reading das Capital

Allow me to be the voice of dissent and say, "stay away from Cleaver's dubious book."

Cleaver's positivisation of the proletariat and desire to subsume non-valued spheres to the logic of wage labor and the value form (i.e., the demand "wages for housework") shows that he hasn't really grasped Marx's negative critique of the categories of political economy.

To be completely honest, I think Cleaver enjoys such popularity in the age of the Internet because many young north American anarchists encounter Cleaver's work on the web when they're coming out anarchism and into Marxism. He's often their first and only introduction into non-Leninist strains of Marxism.

So much so, that he's even managed to turn what in Europe is merely a vague term for extra-parliamentary leftists, "autonomist," and actually create something called "autonomist Marxism" out of it!

If you want a guide to Marx, you could do much worse (and you would be doing that if you used Cleaver) than consulting I.I. Rubin's Essays on Marx's Theory of Value.

Freddy Perlman's short pamphlet, The Reproduction of Everyday Life, is also quite nice.

If you can read German, Michael Heinrich's book Kritik der politischen Oekonomie: eine Einfuehrung, is invaluable.

Finally, I'm rather fond personally of John Holloway's Change the World Without Taking Power as a bridge between Marx's mature critique of political economy and some other sophisticated social critics.

I think Wage Labour and Capital is a much better introduction then Value, Price, Profit. It focuses more on wage labour and capital as a social relation, while Value, Price, Profit is more about laying out economic laws.

And I think it's a good idea to start with the last chapter on primitive accumulation + chapter one. I think these are the two most important chapters.

Dialectics is not about making predictions, it is about possibilities that people need to take political action to get to. Marx saw communism as possible because of capitalism, however he did not see it as inevitable, henve the need for the working class to organise politically and move away from capitalism. To paraphrase Cleaver, Marx wrote Das Kapital to put a weapon in the hands of the workers! Not to give them a cushion to rest on and the promise of some communist afterlife.

I agree that a scientific theory is judged based on its predictive value but that this is mainly true for the hard sciences. In social science you cannot really predict anything as "the social" is not subject to any laws, just tendencies. Any social theory claiming to "predict" anything is crakpot, though of course in certain limited contexts it might seem like they do (e.g. classical economics theory of the firm is pretty good at "predicting" that the firm will try to maximise profit).

minor edit for clarity

dialectics are, generally speaking teleological, and that is a problem because it dovetails with all sorts of crude deterministic pish. however, we, as workers/communists/whatever do have goals, i.e. our telos is human liberation/abolition of domination - thus when we use dialectics as a concept to understand society the telos is not immanent to society, but comes from ourselves. thus there is no determinism; we are tactically analysing a situation in order to further our aims. it's not objective science, it's class war

but this, then, basically constitutes a reversal of Marx's attempt to take Hegel's dialectic and use it in a materialist way (most clearly defended in the German Ideology).

The whole point for Marx was that, just as Hegel had identified contradictory pressures within the realm of ideas, so Marx believed that these contradictory pressures actually existed within real social relations that produce capitalism.

and surely Capital is an attempt to show how real material aspects of capitalist society act in dialectical contradiction with each other. I think it's very difficult to read Capital as an outline of a conceptual framework. The whole way in which the book is set out seeks to show how all aspects of capitalist society are really/materially dependent for their existence on other aspects of it - the point being that they are really and necessarily dependent upon (but contradictory to) each other. So, the contradictions between capital and labour are a necessary pre-requisite for, and constitutive of the process of, the creation of surplus value, for example. We simply cannot produce surplus value unless we have a class detached from its means of production and a class that controls the means of production.

The point here, is that whether we think it, or not, in order for commodities to be produced there must be a separation of the workers from the means of production, there must be a capitalist class, there must be exploitation by that class of a working class, and there must be a (faltering) process of capital accumulation. All this is explained in terms of the dialectical contradiction between the real causal elements that in combination ensure the (problematic) reproduction of capitalist society.

If you turn the dialectic into an interpretive framework, therefore, you make all of these statements simply interpretations of the social forces which are currently at play within society. Which is ok, but I definitely think it goes against Marx's view of the dialectical process as something real within, and constitutive of, capitalist society.

i think we accept that there are material contradictions, but the dialectic is a way of conceptualising them - thus it is part of the symbolic order, whereas real material contradictions may not take the form of a dialectic (i.e. reality doesn't fit neatly into dialectical categories, but they are still fairly useful approximations, more so than say neoclassical economics). i think

I wouldn't say stay away from it exactly... it's well worth a read, but I find it weird that anyone would think it was particularly helpful. As far as I recall, the book gives a pretty good explanation of how various struggles can be interpreted using Marx's (dubious) concept of value, with the aim of making Capital 'a weapon in the hands of the working class' (or something). He says that using Marx's conception of value, we can make strategically apt judgements about how workers should respond to threats from Capital. By way of demonstrating the application of this method, he then suggests that we run Wages for Housework campaigns... none of which have been very successful, or presented the threat to Capital - which was the whole point of Cleaver's argument.

