What Was The Purpose(s) Of Marx's Capital?

Marx's Capital was a giant leap for mankind's base of knowledge.

And I don't think that is a bit of an overstatement.

A-A,

It is not a criticism of anything to say that it does not talk about something other than what it talks about.

And you have philosophized what Marx says about freedom and necessity, which is really quite trivial: in any society, there is a certain amount of work that needs to be done in order to meet the material requirements of existence; after that is finished begins the free time that humans have for other things.

In a rational society, the “realm of freedom” would expand with the increasing productivity of labor and the ability to produce more use-values; in capitalism, it is the opposite: the ability to produce more use values leads to poverty for the vast majority.

It is really unfortunate that so many look for some grand “meta-narrative” of history in Marx. Maybe trying to explain something as banal as why workers’ paychecks are never enough to meet their needs is just too banal for most intellectuals.

double post

I said I didnt think they needed to be true for revolutionary class struggle to be valid, that's not saying that they are not true just that if they were untrue that wouldnt change my political outlook

the inevitable end of capitalism doesnt seem to me to be true, for instance, as capitalism seems very strong in terms of its existance, this despite the fact it's in its worst crisis in years. This doesnt mean I think we shouldnt struggle for a different world however.

Surplus value seems to me to be true for lots of working class jobs but not all and I dont think those jobs that dont produce surplus value are therefore without revolutionary potential. I used to work for a charity helping homeless kids, I dont see what surplus value my labour was producing but that didnt mean our conditions werent still bullshit

Very well put, RC.

Impressed, maybe. But my understanding was that he was paid for it. And in true anarchist style, never completed it

Yeah, this is one of those feel-good chestnuts that gets trotted out occasionally by well-intentioned types who want to demonstrate that self-proclaimed anarchists and self-proclaimed "Marxists" don't have to hate each other, and can't Marx and Bakunin get along?

It's a personality-driven approach to politics, like if you could just reconcile the historical personalities Marx and Bakunin (who were bitter political enemies, and by all accounts did not like each other personally either), then you could reconcile the "streams" of "Marxism" and "anarchism."

Fuck that. Marx and Bakunin are not (y)our homies. We didn't know them. They lived a long time ago. Marx wrote some very important work on how capitalism functions, and some interesting journalistic and historical essays. Bakunin made some very prescient comments about the dangers of a radicalized intelligentsia subverting popular revolutions in order to exert a bureaucratic control over society. Both had adherents in the early European labor movement.

Fealty to historical lineages is a substitute for thinking.

Why read Capital? Because you think you might learn something from it. Why read Bakunin? Same reason.

Edit: Sorry if this sounded cranky, it's just that as a translator, it pisses me off to constantly see Bakunin get credit for something he didn't do. Nikolai Danielson is the one who deserves props.

ButCapital is not at all what A-A criticizes it for being-- it is not a theory of "base/superstructure," nor is it based on anthropology of any sort. It is exactly what Marx entitles it-- a critique of political economy; an exploration and explanation of the accumulation of capital, and the limits thereto. It's "narrow focus" is dictated by the subject-- which is capital, and the question Marx poses throughout his volumes: 'What is the economic relation we call "capital." '

Best work? Depends what you mean by "best." Best written? Not hardly. I think The 18th Brumaire... and The Class Struggle in France, 1848-1850 are better reads. Most passionate? Nope, Economic Manuscripts, 1857-1864 is where Marx lets his inner lyricist loose. But best critique of political economy? Yeah, I think it is.

And really, to say Marx, inCapital, or anywhere ignores the importance of geography, military traditions,cultural institutions etc. etc. in the organization of society, to historical materialism, misses the point-- the point that Marx is presenting, in Capital, capital in its distilled expression, just as value is presented in its distilled expression. Marx does not ignore other factors any more than he ignore the importance of price. Price is the phenomenal expression. Value is the core to the accumulation.

