reading das Capital

doesn't adaptive systems science have the concept of 'attractors', poles which emerge spontaneously from complex decentered interactions? could not the formation of classes around property represent such an attractor, i.e. property/state is one relatively stable emergent order, we seek to destabalise it and establish another ...

if so that rejects closed dialectics where all contradictions are unified in a totality, but leaves room for open dialectics of particular equilibriums, where a potential for a radical reorganisation around another attractor always haunts a given totality.

(i suppose classical proletarian forms of organising like workers' councils are also attractors; or for the biologists there's the concept of 'convergance', where certain structures like the eye evolve independently multiple times to 'solve' similar problems (not that evoluition is teleological ))

now theres a fair bit of jargon herein, please call me out on it if you're not sure what i'm getting at

I am not entirely sure what you are talking about but I think there is a problem of scale in what you suggest, eg to compare a specific institution to the connectivities within an anthill is quite useful but when the same scheme is used to describe the origin of ‘property’ and class relations as a totality it seems too metaphorical.

I think Capital (the book) adequately describes the capitalist productive relation which is still the same today, also how that relation underlies all social relations, distorting all interactions (otherwise you end up refusing that there is such a thing as capitalism). On the other hand, Marx did not aniticpate the manner in which capitalism would be able to survive crisis.

SInce the first world war social reproduction has taken an unprecedented turn, and massive resources have gone into ensuring the continuance of the social relation which otherwise would ‘naturally’ tear itself/drift apart. The social institutions and politics of inclusion of the twentieth century, and thus the mechanism for reproducing the productive relation, are not included in Capital and so this where these systems theories could come in useful.

But I am not sure that any of this would give us more than what Foucault and Chomsky have done, and both these tend to produce fatalistic protest type politics. The problem as I see it is still that adaptive system-type thoughts (on my one day old knowledge of them) are thoughts of the system, they have no notion of negativity (robots and ants don’t feel ambivalence, nor do they have a repressed unconscious).

I would like to see how Mr Booey would apply these ideas concretely, there should be more room for science fiction politics, but my advice would be for him to begin from the negative, ie make and test the arguments of why these approaches will not work, and then proceed to prove why they might (in other words, proceed dialectically).

I would also say there is little point in trying to ‘beat’ Marx at the level of theory, the point is to change the world, or something.

pil

yeah all i was getting at is that perhaps something as complex and decentred as a society has certain forms ('attractors') which will emerge repeatedly and independently under given conditions, e.g. states, private property, workers' councils etc - and it is these forms, to date, which marx is pretty much unsurpassed in charting. and given as society/ecology itself is a complex system, there is always the possibility for any apparent totality (e.g. the capital relation) to be ruptured and society to organise around a new attractor (i.e. in lacanian terms, the totality is infact non-All, an excess of potentiality escapes it so the dialectic is never closed).

i'm making this up as i go along mind

making things up is good.

My knowledge of lacan goes as far as knwoing that Alice is the phallus and everything, characters, events are arranged around her; I can see how a rupture (an Alice) could occur within, that is in accord with, the totality, eg a new market established, a new protest movement or something which moves things along and creates new areas/practices from which value may be extracted. But you seem to be implying something like a TAZ, I am not convinced by this – at best I think autonomy might express 'how things could be'. It seems to me that the totality really is a totality and that all innovations are captured and are expressive in their falling back to earth of its gravity.

sorry can't review these thoughts got to go and look at the kids' marble run.

p.

this, for me, is why this kind of science fiction, fantastical imagination approach to political analysis is not that useful - of course we can imagine lots of hypothetical situations/dynamics that might (or "will") occur, but the point is to understand those that actually have arrived.

otherwise, it's little more than guessing the future. Marx himself referred to "chaotic abstractions" - whereby we abstract from reality in a random and unanalytical way, rather than actually seeking to simplify (in order to understand) the connections that exist in reality.

no not a TAZ at all - i'm more working from Felton Shorthall's distinction between a 'closed dialectic' where class struggle can only reaffirm capital, and an open dialectic where the possibility for a revolutionary rupture is ever-present.

