conception of the workday where the capitalist need only pay for the value necessary to reproduce labour (i.e. the culturally accepted necessities of life and family) and the remainder is found money. He hand-waves over skilled labour, supply and demand (lol), the effect of intra-capitalist competition on the demand for labour, etc. etc.
Suffice it to say, we should have stopped at the implication that the capitalist creates no value. That’s clearly wrong, and proves the Labour Theory of Value wrong by contradiction. At the foundation, our economic theory must explain the value of efficient allocation of scarce resources.
So, what’s missing?
First, gains from trade. If you need food and I need water, and you have a well and I have a farm, then we both benefit from trading. Marx’s conception is that in an open market this would just be a trade of like exchange value, with no value created. But, to have a clear economic benefit and not call it value, that’s a problem.
Second, and as a corollary, the Theory can’t explain how supply and demand impact value. Kapital has few mentions of supply and demand because Marx sees those forces as causing mere fluctuations in price around an exogenously determined natural value. Here he relies on ‘socially necessary’, and this reveals the flaw in that concept - how is what is ‘socially necessary’ determined if not by an iterated social process of negotiation and development? if not by discovery through repeated market dynamics? In other words, supply and demand.
Third, and most egregiously, Marx has no understanding of savings, investment, and risk. He transmutes savings into ‘hoarding’ because he is unable to see how saving (of any type) is an investment in the future. Once you understand that abstraction, the question is what determines the investment payoff? You can keep your savings as a hoard of depreciating commodities, like a squirrel hoarding acorns. Or, you could invest in something productive, like a tool you use in your work. If the financial system is better developed, you can invest in a CD (that ultimately finances a bank loan) or even a share of company stock.
Critically, a. every saver is an investor, however attenuated, and b. every investment can go down in value, every investment carries risk. By contrast, Marx starts from the standpoint that a. the capitalist class captures all surplus value (savings), and b. the capitalist class ensures surplus value extraction as a condition of production. He has no conception of labourers saving and what that means. And, he never reckons with the implications of the fact that a capital investment can lose value. That’s because acknowledgement that an investment can go up or down in value requires acknowledgement that the capitalist takes risk and that their decisions impact value creation (greatly), which contradicts Marx’s tautology.
Fast-forwarding, we now understand utility as the source of value and any intro Econ course would quickly build from there to explain these elementary concepts.
The best that can be said of the theory portion of Kapital is that Marx unwittingly teased out obvious flaws in the Labour Theory of Value. There is mild intrigue in reading back the intellectual history of this now irrelevant dispute.
[As an aside, David Harvey’s podcast is a helpful companion to reading Kapital. Harvey’s knowledge of Economics is frequently laughable. He gets excited about Marx’s rebuttals as if all of Adam Smith and Ricardo’s original ideas are still canon and accepted today. But, the side effect of his uncritical perspective is that he can explain the text for what it is since he is, more or less, cosplaying as a 19th century commentarian.]
The history portion of Kapital still has some relevance, as a kind of People’s History of the period. In particular, the very last section on Primitive Accumulation - the transition to capitalism - makes a lot of sense and finally explains Marx’s ill-considered affection for feudalism and subsistence farming, a strange motif.
A lot more could be said, I have never more vigorously annotated a book. I had fun with this. It took me back to being a debate coach, reading broken (yet sophisticated) student cases and having to pierce through to succinctly grok the fundamental errors.
April 23, 2014
This is the third time I've read this book, and I'm confident there will be a fourth, fifth, and even sixth reading. This is the quintessential text for explaining how capitalism is predicated upon the rapacious exploitation of the working class.
Although the review written below contains many errors, and was written during a state of extreme inebriation, I feel no compulsion to edit it.
------------------------
Fair warning, I’m writing this hung over.
The first time I read this, I gave the book 4 stars, knowing it was a 5 star work, but with 4 star writing. I was wrong. Oh-so wrong. Marx’s writing merely reflects his dialectical and masterly way of contemplating, and few of us can dare to grow wings and fly up to such lofty heights of his genius and acumen! Read, reflect, and re-read. Wait, then read again! Perhaps every January, a fine way to start the new year! As Marx forewarns us: “There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”
In order to fully understand capitalism, critically, one must dive into the dialectical water of Herr Doctor Marx. All subsequent critiques of capitalism, since the publication of Das Kapital, stand atop his lofty and rounded shoulders. All apologetic attempts in favor of capitalism stand under his heel!
In order to come to grips with the capitalist mode of production, Marx lets us in on a little secret; the secret of the holy trinity/commodity. What is at once, father, son and Holy Spirit, is in fact use vale, exchange value, and value! Value is the holy spirit of capitalism, where man’s social relations are reified into a congealed and objective measurement of human labor in the abstract! At heart in Marx’s ontology is man as a social being, but on an appearance level, a sensory level, it is one of perennial and staggering exchanges.
Marx is no vulgar materialist as most presume, but heavily invested in the tensions between idealism and materialism, and there anti-matter/matter explosions.
After the commodity is understand in all its mystical and metaphysical glory, Marx guides the reader by the hand – be careful his grip is very callused and bloody – and shows us where profit or surplus value comes from. He takes Say, Smith, and Ricardo to task, it is not from prudence, or spending abstinence, or merely some ripple in supply and demand, nor is it from labor in general, but a very rare and historically necessary commodity, unfathomed by all those who tread before Herr Marx! It is the commodity of labor power.