Claiming Marx proposed a one-dimensional view of human society as "economic" is a) to miss the real meaning of "economic" b) boilerplate baloney.

Not only that, it's almost the opposite, namely Marx shows that the relations of production often influence and determine the technological base. example: Legal limits to the working day necessitates relative surplus-value extraction in the form of machinery, etc.

I don't think you've read the third volume of Capital or Engels' preface to the German Ideology. The introduction and other parts of the third volume clearly make anthropological arguments, and Engels in that preface explicitly credits Marx with the "invention" of the base/superstructure theory, indicating its centrality in his writings (i.e., the idea that the economic 'base' determines the fabric and structure of society).

In other words, exactly what I've been saying all along. The assertion that "relations of production" determine the rest of the makeup of society is inherently reductionist.

By the way, I don't think one should be attacked for pointing out what are valid weaknesses in Marx's overall method and theory. I'm quickly gaining the impression that I have absent-mindedly walked into a church and declared that I'm not in total agreement with the prevailing orthodoxy of the most revered prophet.

Erm, so are we talking about Marx or Engels? Or do you think they were the same person? (There is no "introduction" to Vol. 3 that Marx would have written.)

One other thing, Habermas has this useful distinction between research practice and methodological reflections. He argues that Marx's own reflections and prescriptions weren't always on par with what he actually did. So, he may have written the Preface to A Contribution, which reads as very reductionist (but see Derek Sayer's The Violence of Abstraction), but that does not mean he actually applied such reductionism in his own critique of political economy (and he didn't, as AN points out).

Re. the realm of freedom/realm of necessity, you seem to have completely missed my point. I haven't "philosophised" it beyond the scope of what Marx actually wrote (and I don't think that one should assume a false dichotomy between philosophy and praxis either). I'm more than aware of the possibilities that in a rational society, after socially-necessary work, would exist a realm of freedom and creativity. That is hardly groundbreaking and Marx was hardly the first socialist to say this. My point was that the notion of a "realm of necessity" as Marx understands it all too easily becomes a justification for centralised authority, factory discipline, the domination of nature, etc. This connection is all fairly explicit in Capital vol. 3 (and even in the 1844 manuscripts where he says that it was "necessary" to have a society of dehumanisation in order to conquer nature, etc.), but even more so, e.g., in Engels' essay "On Authority," as I mentioned earlier. The problem with this is that it conflates freedom with domination both in a historical and in a structural sense (after all, domination is a "necessary" step to communism as Engels, Lenin and Mao have conceived it--e.g., Lenin's idea of state socialism as a "transition" to real communism, which surprisingly enough never happened under the USSR once "socialism" was equated with state capitalism). And it's no small wonder that figures such as Bakunin were so concerned with the authoritarian potentialities of Marx's theory.

It's not a straw-man argument to point out that there are problems with this anthropology and that it has inclinations toward authoritarianism. And there are clear passages in Marx's work that point to this.

And as far as talking about a "grand meta-narrative," I didn't "look" for this in Marx. It is already there. And quite directly in fact (if the "materialist conception of history" outlined in The German Ideology isn't a meta-narrative of history, what on earth is)!

Sorry, I'm getting it confused with the German Ideology. I meant chapter 48 of vol. 3.

So he is engaging in "research practice" when he writes something reductionist, but "methodological reflections" when he writes something that *isn't* reductionist? Seriously?

This kind of slippery reasoning strikes me as very poor. For one, as a dialectician, how can one make such a distinction when clearly "methodological reflections" and "research practice" are related to one another. and mediated through one another? And even if such a Kantian division of concepts IS valid, you haven't demonstrated how the distinction has in merit in relation to Marx. The two texts where the reductionism is most clear are The German Ideology and the Communist Manifesto--but it's also there in the Eighteenth Brumaire, for instance... which Marx did author on his own.

