Why Read Capital Today?
This is my introduction to the preliminary session of the rs21 Capital Reading Group on 23/10/2014. A recording is available here.
I want to give an overview of what we’ll be reading, namely Capital Vol. 1. In particular, I’m going to structure what I want to say around 2 questions, or, I suppose, 2 versions of the same question. Firstly, why read Capital today? That is, why read a book written 150 years ago, about which countless reams of things have been written, and which mainstream commentators have consigned to the dustbin again and again in the past 50 years? Secondly, why should we read Capital today? That is why should this group of people read Capital, and why should we read it together, in a group. In the course of considering these questions, I’ll try to pick up on a number of points, controversies and debates that will be helpful to guide us in our reading. A short disclaimer – my intellectual background is in philosophy, and in the past few years I’ve been sort of driven by institutional requirements to read Capital as if I am mining it for relevant passages to my research. This is a frustrating product of how modern day academics work, and certainly not how Marx himself intended it. I’m looking forward to reading Capital through fresh eyes.
So firstly, why should anyone read Capital today? Firstly, because it’s an astonishing work of European Literature. It is, if you give it time, a fantastic read. It is littered with literary references, to Balzac, Horace, Shakespeare, and Goethe. It is full of astonishing imagery and detail. Indeed, entire books have been written focusing on Capital as a gothic novel. Moreover, it’s a hugely significant historical work. It’s published in 1867, 2 years after the end of the American Civil War, 3 years after the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association, 4 years before the formation and the crushing of the Paris Commune. It’s the only volume of Capital published in Marx’s lifetime, and in some ways it’s the great culmination of the sustained period of economic research that Marx engaged in throughout the 1850s and 60s. In this period Marx writes a huge series of Manuscripts, most of which are published after his death in various forms, either by Engels as Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, by Karl Kautsky as Theories of Surplus-Value, or in the 20th century as what is now known as the Grundrisse. So, on the one hand, this is the document that most resembles a finished product, the one most marked by Marx’s own intentions and presentation. On the other, it would be wrong to see this as a definitive, finished whole. It is clear that Marx intended this to be the first volume of a multi-volume work, which was to engage with every conceivable phenomenon of a modern capitalist economy. Within that, volume 1 had a particular function – to focus on the production of capital. Thus Marx abstracts away a series of other questions to which he returns in the later volumes – competition, circulation, credit and so on.
This leads me on to the next reason to read Capital: we still live in a world dominated by capital, by the thing that Marx was analysing. When Marx was writing, capitalism in its modern form was a growing, developing system. It was possible to analyse it, and predict the direction in which it was moving, but it was still a young system. Now, capitalism is a thoroughly mature system, which dominates the world. One of the things we will probably consider is how much the system has changed since Marx’s day, and since the 20th Century. How have changes in the nature of work and the nature of workplaces changed what Marx describes? How has the growth of the vast capitalist state, responsible not just for discipline and control, but also for education, health and welfare, changed the nature of work? Is Marx’s definition of labour, on page 284 as a “a process between man and nature by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature”, capable of incorporating the diverse forms of modern work – emotional, caring, intellectual, and so on. I think it can, by the way, but these are the sorts of debates that the modern world throws up.
There’s also debates about what Marx’s object of study is. Is this a general work of economics, a specific study of capitalism, or something in between? In the introduction to the edition we’re reading Ernest Mandel talks about a particular controversy about whether Marx is concerned with capitalism alone, or also about how capitalism arises from the logic of commodity exchange in pre-class societies. This appears to be a somewhat abstract debate, but it raises important questions. Marx writes in great detail in the later chapters about the what he calls ‘primitive accumulation’, the process by which the peasantry and small craft producers were transformed into a mass working class, possessing their labour power, and their labour power alone, to sell in order to survive. But what drove this process? Put crudely, did primitive accumulation lead to capitalism, or capitalism drive primitive accumulation?
Thirdly, Capital is a work of extraordinary theoretical depth and method. This, I think, more than anything, is what forms the challenge in reading it. Many people suggest skipping the opening chapters. I think that’s a mistake, but you can understand why they do. Marx tells us in the postface to the second edition that the “method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. [inquiry] has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, and to track down their inner connection. Only after this is done can the real movement be appropriately presented.” If nothing else, this shows that Marx put a great deal of thought into how to present this book, and he must begin with the commodity for a reason. But why? As I mentioned before, he does not come to labour, or even social classes, until later chapters. He begins with the commodity, as the most basic cell of capitalist production. The significance of this is subject to many debates, but for Marx this is associated with the idea that you have to begin with how the system appears to us, and then delve beneath the surface to find the processes which constitute that phenomenon. Note, though, that in revealing what lies behind, the appearance itself does not disappear. Appearances are never mere appearance, mere illusion – they have a reality which has to be taken into account. Nowhere is this his clearer than the enigmatic footnote in Chapter 1 where value is described as an “illusion with a material shell”.
