The dice are loaded

Chapter twenty-five is over one hundred pages long, and it represents the culmination of Marx's argument about capitalist economic dynamics in volume one. If you believe Harvey and, also, the presentation of the book itself. This chapter ends on a very empirical note, about sixty pages of examples from various districts in England and in Ireland. The next section, on the topic of primitive accumulation, seeks to explain how capital grew to such extreme heights. The presentation of history of course has ramifications for the logical and abstracted descriptions of economics as a science, but Marx will no longer explore with as much depth the ways in which the various factors of capital will collude in order to produce contradictory crises and unspeakable violence. This is the chapter that pulls it together best.

The first four sections provide the theoretical basis for the concluding empirical descriptions, and if I'm not mistaken, the third and fourth sections are not entirely distinct. Further, Harvey argues that the first two sections are not necessary to reach the conclusions of the third, but I'm not sure myself. But at any rate, here are the steps Marx takes:

Section 1. The Increased Demand for Labour Power that Accompanies Accumulation, the Composition of Capital Remaining the Same

Section 2. Relative Diminution of the Variable Part of Capital Simultaneously with the Progress of Accumulation and of the Concentration that Accompanies it

Section 3. Progressive Production of a Relative Surplus Population or Industrial Reserve Army

Section 4. Different Forms of the Relative Surplus Population. The General Law of Capitalistic Accumulation

In the first section, Marx argues that the accumulation process eternally preserves the class relationship between workers and capitalists because of exploitation, the conversion of surplus-value into capital, wage labor, etc. Nothing new: "...the mechanism of the accumulation process itself not only increases the amount of capital but also the mass of the 'labouring poor,' i.e. the wage-labourers, who turn their labour-power into a force for increasing the valorization of the growing capital, and who are thereby compelled to make their relation of dependence on their own product, as personified in the capitalist, into an eternal relation (765, italics added).

Next, Marx distinguishes between the concepts of concentration and centralization, which he defines in a bit of a counter-intuitive manner. Concentration is merely the fact of extended accumulation by one company in isolation, like a spiral that spins outwards but with no regard for others. But eventually, these growing companies will collide with one another, and they can't simply keep accumulating infinitely without some companies being eaten and others eating them. Centralization is Marx's term for this. It describes a process wherein capitals are attracted to one another, where capital grows not by simply creating wealth ex nihilo (that is, from workers or from credit) but rather by eating the capital of others. So which capital b/eats which capital? Generally the one able to steal all the business by selling cheaper commodities, that is, the capital with greater productivity. And hence "this depends in turn on the scale of production. Therefore the larger capitals beat the smaller" (777). As a general rule, contra the self-regulating dream of supply and demand, the free market breeds unfair competition and monopolies.

Third, Marx pays attention to the drive for productivity , resulting in more capital invested in machines which obviate the need for labor. In other words, variable capital goes down, constant capital goes up. The contradiction of course is that, with competition, the exchange-value of these commodities will soon be canceled out by the technical advances of other capitals, even as use-values are increased; meantime, the rate of surplus-value has decreased because the source of surplus-value, that is, exploited labor, has been decreased relative to the total mass of capital invested. In other words, profit will fall as use-values rise.

Harvey has a good exposition on whether or not this falling profit is a law, a tendency, a tendency of law, a law of tendency, etc. It's worth listening to, around the 43:30 mark and again at the 81:40 mark:




It's also worth checking out a summary of crisis theories from Anwar Shaikh, an economist at the New School, one of the better to have written on this (for a better bibliography, read Harvey's Limits to Capital and search for "falling rate of profit" in the index).

Harvey takes a pretty good position on the truthiness of Marx's law: the contradiction of technology that displaces labor as the source of exploitation is always a disruptive force in capitalist development, and Marx's descriptions of this process are accurate, but they are not predetermined as an economic law insofar as, well, even though profit has fallen throughout history, people have found new ways to generate more profit, and there is still profit to be made today (by the way, I'm going to resist the temptation to write about the massive fuckup that is the current financial crisis, but the connections between the present day and Marx's thoughts on credit, finance capital and deregulation are readily evident).