Not seen this, but heard good things about it, from redtwister iirc.

One thing with Capital, although it's quite long, it's not particularly difficult to read - certainly not compared to a lot of other things. So if you try to read manageable chunks, you should be fine.

I think that's a fair point, and applies to a fair few of the UK people on here as well, including me to an extent. Certainly he was one of the first non-Leninist marxists I read (although I read RCP a bit after vol.1 of Capital). I don't think it's a particularly bad entry point though - especially the introduction - which has pointers in a few different directions, but as with anything which is a commentary, it's good to read other things alongside it.

Indeed comrades, avoid Cleaver's book or you'll catch a north american infantile disorder. The five or six hours it takes you to read that book will surely damage you. Better instead to maintain your purity by reading a paragraph or two of Hegel, in order to truly master the science informing Marx's logic. (Oh, sorry, that should be "the Science informing Marx's Logic.")

Thanks for the ref to the Kamunist Kranti article Booey. I'll print it out later and read it. I think some of the chapters from Capital (primitive acculumation, the working day) can be read productively on their own. They're enriched by reading the rest of the book, and the rest of the book is enriched by reading them. From my own experience, I had a habit of putting Marx on a pedestal, which meant I had to read his every word in the order he wrote it or else I must be wrong. Making him into this world historical Great Man made him more intimidating, and so any time I got stuck it was like confirmation that Marx was so far beyond a mere mortal like me, so no wonder I couldn't read him and understand him. That also meant that I was subject to being pushed around by people who could speak in Marx-speak, or who could invoke Marx in making argument by appeal to authority. I think this dynamic is part of how some of the heads of Marxist groups (in the sense in which Marx said "I am not a Marxist", post-Marx Marxism) maintain their power inside those groups as well. The history chapters aren't nearly as subject to being read that way, which is why they worked for me as a Capital starting place.

Actually, that would be "the Logic informing Marx's Science."

Gotta watch out for that North American Infantile Disorder. I think I cought some of it when I lived in the US, and I haven't felt quite right since.

yeah my starting point to Marx was his early stuff, i think it's fundamental and helps you avoid mistaking his idealised (abstract) circuits of capital for the concrete, i'm guessing that is why you found the historical parts of Capital the most illuminating and they're the bits that I take the most out of. I mean some people take Capital and try and fit reality to it, which is rather like taking a map and then asking why there is no big pink circle where your standing, this isn't to deny the necessity for some sort of map eg concepts and abstract models but rather these should be reflexive and not mistaken for the terrain itself.

Thanks Felix. I always screw those up. I'll get to work on my autocritique, and throw myself on the mercy of the central committee (I mean, the Central Committee).

Revol68, that's an excellent characterisation, I'm going to steal that. I really like the early stuff - alienation and all that - and that was my intro to Marx too, but the way I had read that stuff made it harder to read Capital once I started. I was trying to do what you described. Then when reality didn't conform to the map I assumed I didn't know how to read the map or to read reality, rather than realising that the abstractions are for the sake of argument - a map of reality, not a photo. Anyways thanks for that.

No, I think that's wrong. Marx is giving us two things in Capital: a dialectical presentation, and an account of a really existing dialectic. This can be seen pretty clearly in the preface (or postface? Can't remember) to the second edition, where he quotes a Russian reviewer at length before making the famous comments about inverting Hegel.

So, 'real' dialectic:
The interrelationship between real material relations and determinants (object) and their conceptual expressions in social formations (subject). Where Hegel talks about a subject developing its object, Marx talks about the object developing the subject. There's also the dialectical interrelationship of value and its world, by which it shapes and develops it historically, and loads of others, e.g. production and consumption, and most importantly, capital and class struggle.

Dialectical presentation:
Marx is concerned to understand the laws that govern a particular social relationship. But he's not content to just examine them in isolation - the essence of what he's trying to do is the understanding of how one social form develops and changes into another. This, he thinks, derives from the economic conditions peculiar to that society. So, he wants to talk about a 'real' dialectical movement - but he does so in a dialectical manner.

You can imagine the three volumes of Capital as being shaped like a wedge, designed to crack open the images and mystification of the commodity society; the very beginning of volume one, the sharp point of this wedge, begins with extreme abstraction (X amounts of tea equates to Y amounts of linen, equates to Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz) - but this then develops, becoming more and more complex, until we begin (much, much later) to get something that starts to approximate the reality that it attempts to describe.

