Marx Read Along Capital v.1 - The Commodity
August, 2006
What is a commodity?
1. ‘The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing, which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind’ (126). Whether these ‘needs’ arise from the stomach or mind makes no difference.
2. It also makes no difference wether the thing is used as means of production or means of subsistence, i.e. as tools or resources to make something else, or to consume and destroy (over a longer or shorter period) in consumption.
3. ‘The wealth of capitalist societies exists as an ‘immense collection of commodities’. The individual commodity is the ‘elementary form’ of this wealth.
This multiple definition will be refined and complicated further as the text proceeds
What is a use-value?
We take a commodity and we say that it is useful because it possesses so many ‘useful’ qualities. This is not to be conflated with ‘useful’ in the utilitarian sense. A piece of paper is useful not only for keeping notes or records (a ‘utilitarian use’ I suppose) or to make a paper airplane from the thing (not very utilitarian at all, but totally fun!). At this level of abstraction, both are useful qualities of the paper commodity. They are both use-values.
Though there is clearly a qualitative difference as to whether the paper is used as an airplane or for record keeping, we are concerned here with the use-values of commodities as quantities of use values (we always assume that use-values exist in varying quantities). That is, with x of paper commodities we can make y paper airplanes or print z characters.
This is merely a method of abstractions and not intended to brush aside the individual qualitative, relational, or symbolic properties of commodities as ‘mere use-values’.
‘…use-value does not dangle in mid-air. It is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter. It is therefore the physical body of the commodity itself…which is the use-value of a useful thing. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labor required to appropriate its useful qualities.’
For example, the fact that one can make a paper airplane with the paper is incidental to the fact it takes v hours of labor time to make the sheet of paper in question - of course one is probably less inclined to go the airplane route if v is higher than lower, and one must be able to ‘discover’ the properties and means of making paper ‘fly’, but these latter two points are outside the present scope.
In addition to existing in definite quantities, ‘Use-values are only realized in use or consumption. They constitute the material content of wealth [the 'body' of wealth], whatever its social form may be.’ That objects have qualities which make them useful is not particular to any one type of society -though of course the types of things that have uses or the types of uses which are realized may change over time.
What is distinctive about use-values in a capitalist mode of production is that they are ‘material bearers of…exchange value’ (126).
Exchange value, of which much more will be spoken next time and many times after that.
Today I am detetmined to punch out of the preface material material so that tomorrow (or the next time I post) it will be at the start of Capital v.1 proper.
Contuning with the Postface…
Here is a quote from what Marx terms a ‘generous’ review of his method followed by a short comparison and contrast of his dialectic method to that of Hegel.
“It will be said…that the general laws of economic life are one and the same, no matter whether they are applied to the present or the past. But this is exactly what Marx denies. According to him, such abstract laws do not exist…On the contrary, in his opinion, every historical period has its own laws…As soon as life has passed through a given period of development, and is passing over from one given stage to another, it begins to be subject also to other laws….Marx denies, for example, that the law of population is the same at all times and in all places. He asserts, on the contrary, that every stage of development has its own law of population….from this point of view, he is only formulating…the aim that every accurate investigation into economic life must have…The scientific value of such an inquiry lies in the illumination of the special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development and death of a given social organism and its replacement by another, higher one. And in fact this is the value of Marx’s book’ (101-102).
Of course, we know better than to assume that the next stage of development will be a ‘higher’ one; know that the dominant concepts of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ stages are socially shaped and shaping relative concepts.
Marx appreciates this generous review, “But what else is he depicting but the dialectical method?”, he says. And now we’re on to his self-summarized relationship to Hegel. One can certainly reference Marx’s earlier works like The German Ideology, or Critique if Hegel’s Doctrine of the State to get the more nuanced versions.
This is on the level of ontology.
“My dialedtical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly opposite to it. For Hegel, the process of thinking, which even he transforms into an independent subject, under the name of ‘the Idea’, is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the idea. With me the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought.”
“The mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general forms of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”
“In its mystified form, the dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and glorify what exists. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to the bourgeoisie and its doctrinaire spokesman, because it includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction; because it regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion, and therefore grasps its transient aspects as well; and because it does not let itself be impressed by anything, being in its essence critical and revolutionary” (103).
The remaining preface material, “Preface to the French Edition”, “Postface to the French Edition”, and then Engels’ “Preface to the Third Edition”, and “Preface to the english Edition” mainly have to do with editorial commentary regarding changes/additions/translations to the volumes. I feel this passage of Engels’ from the “Prefaqce to the English Edition” sets the proper tone for the rest of the book.