(P.S. i only know lacan via secondary sources, but the idea of the non-All seemed appropriate, i.e. that which is everything but which a certain excess still escapes)

That's where the proletariat comes in, the class in radical chains, the non-part part, the excluded set that determines everyother one. A class in society but not of it. Meaning not that it's guaranteed to escape the totality rather that the totality is dependent on it's ability to at once trap it but at the same time not completely dominate it, so it always has the potential to slip it's lead.

There was a very good reason why Kes centred around a Kestrel (beyond the name, smartarses!).

Not necessarily dilectical, but dielctical thought can be traced through him as he adhered to the philosophy of internal relations. This philosophy is essential to dialectics (it is basically informs its ontology) but it is often ignored in studies of Marxism.

The problem with descriptive theory is that it often posits TINA. THis is because it comes from the hard sciences where stuff is more given. When applied to the social it can very easily end up as reification. E.g. the complexity theorization of Pareto (if I remember this correctly) basically just says that some people will just be richer in free market capitalist societies, and just leave it at that somehow being "natural".

IMO complexity theory for the social sciences is pretty positivist. However, what complexity theory does, and which is an improvement to analytical logic, is that it has a very different ontology that does not arbitrarily fragment social (i.e. the system) reality into isolated (and momentary) pieces. Instead it looks at the whole (the system) being integral to the parts of the system.

This is actually what dialectics posits. Complexity theory and dielactics share ontologies, or they are at least quite similar.

Using dialectics in this sense is very vulgar, and in fact more Hegelian. The dialectics of thesis-synthesis is a close d dialectic.

Please keep posting here about it. I am very fascinated by complexity theory and would like to study it much more than I have. Wjat I think is important is to wrest complexity theory away from natural science thinking because that philosophical baggade (IMO) often leads to reification of the social.

Hmm, yes I agree but the thoughts that spring to mind are these:

1. the proletariat is only an economic formation, as soon as it attempts to become something else, ie maintain an identity but 'progress' it politically into extraneous organisation it loses sense of what it is and passes into ideology. For this reason the basic class antagonism of workers to the social relation (before and inspite of consciousness) is always keener than the role foisted on it, and the statements made about it.

2. If we follow the Lacan thing a bit further (accepting that only revol has read him): if an island is dominated by a physical feature such as a mountain, then the mountain for the local tribe becomes the centre of its signifying system, everything is measured by it, religion, language, identity etc; the mountain becomes a distributive node in the economy. I get that but I don't see what that has to do with ruptures in the capitalist social relation, is it something to with the 'real' or what is latent – to do with creeping non-recognition, perhaps the development of the productive relation (as in the master/slave dialectic?

3. I am being slightly scattershot here but what exactly is it that is 'captured but not entirely dominated', surely not the working class (which must be abolished), then is it an 'event' or (ho ho ho) human nature? Or perhaps you will say it is unknown, it is precisely that which is not coded?

4. what is the role of crisis in these ideas?

What was it?

I'll take the recommendation on the 'incomplete Marx', it sounds interesting.

p.

yeah the author's one of aufheben

I would argue that it wasn't capitalism that survived all the criseses that occured, so much as the ability for the state to reform itself unless it's destroyed. Since capitalism is the highest form of hierarchical state society, then it isn't so much capitalism that survives crises, as the state that survives the crises, but a re-emergence of capitalism occurs as capitalism is the highest form of the state. History can only be regressed so far.

As far as the discussion of the dialectic is concerned, the most important thing to understand about it is the synthesis of thesis and antithesis correlative to Hegel's maxim that "unbeing and being are alike". The thesis of a thing is the synthesis of its own thesis and antithesis -- in other words, the a form's content is its own internal contradictions. The primary aspect of a contradiction is in determing the objective of that form, the totality of it, or "general universal" as Bookchin cites in "Listen Marxist!". When the thesis of a thing is understood, then the internal contradictions particluar to the general of that thing can be determined.

A great example of anarchists employing the Marxist dialectic can be found in the Platform here:

http://www.nestormakhno.info/english/confus.htm

Where Dielo Trudo specifically discusses the class struggle, (objective) particular to its content being the struggle between labor and capital (internal contradictions).

Another example of the dialectic in anarchist writing can be found in the same document here:

There are numerous other examples of the dialectic being used in the Platform.