Marx’s method also raises broader questions. It is commonly referred to as dialectical, a word most closely associated with German philosophy of the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, and in particular with Hegel. Hegel’s dialectic involved a complex system of analysing concepts, noticing how they were related, and how they seemed to naturally lead to others. Marx says, again in the postface to the second edition, that his method is Hegel ‘turned on his head’. This, I think, mystifies more than it helps. I don’t think there is a sense in which Marx is just Hegel in reverse, or Hegel upside down. To think in these terms is not to really do justice to the distinctiveness of Marx’s method. However, it certainly is true to say that Marx thinks dialectically in at least one sense. As David Harvey observes in his lectures on Capital, you will not find Marx talking very often about causation. Marx does not say that one phenomena causes another. Rather, he will stress that they are related, that they condition one another. Moreover the way in which they are related is ‘internal’, they are not just two, discrete things bumping up against one another, but things which only make sense when understood together. – see also the argument about labour as measure of value.
So Capital is a fantastic theoretical work, one of the best, and most influential, in Global Thought. But that doesn’t answer the question of why we should read it. When I say we, I mean first of all, rs21, a specific group of activists concerned with understanding the world in order to change it, but also, in general, activists in the mess that is the British left at the moment.
The first reason to read it, is, I think, that it’s good to read things together. Those of us on the left tend, on average, to read a bit more than most in the population. We encourage others to read, we recommend books, articles, readings. We produce content, in magazines and online. But so much of this is individual, on our own. Reading something – anything – together gets us talking and discussing ideas. It’s also essential if we are ever going to come to collective positions, or a shared understanding, of the sort that provide a basis for collective action. Note, that to come to a shared understanding is not to reach agreement. But it is to create the contexts in which agreement might be possible, where we know broadly the way in which others use concepts, and the terms of a discussion. If you don’t do this sort of thing, you risk that awkward moment when two people quote the same Lenin passage in service of diametrically opposed arguments!
So reading things together is important. But why read Capital together? This is because Capital is not just a great work of historical literature and analysis, but also a tool written from the point of view of changing the world. For Marx’s purpose in writing Capital was not idle interest. Marx had been a Communist for around 25 years by the time volume 1 was published. His political commitment to overthrowing capitalism had been in place for some time, as had his involvement in actually existing political movements and struggles. In the introduction, Mandel argues that “precisely because Marx was convinced that the cause of the proletariat was of decisive importance for the whole future of mankind, he wanted to create for that cause not a flimsy platform of rhetorical invective or wishful thinking, but the rock-like foundation of scientific truth.”
As an account of what Marx thought he was doing, this is almost certainly accurate. Marx was presenting a manual for understanding the world in order to change it. Yet this too raises many questions. Because Marx’s ‘science’ is not the positivist conception of science that we tend to think of today. Marx’s science is a committed, partisan science, one that in a sense only makes sense from a particular point of view. Two points to illustrate this: In Chapter 1 Marx makes a famous claim about Aristotle: that he could not see that the measure of value was labour time, because he lived in a society in which there were slaves. His society did not recognise the equality of all labours, and thus he could not recognise labour time as a measure. There are two ways of taking this. One is that it was true then, but that Aristotle could not see it, the other is that Aristotle could not see it because it was not in fact the case.
Another example: Marx frequently says that the problem with the generations of economists that preceded him was that they saw capitalist society as the absolute horizon of their thinking. But the striking thing is that Marx says that this was inevitable until the rise of the workers movement: “In so far as political economy is bourgeois, i.e. in so far as it views the capitalist order as the absolute and ultimate form of social production, instead of as a historically transient stage of development it can only remain a science while the class struggle remains latent or manifests itself only in isolated and sporadic phenomena.” It is only after, and perhaps from the point of view of, the development of the workers movement, that the secrets of capitalism become knowable, and perhaps, in a certain sense, become real.
I think these two examples reveal a very particular way of thinking about ‘scientific’ or theoretical enquiry – an approach that is partisan and historically specific. I think this throws up as many puzzles as it does answers, but it seems to me integral to Marx’s approach, and I think it’s something we might want to return to as we read. In particular, thinking about what applying this approach in the present day might mean – where do we look for practices and politics which shine a light for us in the way the workers movement shone a light for Marx?
Finally, there is an organisational point. It was striking for me, listening to the first of the David Harvey lectures, where he talks about the first time he organised a Capital reading group. It was in the late 60s, not long after the assassination of Martin Luther King, in the context of all sorts of crises, and revolts, as well as a crisis of the organisational left. With a desire to work out what was going on, he turned to Capital, and organised a reading group. Now, I don’t want to make any grand or silly claims, but it seems to me there is a logic, in the context of a series of crises, not just of capitalism but of those who want to overthrow it, to going back to the classics, to reading together, and again, and retracing some old steps, in new shoes.