Not only does capital shoot itself in the foot by displacing labor, Harvey concludes, but it also generates a condition that is worse for the worker. When there is more supply of labor than there is demand, workers' wages decrease, and more exploitation can be squeezed out of employed workers who are expendable and superfluous to the actual production process. De-skilling and machinery are a big part of this. And of course, one of the lessons of neoliberalism has been that when the inevitable crises do occur, the capitalist classes will try generate more capital, that is, more surplus-value, by squeezing wages down even further; and they get away with it because of the pressure exerted by the industrial reserve army in the backdrop ("Sure you can quit, but I'm just going to hire that guy instead when you leave").

Marx thus ends on the most crushing note of the capitalist process, that is, the way in which it produces and fixes a relation between superfluous working classes and the capital they have become dependent upon, even as the capital displaces them from any sort of political, economic security. In my mind, I couldn't help think of the somewhat trendy yet completely de-historicized attention paid recently to such populations, given various names by various theorists: Agamben and homo sacer; Foucault and biopolitics; Subaltern studies; the various decontextualized others of Levinas and other literary critics; etc. etc. Isn't it necessary to re-assert the history of how such populations are reproduced by particular socio-economic dynamics? Isn't it incumbent to demonstrate the underlying, broadly encompassing processes that unify these snapshots scattered across and time and place? Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to happen much.

My final thought on this chapter and on Marx's argument as a whole is that it seems very difficult to pin down precisely a single concept the process that holds the key to its effectiveness. This is perhaps why the left has been fighting with itself for so long over what to do about capital. It's not just about exchange-value, it's not just about machines or money, it's not just about wages or time, although all of those factors are very much integral to the history of the modern world.

What really strikes me about Marx's presentation is that capital's strongest weapon is that it grows. When it grows, it displaces people who are forced to rely upon capital to survive, and the more it grows, not only do the alternatives disappear but more pressure is exerted upon the worker and the capitalist classes to adhere ever more stringently to capital's laws. Capital becomes personified.

In the case of wages, workers' wages will only go down once it becomes clear that alternatives for non-wage based labor have disappeared. In the case of the organic composition of capital (variable and constant capital ratios), only when industries fight one another in such a deadlock will the pressure for technological changes enabling greater productivity actually generate faster, better, bigger machines.

If there were a name for this dynamic, it would be the dynamic of competition. But competition is an empty term, a formal one that lacks any actual commentary on who is competing with whom, what draws them together, who wins and why they win. Again, in order to explain why it works, one must start explaining the different, interacting levers of action that spur accumulation, centralization and crises.

At some point, Marx will make arguments about capital that is not yet fully mature, stages in production that cannot yet generate systemic crises or throw laborers into a state of floating insecurity. For example, on 785:

This peculiar cyclical path of modern industry, which occurs in no earlier period of human history, was also impossible when capitalist production was in its infancy. The composition of capital at that time underwent only very gradual changes . . . . Even though the advance of accumulation was slow in comparison with that of the modern epoch, it came up against a natural barrier in the shape of the exploitable working population; this barrier could only be swept away by the violent means we shall discuss later.

In a footnote inserted into the French edition on the next page:

But only after mechanical industry had struck root so deeply that it exerted a preponderant influence on the whole of national production; only after foreign trade began to predominate over internal trade, thanks to mechanical industry; only after the world market had successively annexed extensive areas of the New World, Asia and Australia; and finally, only after a sufficient number of industrial nations had entered the arena -- only after all this had happened can one date the repeated self-perpetuating cycles, whose successive phases embrace years, and always culminate in a general crisis, which is the end of one cycle and the starting-point of another (786).

These paragraphs suggest to me that capital's force lies in its imperative for growth, which comes not from a single source but rather from the mutual reinforcement from competition among many different sources. This is more than simply saying it cancels out other alternatives; it makes any decision to seek an alternative irrational and suicidal. Even if competition destroys itself, the stakes are too high to allow that destruction to occur, for capital is too mutually dependent to simply allow anyone to leave, cough, bailout (sorry). Competition, more than simply fixing a relationship of exploitation or drawing a line between the haves and have nots, regulates that line and manipulates it in order to maximally intensify exploitation to its logical limit. Much like the self-regulating supercomputers behind hedge fund schemes, capital is less about subjective and more about objective limits and forces. Even if it is regulated, that regulation, definitionally, only aids and abets that extremism. And it ends in scenes as ugly as this:

Capital acts on both sides at once. If its accumulation on the one hand increases the demand for labour, it increases on the other the supply of workers by 'setting them free,' while at the same time the pressure of the unemployed compels those who are employed to furnish more labour, and therefore makes the supply of labour to a certain extent independent of the supply of workers. The movement of the law of supply and demand of labour on this basis completes the despotism of capital (793).