I am very excited about the fact that many young Anarchists are rediscovering Marx, as I believe that the dialectic will be the ideological glue or "theoritical unity" needed to absolutely destroy capitalism once and for all. A great article that I've recently read on Marx and Anarchism is here: http://www.marxists.org/archive/rubel/1973/marx-anarchism.htm

It's time to rip the Marxist Dialectic out of the still beating hearts of the authoritarian left and use it for to liberate the working class.

Just a question for you so that I can understand you a bit better; how do you define class? And for that matter race and gender?

I am a big fan of E.P. Thompson that basically argued that class is a happening (and IMO so are race and gender) as opposed to a sociological category. I.e. (and I might be pushing it a bit here) class can be seen as an emergent phenomenon that tries to self-organize. This would also go well with the notion that communism is the real movement away from capitalism.

I totally agree with the first part, but I as I said in my previous post the inherent positivism of this theory can lead to reification. Would you use notions of phase transitions for when it comes to pull apart power? I've seen some (Paul B. Hertzog I think) basically use that term from physics to basically mean revolution.

Booey you might also check out 'Change the World Without Taking Power,' by John Holloway. He's a Marxist with libertarian politics. He's got something of a philosophical version of the idea that Atlemk mentioned from Thompson - class happens, it's a dynamic process, not an entity. Holloway argues that all the categories of capital and of Capital should be seen this way.

On the primacy of class etc - I think the Marxist point, when it's expressed well (and which is absolutely correct) is not that workers have it worse than gendered, raced, and other chains. Rather it's that if we eliminated the chains on the proletariat - the compulsion to sell our labor power then those other forms would be pretty gutted. That's not to say "class first!" though. Sometimes quite the opposite. Insofar as hierarchies in the class help keep the class divided, that means at least sometimes those hierarchies need to be addressed first, as a precondition for workers acting together as workers. Harry Cleaver's stuff is quite good on all this.

I would recommend reading Ricardo's "Principles of Political Economy" *before* reading Capital. This will place Marx's work in context and explain the key difference between exchange value and market price (among other things). I would recommend chapter 4 and 30.

I would also recommend Castoriadis work, particularly "Modern Capitalism and Revolution", for a good introduction to the problems with Marx's approach (it basically abstrasts from the class struggle, which is meaningless for an analysis rooted in a *Labour* theory of value).

www.anarchistfaq.org

I've read Capital with Nate. Do NOT start his way. Ugh, he didn't even understand why Marx differentiated between exchange-value and use-value. Wow Nate, I miss busting your nads on this

Btw, Capital makes a lot more sense after engaging with the Phenomenology of Spirit, since Capital is kind of a phenomenology of capital.

And Cleaver is NOT helpful IMO. I don't find his reading interesting at all. He is too much of a Leftist-activist.

Starting a pissing match,
Chris

Cleaver is over-rated; read II Rubin's book alongside Vol. 1 if you must read anything. Or better yet, read both. Or Felton Shorthall's book, which is available on Libcom.org for free (The Incomplete Marx), which addresses all three volumes. Its the official Aufheben Guide to Capital.

Better Shorthall and/or Rubin than Cleaver.

Then again, I have a nice little comment on approach to reading in the Libcom Library that I can't help but recommend:
http://libcom.org/library/reading-theoretical-works-chris-wright

Chris

And anti-dialectical (see 1st page of this thread) right?

Not to be too much like Althusser, but I recommend going through Part I of Vol. I rather quickly. I've seen a lot of people (including myself the first time I tried to read it) get so discouraged with the first chapter that they gave up altogether. You can be sure that you WILL NOT understand the first chapter in any deep sense the first time you read. You probably won't even understand it very well the second time you read it. (Maybe the third time you read it you'll get some important things out of it.) And since you won't understand the first chapter, the second chapter (on the act of exchange) and the third chapter (on money) will seem arbitrary, boring, etc. So just get what you can from chapters 1-3 and move on. If you're not terribly discouraged then perhaps give it more study. But it's better to move on that to give up.