My point is not to say that such economic reductionism is totally invalid. Of course there are many instances where there is a direct and overbearing relation between the economic 'base' and other elements of society, particularly under capitalism. I have witnessed firsthand, though, how feminists and others are so wantonly and savagely attacked by some Marxists on economic reductionist grounds (claiming eg. critiquing patriarchy is "reactionary," "bourgeois" or whatever other fashionable epithet you like--or it "distracts" from the "class struggle"), and thus I think defending this element of Marx's analysis, or trying to deny it, is incredibly narrow-minded, to say the least.

My impression is that you implicitly presuppose that people who discuss Marx on this forum are "Marxists" in the sense that they subscribe to a certain body of doctrines, consisting mostly of Marx's and Engels' writings as well as those they co-authored, which was systematized in the late 19th century. However, most, if not all, people around here are interested in the critique of political economy (the few published writings and thousands of pages of manuscripts leading in one way or another to Capital), and realize that not only some of Marx's writings are not very interesting (or just outright boring and useless to everyone except witty biographers, like Herr Vogt), and defend ideas that many of us reject (national liberation, to take a very "innocent" example!), the whole corpus – if taken literally and absurdly as a monolithic whole ­– is inconsistent (the theory of absolute immiseration in the Manifesto vs. relative impoverishment in Capital is just the best known example). Therefore, we (if I may speak for the Libcom Marx crowd) are not really terribly interested in what, e.g., The German Ideology (written at a time when Marx still subscribed to Ricardo's economics, at best) had to say – or if we are, we usually look at such earlier writings through the lens of Capital. I, for one, do not subscribe to the "epistemological break" view as traditionally expressed, but there was certainly some intense development going on in Marx's views throughout his 40+ years long career.

But saying Capital is somehow reductionist in that it focuses on economics is a petitio principii. Capital is a critique of economics. What else should it be about? And it is just as fallacious to go from Capital's "economism" to saying "Marx was an economic reductionist", because, as dozens of examples can witness, Marx was very well aware (and, remember, this is a 19th century thinker!) of the importance of culture, political power, language or familial relations in the analysis of societies. Just look at the chapter on pre-capitalist forms in the Grundrisse or the analyses of the archaic mode of production in the Ethnological Notebooks!

I think you can do better. Research practice and methodological reflections have a different subject-matter, for starters. Methodological reflections are concerned with how research practice has to be done, while research practice is, in Marx's case, mostly concerned with the analysis of capitalist society.

Ah, Engelsian notions of dialectics with its mystical mixing of dialectical opposites. In your view, use-value and value probably can't be distinguished in a crude "Kantian" manner (the horror!) because they're dialectically "related" and "mediated".

Yet we are the orthodox marxists. Give me a break.

The examples of writings you mention are almost completely unrelated to the critique of political economy (hence not very interesting to me, although Brumaire is a fun read for the style).

Read them both numerous times, and what Engels wrote is not what Marx wrote, a point that is more than a mere technicality.

If you don't mind doing so, perhaps you can point out the "mis-"anthropology that informs, determines, Marx's analysis of capital, wage-labor, the dispossession of the immediate producers, surplus-value, profit, cost of production, prices of production, ground rent, the trinitarian formula etc.etc. etc.

Where exactly, in Marx's volumes of Capital, not Engels' commentary is the "reductionist" base/superstructure formula? Where is the bad anthropology in the discussion of the rate of profit.

Nobody's asking for ideological adherence, as if this were a religion. We are asking for concrete evidence in Capital for what you claim are the weaknesses in Marx's critique.

What I think you fail to understand is that as Marx says, all societies reproduce themselves through determining the allocation of labor time to those very tasks of reproduction. "All economy is the economy of time." All economy is about the labor process and the social mediation of that process.

If you, or anyone, know of a better way of describing why and how classes do what they do, please explain it. However, arguing that the accumulation of value determines the course, path, history of capitalism is not reducing human beings or society to mindless automatons. It is an argument that capital is exactly what it is-- a social relation of production based on a specific organization of labor that aggrandizes the time of the producers as value.