Runs the shibboleth

What I want to talk about by the end of this post is the (non?)-distinction between a theory of capital focused primarily upon accumulation as the agent of history versus labor. It is a distinction I have read and heard before, if not explicitly, then at least implicitly, in debates about how to understand capital. Related to this is the question, of course, of how to do something about the system and its logic, a topic about which I don't think I'll have the guts to speak about until many more years of thinking about these problems.  . .  .

The following is meant to be an exposition on chapters sixteen through twenty-four, conforming to Harvey's division, but I mainly will talk about chapters 23 and 24 because the prior ones seem to repeat arguments, and I didn't find very much continuity between them and the later ones. I think I should re-read the chapter on money and watch Harvey's lecture on it, because that seems to be the only key insight that arises from his discussion of wages.

So let's begin with a point that is reiterated throughout these chapters and which appeared earlier, too: volume one is primarily a simple model. He says he will assume that commodites are sold at value, that there is always an equilibrium between the prices of commodities and their value, that there is no overproduction or underconsumption, there are no taxes, no interest, no landholding, no banks, no tariffs or export and transportation issues. It's a closed system.

In his defense: this is not a bad thing because for understanding the larger schema of things, one must understand the basic elements and how they push things along, beneath the surface of more complicated financial formula. There will be time in volumes two and three for that. Offense: this is a good thing because Marx can prove that even when the system is at its simplest and runs smoothly according to the tenets of classical political economy, it results in exploitation.

Within this simplified model, Marx observes that value oscillates between two hands but essentially remains the same: labor and capital. If we assume capital exists, then its next stage is to buy labor-power (as exchange-value), which gives the capitalist the right to all the labor expended by workers (as use-value), which results in commodities sold on the market (as an exchange-value greater than the wages), pocketed as surplus-value, which ultimately becomes reinvested as more capital. Old story right? UV -> XV> Exchange-value is a ruse for the use-value of labor, and it is this oscillation that allows for the sleight of hand. As in chapter one, he writes: "Not a single atom of his old capital continues to exist" (715).

It has vanished into the undifferentiated commodity form.

Marx also returns, seemingly for the first time since chapter one, to the obvious question of -- so where did all that capital originally come from? 

From our present standpoint it therefore seems likely that the capitalist, once upon a time, became possessed of money by some form of primitive accumulation [ursprüngliche akkumulation] (714).

More on this later, of course. Instead of harping on primitive accumulation, though, Marx more logically says that since at the end of the cycle, surplus-value is converted into capital, we should think of the originary capital invested in labor-power as simply past labor. Dead labor. Labor extracted from the capitalist is then used to pay the laborer again and again and again. It is a never-ending cycle.

Marx then spends time developing two big ideas. First, he argues that even in a static system, such a process of using labor to feed labor cements the division between the working and capitalist classes. If the process iterates repeatedly, the worker winds up with no surplus, and the capitalist piles up the surplus. Thus the formation of classes. Even when the worker gets a wage and spends it on food for its family, it is still doing it to support the capitalists who profit from their consumption (in two ways: the food gives the worker energy to work, and the profits from food probably go to the capitalist):

By converting part of his capital into labour-power, the capitalist augments the value of his entire capital. He kills two birds with one stone. He profits, not only by what he receives from, but by what he gives to, the labourer. . . . The consumption of food by a beast of burden does not become any less a necessary aspect of the production process because the beast enjoys what it eats.(717-718).

Next, Marx spends chapter 24 asking why the capitalist doesn't just use the surplus-value to consume things and live a nice life. Why does surplus-value necessarily become more capital? His answer is that capital is a spiral and that in order to survive it must grow, and if you aren't growing then you are dying. In the mind of the capitalist, it becomes stated as an imperative to

Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! 'Industry furnishes the material which saving accumulates.' Therefore, save, save,i.e, reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value, or surplus-product into capital! Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie in the period of its domination (742).