Humankind’s ability to labor, and reproduce that labor, in an intertwined market, has its own value – initially a subsistence value, capable of being raised through moral struggle – the value of the reproduction of labor power itself. A good portion of the working day is spent merely meeting subsistence levels of nourishment and daily reproduction, but then there comes along that dastardly moment of working beyond the means of subsistence. This moment is no short period, it’s no ‘final hour’ as bourgeoisie economist frequently claim. No it’s in fact many hours, which is how the capitalist extracts absolute surplus value. This is where the capitalist definitively EXPLOITS the worker. The worker has no right to raise contention, he’s sold his labor power, to the highest (of low) bidders, and the law ensures he honor this social document. Maybe the worker can go on strike, lower the working day, and reduce some of that exploitation. But alas, relative surplus value – increased productivity in the means of production, lessening the time duration needed to provide for subsistence labor - would sneak up and clandestinely exploit the worker further, without the workers awareness.
Labor theories of value, in Locke’s, and Smith’s time, believed and argued that the worker had a right to what he labored over and on. His product was his. This right was rational, it was divine, and it was human. Alas, what really ended up happening is the capitalist garnered the right to expropriate the labor of someone else, via the immaterial contract he generated, with the violence of the state enforcing it, in a manner that appropriates the value of the laborers product into the capitalist own coffers. One no longer has a right to their product; one is now ‘free’ and right-less, under capitalism!
What is the capitalist to do with this surplus? Try as he might, he cannot spend it all on his own luxury without imploding the capitalist structure. No, he must reinvest: “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! … Reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value, or surplus-product into capital! Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie.”
Thus we are left, beholden to an irrational market order, where rational agents withdraw their rationality to the invisible hand of the market. Another abstract and reified notion that mask real material and social relations, contingent upon the exploitation of the many by the few!
Now it’s time to read Volume II!
Although the review written below contains many errors, and was written during a state of extreme inebriation, I feel no compulsion to edit it.
------------------------
Fair warning, I’m writing this hung over.
The first time I read this, I gave the book 4 stars, knowing it was a 5 star work, but with 4 star writing. I was wrong. Oh-so wrong. Marx’s writing merely reflects his dialectical and masterly way of contemplating, and few of us can dare to grow wings and fly up to such lofty heights of his genius and acumen! Read, reflect, and re-read. Wait, then read again! Perhaps every January, a fine way to start the new year! As Marx forewarns us: “There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”
In order to fully understand capitalism, critically, one must dive into the dialectical water of Herr Doctor Marx. All subsequent critiques of capitalism, since the publication of Das Kapital, stand atop his lofty and rounded shoulders. All apologetic attempts in favor of capitalism stand under his heel!
In order to come to grips with the capitalist mode of production, Marx lets us in on a little secret; the secret of the holy trinity/commodity. What is at once, father, son and Holy Spirit, is in fact use vale, exchange value, and value! Value is the holy spirit of capitalism, where man’s social relations are reified into a congealed and objective measurement of human labor in the abstract! At heart in Marx’s ontology is man as a social being, but on an appearance level, a sensory level, it is one of perennial and staggering exchanges.
Marx is no vulgar materialist as most presume, but heavily invested in the tensions between idealism and materialism, and there anti-matter/matter explosions.
After the commodity is understand in all its mystical and metaphysical glory, Marx guides the reader by the hand – be careful his grip is very callused and bloody – and shows us where profit or surplus value comes from. He takes Say, Smith, and Ricardo to task, it is not from prudence, or spending abstinence, or merely some ripple in supply and demand, nor is it from labor in general, but a very rare and historically necessary commodity, unfathomed by all those who tread before Herr Marx! It is the commodity of labor power.
Humankind’s ability to labor, and reproduce that labor, in an intertwined market, has its own value – initially a subsistence value, capable of being raised through moral struggle – the value of the reproduction of labor power itself. A good portion of the working day is spent merely meeting subsistence levels of nourishment and daily reproduction, but then there comes along that dastardly moment of working beyond the means of subsistence. This moment is no short period, it’s no ‘final hour’ as bourgeoisie economist frequently claim. No it’s in fact many hours, which is how the capitalist extracts absolute surplus value. This is where the capitalist definitively EXPLOITS the worker. The worker has no right to raise contention, he’s sold his labor power, to the highest (of low) bidders, and the law ensures he honor this social document. Maybe the worker can go on strike, lower the working day, and reduce some of that exploitation. But alas, relative surplus value – increased productivity in the means of production, lessening the time duration needed to provide for subsistence labor - would sneak up and clandestinely exploit the worker further, without the workers awareness.
Labor theories of value, in Locke’s, and Smith’s time, believed and argued that the worker had a right to what he labored over and on. His product was his. This right was rational, it was divine, and it was human. Alas, what really ended up happening is the capitalist garnered the right to expropriate the labor of someone else, via the immaterial contract he generated, with the violence of the state enforcing it, in a manner that appropriates the value of the laborers product into the capitalist own coffers. One no longer has a right to their product; one is now ‘free’ and right-less, under capitalism!
What is the capitalist to do with this surplus? Try as he might, he cannot spend it all on his own luxury without imploding the capitalist structure. No, he must reinvest: “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! … Reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value, or surplus-product into capital! Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie.”
Thus we are left, beholden to an irrational market order, where rational agents withdraw their rationality to the invisible hand of the market. Another abstract and reified notion that mask real material and social relations, contingent upon the exploitation of the many by the few!
Now it’s time to read Volume II!
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