I have no problem with you, or anybody else, "pointing out valid weaknesses in Marx's overall method and theory." The kicker is of course the term "valid." So far, IMO, you have not produced a valid criticism of either. Instead you substitute Engels' comments for Marx's writings and then suggest others haven't read Marx when the evidence provided by and in your own technique suggests you are the one who hasn't bothered to actually read Marx.

So OK, tell me where is the "meta-narrative" or the anthropology in chapter 48, since that chapter is exclusively concerned with capitalism. Not the history of all pre-existing societies, not some eternal "law of value" manifesting itself in different forms-- but specifically and solely capital/profit, land/ground rent, labor/wages? In short there is nothing here other than the critical facets of capitalist reproduction.

Marx says, "We have seen how the capitalist process of production is a historically specific form of the social production process in general. This last is both a production process of the material conditions of existence for human life, and a process, proceeding in specific economic and historical relations of production, that produces and reproduces these relations of productions themselves, and with them the bearers of this process, their material conditions of their existence and the mutual relationships, i.e. the specific economic form of their society."

So here's what the claim of "meta-narrative" misses: 1) Marx is claiming that capitalism is aspecific moment, expression of human history 2) that capitalism is no more a natural condition than any previous organization of society 3) that reproducing the means for human beings to survive is not, and is never, simply an issue of "mechanics" or of "tools,"-- it's never just an issue of the technical basis of production-- it involves reproducing the social relations, the relations between "producers" and "owners" 4) that the "meta" category of surplus-labor, which indeed exists in societies that are not capitalist, takes the form of surplus-value in capitalism 5) that this specific expression surplus-labor, the productivity of labor, takes under capitalism as value requires capitalism, and capitalists, to attempt to aggrandize ever-more value--to accumulate means of production to expand that accumulation of surplus value, that is to say to enhance the productivity of labor 6) that the very expansion of capital through increasing the productivity of labor creates the basis [and if we explore this further, the necessity] for the abolition of capital.

I don't see much of a "meta-narrative" here. I see a critique of capital that anticipates its abolition, and abolition driven by its own make-up.

Not sure if there's life still left in this thread or no. I don't know enough about Marx as an individual to say what his purpose was in writing the book beyond that he was a convinced revolutionary who thought his book would help with efforts to end capitalism, and I personally think it's a very important book. Among other things, one thing I think is very good that the book accomplishes is that it shows that a 'perfected' capitalism (one without any errors of implementation, so to speak) would still be a terribly flawed and inhumane society to live in. So it's not just a criticism of actually existing capitalism, but of any possible version of capitalism.

Yeah, I think that's a good point.

Marx took capitalist political economy at face value, demonstrating that even in their perfect model of capitalism, exploitation, alienation, poverty, and crisis were inevitable.

Downed? Really?

Look this online game kill your boss it gives you an idea of low level anti capitalism

Why did Marx choose to present the categories in the opening chapters in purely logical terms? I understand it was inspired by Hegel's presentation in The Science of Logic, but was there any practical, pedagogical reason for it? It seems to have resulted in 150 years of confusion, on the one hand, and to have elevated an obscure letter to Ludwig Kugelmann to the status of a key piece of Marxology on the other.

I was reading some of Erik Olin Wright's Envisioning Real Utopias, and was surprised (perhaps naively) to see him reject the LTRPF on the basis of this hoary old criticism of Marxian value theory.

The letter to Kugelmann shows that the "chatter about the need to prove the concept of value" goes back all the way to the publication of Volume 1. So the reason Marx doesn't provide a "sustained defense" of the concept isn't simply that it was "a broadly accepted tool of economic analysis in Marx’s time", but, as he says in the letter, it's because the demand for such a defense "arises only from complete ignorance both of the subject under discussion and of the method of science", and "every child knows ... that the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour." (one of the funnier sentences he ever wrote)

So society always faces the problem of the proportional distribution of the total social labour, whereas socety never faces the problem of the distribution of the total caloric content of human bodies (except indirectly in the form of the distribution of the total social labour).