Accumulate to accumulate, produce to produce, labor to labor, value to value. On the one hand, it is a self-referential and nihilistic position (insert the need for religion and some sort of spiritual reassurance that something external and greater has a plan for all of us), and on the other hand, in its self-referentiality, it is limitless in its prospects. Ask capital when it plans to stop using resources and widening the rich-poor gap, and it wouldn't even understand those terms.

The other passage that I think is worth quoting is on the page before:

[I]n so far as he is capital personified, [the capitalist's] motivating force is not the acquisition and enjoyment of use-values, but the acquisition and augmentation of exchange-values. He is fanatically intent on the valorization of value; consequently he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production's sake . . . Only as a personification of capital is the capitalist respectable (739).

Now to try to bring this together. 

It seems to me that the last two quotes -- 'accumulation for accumulation' and 'capital personified' -- while not at all facetious reveal Marx's writing mode as a model. In extreme cases we have absolute bastards like the ones he writes about, but really what you probably find in real life are people whose intentions aren't completely evil but, when it comes down to it, share the tenets of capital personified. If one were to reduce someone's role and position in an economy to their most fundamental logics and actions, then you wind up with capital personified.

So this is how one can come to the conclusion that the agent of capital is capital itself. As William Sewell has claimed a few times, taking a cue from Moishe Postone, the social horizon of the modern era has been the accumulation of capital. Here is a line from his article that has stuck with me for months:

I would tend to emphasize the endless accumulation of capital as forming the crucial underlying dynamic of capitalism, with class and class struggle figuring more as a context and outcome of the dynamic of accumulation. In capital-centered Marxist theories, the endless accumulation of capital produces changing historical configurations of political power, spatial relations, class struggles, intellectual forms, technology, and systems of economic regulation that endure for a certain time until they are dismantled by their own contradictions and replaced by new configurations.

The opposition in this quote lies between Sewell's emphasis on capital accumulation versus Geoff Eley's emphasis on class. The opposition seems to be between a theory that sees history moving forward by the actions of the capitalist class (who accumulate) versus a theory that sees history moving forward by the actions of the working class (who get exploited).  Eley's position is similar to the position taken by the editors of the Re/thinking Marxism journal, Resnick and Wolff. An oversimplified version of Eley's and R/W's theses would be that in all social phenomena, since capitalist exploitation is involved, class is involved. Class overdetermines everything, and even though there are variations in class dynamics, it is always present and hence almost transhistorical (within the historical limits of capital).

After reading these last few chapters, I think that I am willing to agree with Sewell but with the need for a fuller explanation. Something paradoxical emerges from these chapters. On the one hand, the only governing principle of accumulation is completely lifeless and abstract. No single person is giving the orders to accumulate, businesses full of greedy people run themselves into the ground trying to accumulate more than their peers, and well-intentioned people also do bad things to other people because they see it as the only way for them to survive. Would they do this if they had the total freedom to choose how to live their lives? Hard to say but probably not as unanimous as it appears today. No one is really running the show. 

On the other hand, where could capital come from if it does not come from the workers? Capital is simply a disguised form of dead labor, which emerges from living labor itself. You cannot have capital without the workers, but then of course you could not have a working class without an exploitative one. So it is a system that depends upon the life and blood of those who form the basis of value. These processes of class, labor and accumulation seem incredibly, inextricably intertwined. How could one choose?

And then add to the formula the fact that Marx is writing in full modular mode. What he writes is very powerful and resonates strongly with everything we experience by simply living in this world economy, but it is definitely a simplified version, and if that's the case is he underestimating the role of any alternative logics outside that authorized by capital? In his above exposition of how the worker is reproduced as a figure within capital, Marx seems to suggest that even when we think we are not at work -- resting, eating, complaining about our jobs -- we are simply refueling for more work, a socially necessary element for capital's functioning. Which would suggest we are always at capital's mercy.