“Every new aspect of a science involves a revolution in the technical terms of that science….Political economy has generally been content to take, just as they were, the terms of commercial and industrial life, and to operate with them, entirely failing to see that by so doing it confined itself within the narrow circle of ideas expressed by those terms…It is…self-evident that a theory which views modern capitalist production as a mere passing stage in the economic history of humankind, must make use of terms different from those habitual to writers who look upon that form of production as imperishable and final” (111).
Next time we enter Part One - ‘Commodities and Money’!
I’ve been trying to think about other angles of relevance in terms of this discussion about the relationship between the practice of a science and the social context in which the science develops/is placed.
Science is a socially situated practice -and political economy, sociology, anthropology (whatever) especially. It seems Marx was both aware, and trying to make his readers aware, of this through the German example.
Political economy, whether bourgeois or socialist, is not equipped to totalize. Nevertheless the ’science of capitalism’ (if you will) and later on the ’science of socialism’ (if you will) did just that, and to a certain extent applied a total analysis/explanation on particular societies in particular phases of their development.
Even though capitalism is now total, its expression is not, and the analysis, crtique, and reaction we bring to it cannot be satisfied with (reduced to) a totalizing approach. We must always bear in mind, in science, the particular historical, material, cultural -social contexts.
For example, today I had a conversation about communism’s many failures, and in particular Cuba. Do we point to Cuba and say ‘communism doesn’t work!?’ Or do we look at Cuba and try to assess and understand the path it took in relation to its particular historical and social conditions?
In a sense we are anticipating elements of ‘post-modernism’, though I would never be so vulgar as to suggest Marx was ‘post-modern’.
Yeah, yeah, it was an abrupt end yesterday -but like I said when we started this I would just post what gets done in the hour or so. And then there are chores and things. You know how it is. So anyway,
We were talking about how a discipline can be imposed upon another culture. In this case the most industrially developed capitalist economy imposed its ’science’ of political economy upon less industrially developed countries.
Only in this instance the ’science of political economy’ imported into Germany did not match the conditions ‘on the ground’ so that the ’science of political economy’ in Germany remained in an underdeveloped state.
Sort of how the World Bank develpment programs that emphasize free trade conditions (generally good for the core nations and not so great for the periphery). The result of these programs tends not to be development, but a persistent relative underdevelopment.
A good anecdote for analogy. My partner, an objects conservator for an ethnographic museum here in the Netherlands does a lot of work with museums in underdeveloped Southeast Asia - Jakarta and Manilla (Indonesia and the Phillipines). There is a tendency for the ‘pupil’ and ‘expert’ relationship in her exchanges, where the underdeveloped tropical museums look to the ‘developed’ museum in temperate Netherlands for the ‘right’ way to store and treat their objects. The problem is storing and treating objects presents different needs and possibilities, a different array of materials (in both availability and priority) and so on and so forth depending upon whether your climate is tropical, arid, temperate and from which climatic conditions the objects hail. Nevertheless, the conservation practices found in the core portions of Europe, Australasia, and North America have a tendency to dominate the conservation practices of the periphery.
I would never suggest that this dominance in terms of ideology and practice exists in every instance, but there does appear [at a glance] that this is the case. At any rate, Marx feels this is the case with Germany and political economy at the time of this book. One could probably find a number of contemporary analogs.
III. The relationship between the level of class conflict and the extent to which ‘political economy’ is capable of being critical of itself, i.e. scientific versus dogmatic or polemic.
“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 development, it can only remain a science while the class struggle remains latent or manifests itself only in isolated and sporadic phenomena” (96).
According to Marx, Ricardo was the last scientifically motivated political scientist, and “…classical political economy belongs to a period in which the class struggle was as yet undeveloped” (96).
The following period, however, ‘was the vulgarizing and extending of Ricardo’; the transformation of ’scientific’ poltical economy into a weapon of the bourgeoisie once they finally siezed political power from ‘the governments and the feudal aristocracy gathered around the Holy Alliance’. The siezure of legitimacy “sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economics”.
“It was thenceforth no longer a question whether this or that theorem was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, in accordance with police regulations or contrary to them. In place of disinterested inquirers (academics) there stepped hired prize-fighters (think-tanks, lobbyists, publicists, pundits, etc.); in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and evil intent of apologetics” (97 - paranthesis mine).
In Germany, because it imported the ‘bourgeois science of political economy’ before the material conditions of the country in question met the material conditions upon which the science was based had the situation where “the capitalist mode of production came to maturity after its antagonistc character (that is the class conflict that partially defines capitalism as a struggle between exploiters and exploited) had been revealed” (98).