I don't know if Wright and other quasi-/neo-/post-Marxists like him would find that answer satisfactory (they might argue that there's still no proof of the causal relationship between the distribution of the total social labour and the exchange-values of commodities), but the fact that he's apparently completely unaware of this side of the argument, and this way of thinking about the question, seems to suggest that Marx probably should've put something to that effect into Capital, especially if the "chatter about the need to prove the concept of value" has been going on since 1868. This assumption that everything Marx had to say about the concept of value is contained in the opening chapters of Capital is also the basis for the likes of Murray Rothbard claiming you don't have to read past the third page of Volume 1 to see that Marx is full of shit, that he's just piling fallacy on top of fallacy, to the point where there's no reason to read any further.

Edited to add: On Wright's other comment on scarcity - surely the scarcity of a particular resource bears a direct causal relationship to the amount of society's total available labour that has to be allocated to its discovery/extraction/production. Even Hollywood understood that much:

Think it may be worth pointing out that those wanting a more concise summary of Marx's economics would be better off with Value, Price and Profit
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/index.htm
Capital was written, I think, more as an attempt to create a vivid, in depth portrait of the nature of the beast (capitalism) as well as to explain the mechanics of it, hence the ten years of re-writes and painstaking research and the use of some very archaic, sometimes almost biblical language

Good post, 44! BTW, that Wright's criticism of Marx there is basically what Böhm-Bawerk said, only he didn't use the example of calories expenditures and simply offered "scarcity", "subjection to supply and demand" and "being appropriated" as other candidates for the "common property". And in a sense, the criticism is correct: Marx's argument that being a product of labor is the only common property is most definitely an invalid argument. The real question, however, is whether it is put forward by Marx as a "proof" of value (which can thus be easily refuted), or simply as a (rather weak) justification for the train of thought he's going to follow, which is ultimately supposed to provide value with a much more solid justification (by solving a fair amount of puzzles throughout Vols. 1, 2, 3, and linking value and price, surplus-value and profit in Vol. 3).

Hmm, I don't think it was a very wise decision in didactic terms. It seems to me that there were two related reasons, an "epistemological" and a "pragmatic", while the latter is somewhat related to practical (or political) reasons.

The epistemological reason is that Marx, following Hegel, had some quite unorthodox views about what is scientific knowledge and how it should be justified. This has been the source of endless polemics ever since. (I do believe, however, that despite the idealism, Hegel was onto something with his views of proper science, and that Marx was correct in picking up on this, and that much philosophy of science of the 20th century could have fared better had it not ignored Hegel completely. Interestingly, there's been a resurgence of interest in Hegel in the analytic camp in the last few decades, and some of it, I think, could be interesting for marxists, too.)

The other reason is that Marx's mode of proceeding allows him to formulate particularly persuasive arguments against the politico-economic tradition; arguments which start with presupposing some of the positions of the opponent, deriving their consequences, and then showing that these consequences are in fact incompatible with some of the other presuppositions. An example of this is Marx's drawn-out argument in Vol. I against the "law of appropriation", which is shown to be incompatible with (any) labor theory of value that wants to explain surplus-value. And this "law of appropriation" is basically a consequence of the Lockean theory of property; hence, Marx's critique, because it is built the way it is, is also a critique of the fundaments of bourgeois thought. Now, it could have been built in a completely different way (say, as an axiomatic system), and it would still be pretty much the same theory, but this critical dimension would have been lost to the reader (although the critical consequences would still be derivable from the system).

I think Marx hints at both reasons in a 1867 letter to Engels. The whole letter is interesting, but this paragraph is explict about the dialectical method:

(http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867/letters/67_06_27.htm)

In writing Capital, Marx didn’t think of all the economics that came after him that denied the simple fact that it is human labor that transforms nature into useful things. Modern economists say: well, Marx says it is labor, but couldn’t it be the capital that is invested, or energy, or scarcity, or ingenuity, etc. etc. ...?