As Harvey says in his podcast, the modular mode for Marx is necessary because capital is a shape-shifting force that cannot be represented in a single, fully complex moment but must be stripped down to a governing logic that grafts itself on top of historically specific situations. Other logics do exist and co-exist with capital, but it's just that capital seems to appropriate and make use of those logics in different ways in each instance and somehow in the end remains, at its heart, intact. 

So is capital accumulation the only logic? Probably not. And could capital exist without labor and without reproducing classes? Nope. But those classes are much more a result of capital than they are a pre-existing historical agent. Capital gives, and capital can take away. I think that's Sewell's point, and it's a more dynamic formulation than the crappy cultural studies model of looking for reified class distinctions (along with gender and race and sexuality and caste and religion and whatever) outside of history. 

About today -

This is a gigantic chapter, the subject of two videos by David Harvey, and so my own coverage will necessarily be too light. I have a few bullet points in my notebook that I will try to develop and transcribe here, but I'm not really sure how this post will go. Excuse the frenetic appearances.

I thought a good starting point that would pick up on the theme of the last post would be a quote that bleeds between pages 568 and 569 on the contradictions of the social organization of capital rendered by new technology:

Since therefore machinery, considered alone, shortens the hours of labour, but, when in the service of capital, lengthens them; since in itself it lightens labour, but when employed by capital, heightens the intensity of labour; since in itself it is a victory of man over the forces of Nature, but in the hands of capital, makes man the slave of those forces; since in itself it increases the wealth of the producers, but in the hands of capital, makes them paupers-for all these reasons and others besides, says the bourgeois economist without more ado, it is clear as noon-day that all these contradictions are a mere semblance of the reality, and that, as a matter of fact, they have neither an actual nor a theoretical existence.

This short list encompasses Marx's own argument that as new technologies seemingly benefit everyone by making the production of greater use-values more efficient, more abundant and less strenuous on all, it is counter-balanced by the dynamics of exchange-value, that is, competition, which drives down prices and forces capitalists to continue investing more into their fixed and variable capital, that is, to continue exploiting labor in order to create a profit. The crux is that any profit one gains is always a comparative profit - no matter how nice and shiny your machines, if everyone else has the same machine, then you will not make a profit.

The result of this dual movement is that more use-values are created but exploitation continues because of the gap between use and exchange-value, which regulates wages as well as a host of other capitalist practices for managing investment. More broadly, one could say that on the one hand, capitalism is a liberating force that really opens up all sorts of possibilities that, for the sake of argument, a slave or feudal society would not allow. Never did a pauper become a king, never did a king text message with a 3G iPhone, never did a slave-owner in Mississippi eat Kobe Beef flown in from halfway around the world. Hierarchically, spatially, temporally, the limits of economic activity become transformed and the distance between extremes proportionally shrinks as capital loosens existing segmentations. On the other hand, capital that depends upon technology also deepens one's servitude in a single function in a larger net of specialized labor. A former shoemaker now only makes soles or the heel or the laces, a former textile weaver now only makes fabric or turns the fabric into a particular cut, or assembles cuts into modular-sized clothing. One is basically de-skilled in order to maximize co-operation, the theme of the last chapter.

One basic connection between these two movements is that the relative leveling of skill converts all jobs into relative commensurability. The minimum wage evaluates a job at McDonald's the same as a job at a supermarket. A security guard in a school is the same as a security guard at a courthouse. A job assembling parts in one factory is the same as assembling parts in another factory which produces completely different finished products. Ah, see how the commodity form is interwoven into this logic of work? So on the one hand, specialization occurs, but on the other hand, the commensuration of specialized jobs logically extends infinitely to any other numbers of jobs.