In other words, when the material conditions for developing a science of political economy indigenous to the ‘German condition’ finally presented themselves, the class conflict had already reached the point where any such science (or at least the dominant approach in that science) descends into the vulgarisms Marx mentions above.
When it comes to the vulgarized bourgeois political science, Marx identifies two groups of ’spokesmen’ (because now they are not scientists but apologists or idealogues):
1. ‘prudent, practicval business folk’ (perhaps crudely typified in our context by economics and business degrees -MBAs, the ‘entrepeneur’ who may study things like ‘the law of supply and demand’ but not look at the things underneath.
2. the apologists “proud of the professorial dignity of their science, followed John Stuart Mill in his attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable” (98).
Might it be possible to make the same basic illustration with Marxist political economy and the socialist revolutions that seized legitimacy in the periphery and semi-periphery of the capitalist world economy in the last century?
Okay. I did scan back on this last night. And I am looking at it again right now; will spit out denotations as they occur to me. Quote the stand-outs. Actually, a number of things occur to me, and things we probably should note if we want to evaluate the parts and then total of Marx’s analysis -which I suppose is one of the investments here, in reading this material and adapting it to our contexts.
I. The epistemological approach…
Marx informs of changes, additions and so forth from the first edition so that things in general have “been carried out with greater scientific strictness”.
Is ’scientific strictness’ here to be conceived of as sticking to theories as a religion takes its scripts, or of constantly refining and critiqueing -sometimes revolutionizing- the way we think and do thinking and do? or whatever.
“I find now, on revising the French translation…that several parts of the German original stand in need of…thorough re-working…” (95)
It’s always being re-worked.
II. Consequences of Germany’s role in the capitalist world economy of 1871-2.
“Political economy remains a foreign science in Germany….the historical circumstances…prevented the development of the capitalist mode of production in Germany, and consequently the construction there of modern bourgeois society. Thus the living soil from which political economy springs was absent. It had to be imported from England and France as a ready-made article; its German professors always remained pupils. The theoretical expression of an alien reality turned in their hands into a collection of dogmas, interpreted by them in the sense of the petty-bourgeois world around them, and therefore misinterpreted.”
1. The most ’economically advanced’ states of the world economy, England and France, developed the study of economics and exported that study -imposing it in a sense- upon the ’second’ and ‘third’ worlds of their day, such as Germany (from here on out we’ll use Wallerstein’s categories - core, semi-periphery, periphery -terms which strictly refer to the role the country plays in the world economy in relation to all the other states and not a measure of ‘economic development’ though certainly variably related).
Marx Read Along Capital vol.1 (preface part 5)
August, 2006
Okay. Am I glad to be past that last one. I really don’t like posting that tedious stuff. But it also means we can put this preface to rest.
A few last things to top off the discussion. Let’s just bullet this.
1. How is Marx dealing with the agent in Capital?
A: “Individuals are dealt with here only in so far as they are the personifications of eocnomic categories, the carriers/bearers of particular class-relations and interests.” (92)
In other words we are not looking at the ‘whole individual’, but only that part of indivudual which is the ‘personification’ of economic categories. We have to wait until Giddens or Bourdieu to refine the discussion (this personification) of political economy to include (or even focus upon) those difficult concepts like taste and culture - and to a demonstration of how there are certain class patterns (though not determinations) to the distribution of cultural production and consumption - of cultural capital.
However, Marx is a century earlier, and in order to analyze the mode of production abstraction is required. Marx is using the 500x microscope, later social scientists can (though seldom really do) move on to the 10,000x.
Marx has also this to say about the peculiar character of economics as a ’science’:
“The peculiar nature of the material it deals with summons into the fray on the opposing side the most violent, sordid and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.”
However,
“…within the ruling classes themselves, the foreboding is emerging that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and constantly engaged in a process of change.”
“I welcome every opinion based on scientific criticism.”
That’s that.
Make of the preface what you will - but it seems we will be analyzing capitalism:
1. at the ‘microscopic’ level, yet also as a macro level social structure, i.e. as an abstract type (or rather a set of related abstract types)
2. from the perspective of a tension between agent and structure - the historical material angle; change as dialectic, conflict - the atom (agent) sent on a trajectory but, to a certain extent, resisting or shaping that trajectory over time.
3. A stagist and rather linear conception of economic development.
4. as the locus of ideological struggle
5. as ever changing and capable of being consciously shaped within the limits a given set of material conditions will allow. (this is in some respects a mere repetition of the second point).
I notice I made very few notes on Marx’s ‘Postface to the Second Edition’ so I will scan it to see what, if any, is vital at this stage of the read along. I won’t say I’ll post tomorrow because last time I did that it wound up being almost a week later! Consider that lesson learned.