But DO reread it, either after you've finished Capital or go back to it after you've read some more. And not just once or twice, but three, four, five times, as many times as you can handle. Chapter 1 is absolutely essential for understanding Marx's argument. And if you have access to Capital and Class, go back to one of their first issues in which they publish the Appendix to Chapter 1, which was included in the first German edition of Capital, on the form of value (this appendix was removed in the second edition of Capital and replaced with what is now section 3, on the form of value).

For things to read alongside Capital, I would NOT recommend Harry Cleaver. I would say that his presentation of Chapter 1 is one of the worst in existence. If you read it, also read other people, such as II Rubin. You'll find out for yourself just how poor Cleaver's understanding of Capital is.

But supplementary readings aren't necessary. And to be honest I don't think I've ever seen one that is really satisfactory for the introductory reader. Perhaps William Blake's "Elements of Marxian Economic Theory and its Criticism" is one of the best. It can be found online here. Andrew Kliman has written a pamphlet called "Marx's Concept of Intrinsic Value," available from News & Letters or from an old issue of Historical Materialism, which is one of the better things on the topic as well.

But even here, be aware that you are NOT reading Marx's text. You are reading an interpretation of it. Which is completely fine. But if you want to read Marx's text, you have to read: Marx's text. As long as you don't confuse the two you'll be okay. Keep a critical and open mind.

And aside from Cleaver, I'd also recommend staying away from anything by Paul Sweezy, Maurice Dobb or Ronald Meek. The classics of anglophone Marxism are absolutely terrible. Postone is better in some ways but also has major shortcomings.

As for dialectic:

I don't care too much for the "dialectical" readings of Capital which emphasize the Marx-Hegel connection and claim that Marx used a "Hegel's (L)logic" (either with a bit L or a small l). Even a superficial knowledge of Hegel is enough to know that Hegel's dialectic was not a form applied to the object but was the immanent logic of the object itself. And since the object of Hegel and Marx was different, it is prima facie obvious that the "dialectic" or "logic" of the object was also different (also notice that Marx does not use the term "logic" to describe his object, but "law of motion," which makes sense give his very different object of analysis). You can only understand Marx's dialectic by understanding the text as a whole.

I wish you luck on reading Capital. It's an amazingly difficult text at parts, but it's well worth it. It's rather sad that even most Marxists have not read it, and even those who have HAVE read it have not understood it (this goes for the pro-Situs and autonomists as much as for the orthodox Marxists). Knowledge of the economic law of motion of capitalist society easily destroys all reformist and utopian illusions, and it's amazing how many debates you witness within leftist circles that would be easily dispelled if the participants in said debates had a working knowledge of Capital.

Mike

And for the idea of reading the secton on primitive accumulation first: this is not necessarily a bad idea, but you definitely lose a bit of the elegance of Marx's argument, which is intimately related to the structure of the book. If you do read the section on primitive accumulation first, reread it when you get to the end of Part VII, since otherwise the nature of the theory of primitive accumulation in relation to the theory as a whole is obscured.

Someone else might have mentioned it, but I also recommend Value, Price and Profit, a speech Marx gave to the First International in his debate with Westone. It encompasses many of the themes of Capital (even going into some aspects that are prominent in Volume 3) in extremely clear language and in a very accessible way. It's no replacement for Capital but it's a great text and a quick read.

hi Chris,

My favorite memory from that reading group was when you sat
bolt upright during some discusssion of a passage and exclaimed with a glowing face: "that's a syllogistic mediation!" My second favorite memory was drunkenness and burritos.

One thing we've never agreed on was on what the disagreement we even have is. I like your read of Marx and of Capital. I don't know that I agree or that I much care that it was Marx's own understanding of what he was doing. I think I also have lower standards, maybe. If someone is having trouble with Capital and wants to get something good from it, I recommend reading it the way I suggested. Read the history chapters first because they're brilliant and they're exciting. Use that energy to read the hard, dense, and perhaps superfluous chapters that Chris is in love with, if you're so inclined. Different strokes for different folks. The idea that one has to read Hegel before reading and getting Marx is nuts, though. I mean, it may be true for all I know, but who has the time and the energy for that? I was in a reading group on the Encyclopedia Logic for a whole year, met about once a week, and fucked if I can tell you what that books about. And I _like_ philosophy.

So all I'm saying is that the way I like to read that book, and the folks I like to read alongside it (Cleaver for one), make it easier and help one to not give up in the face of some real hard going.