In a somewhat bizarre and jarring passage, Marx speaks of this process, albeit only briefly, as a positive development. Or, properly dialectically, negative and positive (so bad it's good). Here is a condensed version from page 618, with some reading markers:

But if Modern Industry, by its very nature, therefore necessitates variation of labour, fluency of function, universal mobility of the labourer, on the other hand, in its capitalistic form, it reproduces the old division of labour with its ossified particularisations. We have seen how this absolute contradiction between the technical necessities of Modern Industry, and the social character inherent in its capitalistic form, dispels all fixity and security in the situation of the labourer; how it constantly threatens, by taking away the instruments of labour, to snatch from his hands his means of subsistence, and, by suppressing his detail-function, to make him superfluous, We have seen, too, how this antagonism vents its rage in the creation of that monstrosity, an industrial reserve army, kept in misery in order to be always at the disposal of capital; in the incessant human sacrifices from among the working-class, in the most reckless squandering of labour-power and in the devastation caused by a social anarchy which turns every economic progress into a social calamity. This is the negative side. But if, on the one hand, variation of work at present imposes itself after the manner of an overpowering natural law, and with the blindly destructive action of a natural law that meets with resistance at all points, Modern Industry, on the other hand, through its catastrophes imposes the necessity of recognising, as a fundamental law of production, variation of work, consequently fitness of the labourer for varied work, consequently the greatest possible development of his varied aptitudes. It becomes a question of life and death for society to adapt the mode of production to the normal functioning of this law. Modern Industry, indeed, compels society, under penalty of death, to replace the detail-worker of to-day, grappled by life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers.

What I find puzzling about this quote is just how such a fully developed individual is to be brought about. I understand the capital leads to specialization and that specialization forces workers to do various jobs throughout their lives in order to live. But what stake does capital have in actually creating individuals who can do multiple jobs, vitiating the need for specialized workers? It seems like while there will be exceptional workers who learn multiple skills, the majority of the population must necessarily stay wed to their specialized job in order for production to occur. I suppose this is the problem of actually existing socialism.

In fact, this section contains many passages which can be traced to Marx's Communist Manifesto days and to the politics and rantings and ravings of latter day socialists. Marx also argues that the abolition or concealment of former boundaries - gender, age, family - marks class as both a predominant and universal dimension of social existence, something in itself revolutionary (a double sense of revolution, I think, or at least a 1.5 sense. Not revolution in the CC/C/P way, but that's not unrelated to the sense in which capital revolutionizes economic organization):

However terrible and disgusting the dissolution, under the capitalist system, of the old family ties may appear, nevertheless, modern industry, by assigning as it does an important part in the process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to children of both sexes, creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes. (621)

What is the "higher form" here? It's very ambiguous. Ultimately, I think one can say that any positives Marx found in this economic order would only come about with its own dissolution, not simply because Marx disliked capital but also as a scientific observation of the historical tendencies of successive technologies. Contrast this with the article linked in my last post, where Mr. Prasad believes that the forces of neoliberal capital in India will help the depressed castes, not by tearing down capitalism but by allowing the castes to thrive within it. It is a similar argument to Marx's: class and economics will overcome other categories (gender, family, caste), but Prasad seems to believe there is something stable or neutralizing about this process. That is, unlike Marx, he does not see the future upheaval of this liberating economic order, an upheaval necessitated by the inner dynamics of its own growth.

To backtrack a bit, I also wanted to point out that this contradictory tendency of both liberating and segmenting one's economic position is also a good response to those who argue that capital is what allows for X, Y, Z success story to occur. Much like Mr. Prasad's examples, such success stories are undeniable and are a strong incentive for any of us to work hard at our jobs. I think it is a bit of an intellectual blackmail to say it's either incentives/success or no-incentives/stagnancy. I think the first counter-argument should be the one in the NYT article itself, that as a general tendency those success stories are exceptions. And second, well, I'm not sure, we'll need to figure out some better socialist model before figuring out how to re-frame the question.

Next point. As Harvey points out for much of the first video on this chapter, the footnote on page 493 provides a glimpse into a properly holistic perspective on the economy, one that takes into account the multiple categories of social life intimately connected to properly economic activity. Harvey jumps up and down over this footnote, so you should just watch the video. Even before re-reading the footnote I noticed that this chapter represents what many today would call the "cultural studies" or even "social history" side of Marx. He delves into discussions of how the economy effects changes in the family like alcoholism, de-skilling, the end of education, the liberation of women and children, the shift from an individual to family wage, etc. I think the categories laid out in the footnote, although very useful, are a bit fetishized by Harvey, who repeats them throughout his discussion, classifying everything into the categories of technology, mental conceptions (WTF does this mean?), etc.