At the beginning of Capital, Marx is making steps from the very obvious to the non-obvious. He says: You don't have to make a mystery out of the fact that the only common thing of two products things that are exchanged is that they are products of labor. Even the word “product” says it. Its much more interesting to ask: what sort of labor is producing things that are exchanged. What role does labor play when it produces things for exchange? But that it is labor that humans that have to apply, that it is their natural power and mind that forms things – this is nothing that has to be proved.

The Kugelman letter is Marx’s response to these critics: Every society has to divide its labor into what is needed and the connections of partial labors that have to fit into each other. This is necessary in every society with a division of labor. Its only interesting how this gets done in an economy with no planned division of labor, in a society of private labors, of private production. In capitalism, this is done by value, by the purchasing power that the products achieve.

Nowadays, readers of Capital Vol 1 immediately bump into all the objections that have been made by the bourgeois economists who came after Marx. This begins at a point where Marx just didn’t think he had to make an argument, but started out with a self evident thing: labor is the basis of production. This is not in need of an argument. But here already the objections start from the bourgeois economic view, essentially production factor theory, which says that value is the product of three sources. Marx gets to this in Vol 3 on the Trinity Formula: all the sources of income in capitalist society are viewed as sources of the value that is distributed as income: labor does not produce products but wages; the means of production produce not products but interests rates; land produces not vegetables but rent.

There’s no need to defend Marx at a point when he just doesn’t deal with all that. This just has to be refused or you won’t get to what Marx wants to explain.

Evidently Marx intended to describe every part of bourgeois society starting with how the needs of life are produced (economics,) and continuing with a description and examination of how different members of society relate to each other and to other societies (race, gender, religion, ethnicity, nation, etc.) and the form of the power and authority structures that hold this social framework in place (law, police, state, education, etc.) He died before he could complete his vast project (indeed, volume three of Capital was left unfinished at the time of his death.)

The Nature Notebooks constitute the last of his work, and unfortunately they exist in expensive volumes only to be found in a few libraries, according to what I heard from the late Fellow Worker Franklin Rosemont.

Jura, how would you square these two quotes?

1) "I applaud your idea of publishing the translation of “Das Kapital” as a serial. In this form the book will be more accessible to the working class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else."

2) "Now if I wished to refute all such objections [against value] in advance, I should spoil the whole dialectical method of exposition. On the contrary, the good thing about this method is that it is constantly setting traps for those fellows [the "philistine" ecnomists] which will provoke them into an untimely display of their idiocy."

Is the first quote only true in principle, while the second is true in practice; did Marx feel, in principle, that accessibility (which I would assume implies argumentative transparency) to workers is the paramount consideration, while actually in practice being led by his ego, or whatever, to play intellectual cat-and-mouse games with bourgeois economists?

RC, are you suggesting that during the decade or so that Marx spent writing Vol. 1 that there was no "chatter about the need to prove the concept of value" (or that at least the theoretical assumptions that would lead to this "chatter" weren't well established within bourgeois economics), and that these criticisms sprang into existence immediately upon its publication? Because what the letter to Kugelmann shows is that these aren't criticisms that only emerged during and after the marginalist revolution. They go right back to the beginning; Marx lived another 15 years after that letter in a world filled with "chatter about the need to prove the concept of value". Why are these assumptions that would lead SO many people, right from the first publication of Vol. 1, and for another 150 years, to demand a proof of the concept of value, why were these assumptions not among the ones that Marx engaged with, 'set them up to knock them down', and so on?

EDIT: And isn't the usual explanation for the somewhat a priori appearance of the opening chapter that the claims he was making were uncontroversial, that he was basically just summing up the Ricardian theory of the day? If I remember correctly that's David Harvey's explanation.