The way you like to read that book, Chris, and the folk you like to read alongside it, is impressive but kind of insanely difficult and slowgoing. If a friend came to me and said "this book's a breeze! I think I must be missing some subtle difficulties!" I'd give them your email address Chris and tell them to do exactly as you say. On the other hand, if they said "for fuck's sake, this book is hard and I'm not sure I'm going to actually be able to read it all," I would not recommend your method. And you seem invested in saying that your read is a much superior one, where I'm happy to say that mine is just different from yours - with the sole bonus that my way's a lot less work. I respect your monkish devotion but not all of us are able to replicate it, comrade!

cheers,
Nate

yeah i find it much easier to start with texts that make something more concrete, more contemporary and then work back from there. Basically I start from a position of a series of concrete ideas, sketchy thoughts, experiances and try and understand them in relation to various theories, to see if if gives me a deeper insight, a radical perspective or even just a more cogent hold on my thoughts.

Furthermore I think this is the very basis of Marxism, he doesn't work out the existance of classes from his analysis of capital. He starts with his own experiance, albeit mediated through hegel and feuerbach and develops from there. He begins with the concrete class, seperation from means of production, alienation and production and then seeks to make sense of it in terms of abstract laws of value, circuits of capital, which in turn fed back into the concrete.

Whilst Capital might move from the abstract to the concrete, it shouldn't be seperated from his early work because if you do it's very easy to mistake the abstract for the real, to see in the movement of classes nothing more than the self valorisation of economic laws, be that old school diamat or post marxian Postone bullshit.

The fundamental of Marx (to my mind) is not the economic examinations of Capital, the formula's or the idealised circuits, the real value of Marx (labour? hoho) is in his rejection of idealism, the constant reminder to start with real social relations and that we are not mere tools of history but it's artisans.

I don't quite agree, if I'm understanding you correctly. Notice that Marx does not even talk about social classes, per se, until the very last chapter of Volume III. There are definite methodological reasons for this, namely that classes cannot serve as deus ex machina but themselves must be explained by reference to the social system as a whole. Obviously Marx had already come to a theory of social classes before he wrote Capital but he was very conscious of the fact that they could not be introduced until late in his analysis.

I hope to write something about this someday but alas, I haven't, and I haven't seen anyone else either.

I was going to say "someone's just read the latest Aufheben" after the first two paragraphs of your post, but then you did it for me in the third

if you check some threads on here you'll find that i've been arguing that before that was even published.

Of course classes cannot serve as a deus ex machina for class society, but they do serve such a purpose for explaining the development of capitalism which afterall did not arise fully formed from the earth but developed from another form of class society ie feudalism.

It's rather how we escape the conundrum of the chicken or the egg by pointing to evolution.

Yeah, I remember that moment, but also the (copious quantities of) wine and burritos. Ah, good times, good times.

No, my way of reading is slow and at times rather painful, but I do not read everything this way. But Capital, IMO, demands this kind of close reading. otherwise, better to not read it.

After all, no one needs to read Capital to be a communist/anarchist. It is important for theoretical development, but I am all for doing theory right rather than doing it to have done it. Better fewer but better. One good reading of Capital is worth all of the stuff churned out by the left because if you think what you are reading in relation to your own life, you will understand as much as you will get from a large pile of Left Org pamphelets.

In fact, I would wager that you can get a list together of 20 books that you could spend the rest of your life on and get an adequate training in communist theory that you could then extend outward. Everything else you read, you could pretty much read at normal speed.

If you bite the bean, be ready to eat the whole burrito.

Cheers,
Chris

That's our big difference, Chris. There is certainly a level of bad reading at which it's better not to read at all, just like how the Marxism of the Sparts etc is worse than no marxism at all. But above that (I know, rather vague) level, if people get things out of less rigorous readings of Marx then more power to them. And it's pretty likely they will. Marx is a good writer with a lot of wicked important insights.

take care,
Nate

If anybody is interested in demonstrating their knowledge of this text or helping my plodding understanding we've just started reading Capital over at Nutters' Wood. Still only on page 2 or something and possibly going back to the prefaces.

http://anti-politics.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=17

P.