I also read something the other day which claimed that the three volumes could be considered to be analogous to the three stages of the Notion (or Concept, depending on the translation - I think the German is begriff), in which volume one is capital as a universal, volume two is particular capitals, while volume three has capital as a singular (interrelation of the universal and the particular).

Throughout Marx is trying to get beyond the illusions, the mystifications of the commodity, and in order to do this we is constantly leaving stuff out of his account for the sake of clarity, and then introducing it later as everything get steadily more complex, or concrete (where it might be claimed that Hegel moves from the concrete to the abstract - although Hegel would be at paims to deny such a claim - it could be said that Marx moves from the abstract to the concrete).

So clearly the second issue, that of dialectical presentation, is one of choice - but I'm sure that he genuinely believes dialectics to be at work in the real, tangible, concreet world. He then applies a mode of presentation which he feels is able to describe that world adequately, and which is able to get through its mystifications.

In what sense is Spinoza dialectical?

Yeah I agree that Capital does move from abstract to concrete forms, just as how if I want to get to Ballygobackwards I start with an abstract eg a map and then use it to navigate the concrete. However this abstract map started off in the concrete (surveyors etc) and moved into an abstract. Similarly the abstract concepts Marx uses in Capital are but the product of concrete movements in history which he is kind of making a map of in Vol 1, and then he moves from this map to the concrete and has to continually revise and detail the map but we should not mistake this necessity of explanation (from abstract to concrete) for the actual movement of history.

but, then, if Capital isn't describing actual phenomena within social reality (I think this is what you're saying), then isn't it about as useless as a map that doesn't accurately portray the roads that are in existence?

Or is it more like a map that is out of date - some of ther roads are still there, but for the newer ones you just have to work it out for yourself?

or just that a map is neccessarily a functional representation and never a replacement for reality (baudrillard aside)?

Marx's conceptions goes from the real concrete through abstraction to the thought concrete to put it very crudely. Capital is analyzing actual phenomena in society (not just merely describing them) but it cannot give an accurate account.

Using you road analogy it is better to think of it not as a map, but rather a plan of where you want the road to lead to. However, the map shows the roads leading to the times Marx was writing in. In this sense the map needs to be updated (which is what e.g. autonomists, precarity etc. try to do, and which orthodox Marxism fails to do).

The point is that we always need to work out our own roads. Communism is the real movement away from capitalism, class is a happening etc. hence it is impossible to "predict" or have a detailed roadmap to whereever it is we want to go.

Hmmm, I am not very good at working with this analogy

personally, I'd prefer to see Capital as a useful map of contemporary social reality at a certain level of abstration - a bit like it usefully shows the land contours, but not the detailed stuff like roads, and not (at least with any great clarity) the potential for change (like where a bulldozer might actually flatten out the land).

A lot of the contradictions and antagonisms that Marx identified are obviously still in existence - and by showing how they are necessary for society's ability to produce commodities (problematically) we see how many of society's contemporary problems are connected to the mode of production under which we exist.

I'm not sure why we need to see this as a flawed/out-dated attempt to conceptualize reality. Surely we can just say that it captures some aspects of contemporary commodity-producing reality; but that it ignores other aspects.

If, in contrast, you argue that it is a flawed (but close) account of reality then it doesn't appear to be quite as useful (as how do we know which bits are accurate and which aren't?)

In short - our society still produces commodities, they are still exchanged predominantly through a proces of money-mediated exchange, and production is still largely driven by the pursuit of profit. As long as these processes occur, then surely Marx's illustration of the underlying implications/side-effects of such processes (detachment of worker's from means of production, exploitation, individualisation, periodic crisis, etc.) are still useful?

I'm not convinced that we do. Which ones are they?

This is the kind of stuff I'm beginning to work on at the moment, systems of accumulation, selection/persistence of traits, and group identities derived from these. I've quickly looked at the wiki page on this but do you have any other not-too-technical references?

My main problem with it from the outset is what I take to be an assumption of immanent-progress, the thought of reality being in step with reality – which as far as I can see is a step back from Marx given the negative/critical element of the dialectic.

In other words, 'complex adaptive systems' describe what is but are unable to establish a ground for critique or change (I'm guessing).

cheers,

pil

I agree - some kind of description of what you actually mean - booey - is surely needed here. Or a link at the very least.

Dear booey,

I had a quick flick through the intro to this book (on Amazon) - it doesn't really seem anywhere near to the kind of quality found in Capital, to be honest.

From your description, it all sounds very abstract. And from my brief read, it seems to be one of those texts that attempts to simulate reality in a computer world.

The point, surely, is that there is a real world that we should be analysing, not a potential one. And we need real understandings of the social forces that exist within contemporary society.

I think you should have another go at outlining your main analytical points regarding contemporary society, what constitutes it, what dynamics are occurring, and what openings does this leave for purposive transformative agency?

I'm still not convinced that Marx's Capital has been bettered yet.