But the question of technology laid out in the footnote are helpful in answering a question that ran through my head while reading the chapter: what is the relationship between technology, capital and history? In a simple phrasing, "is technology always bad and inevitable?" Or is it the people who use the technology? On the one hand yes, on the other hand, no. As Marx writes in the footnote, "Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature." That is, it is not technology itself but how humans have positioned themselves in relationship to nature that is paramount. Unsure what nature means, but I'm assuming one's relationship with other humans, with animals, with raw materials and resources, perhaps what one could today call ecological concerns.

But I say yes and no because in different sections of this chapter, Marx seems to go in either direction. He seems to disagree with the Luddite response of destroying every machine in sight and instead endorses the realization that one must "distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilizes those machines" (555). This is a pretty good quote that Harvey spends some time on. However, it seems, at least superficially, to be contradicted by a later quote: "The principle, carried out in the factory system, of analysing the process of production into its constituent phases, and of solving the problems thus proposed by the application of mechanics, of chemistry, and of the whole range of the natural sciences, becomes the determining principle everywhere" (591).

While I know this second line is only a phrase that does not overturn the entirety of Marx's social theory, I am not so sure he is not a technological determinist. One could obviously make the statement that Marx always foregrounds the social organization of capital and production and that technology is almost incidental to the way labor is organized. Of course it makes no sense to say machines enslaved humans; rather, it was the class of capitalists who used machines to enslave them. And so when Marx says machines become a determining principle, he does not mean that machines themselves determine the factory but rather that labor itself was qualitatively changed by new practices and that machines became the centerpiece of those new practices. 

A lot is at stake in this question, because if one were to argue fully that machines are incidental to capital, then one could dismiss all those naysayers who say "Marx was right about the industrial age but he is wrong about the information age." But then, Marx is still quite specific about industrial machines in accomplishing something historically unique in the reification of human labor:

But it is only in the factory system that this inversion for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality. By means of its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour confronts the labourer, during the labour-process, in the shape of capital, of dead labour, that dominates, and pumps dry, living labour-power. The separation of the intellectual powers of production from the manual labour, and the conversion of those powers into the might of capital over labour, is, as we have already shown. finally completed by modern industry erected on the foundation of machinery (548).

There is something unique about the machines of the industrial age that separate them from the tools of manufacture. What distinguishes them is not a specific technical difference, for Marx barely names any specific machine, but rather the social relation instantiated by them: from a subjective relationship to one of objectification. But a specific level of technology and machinery was still required for the total inversion to occur. So Marx is ambiguous here. It is a social question. But not social alone. But not technological alone. Perhaps one could argue that Marx, as a good historian, simply was foregrounding those recent inventions as being important to that specific historical stage and not making such a large metaphysical statement about technology and capital in general. But I still think that -- although I am more than inclined to buy the "social" version of Marx -- there is a lingering "technological" question that remains.

The last point I want to make is quite broad. This is a large chapter that is easy to get lost in, and I certainly benefited from patchy re-readings and listening to the Harvey lectures. It helps to begin with and continually return to looking at the section headings:

Chapter XV Machinery and Modern Industry	374
Section 1. The Development of Machinery	374
Section 2. The Value Transferred by Machinery to the Product	389
Section 3. The Proximate Effects of Machinery on the Workman	397
a. Appropriation of Supplementary Labour Power by Capital. The Employment of Women and Children	398
b. Prolongation of the Working Day	406
c. Intensification of Labour	412
Section 4. The Factory	420
Section 5. The Strife Between Workman and Machine	430
Section 6. The Theory of Compensation as Regards the Workpeople Displaced by Machinery	440
Section 7. Repulsion and Attraction Of Workpeople by the Factory System. Crises in the Cotton Trade	450
Section 8. Revolution Effected in Manufacture, Handicrafts, and Domestic Industry by Modern Industry	462
a. Overthrow of Co-operation Based on Handicraft and on the Division of Labour	462
b. Reaction of the Factory System on Manufacture and Domestic Industries	464
c. Modern Manufacture	466
d. Modern Domestic Industry	468
e. Passage of Modern Manufacture, and Domestic Industry into Modern Mechanical Industry. The Hastening of This Revolution by the Application Of the Factory Acts to Those Industries	473
Section 9. The Factory Acts Sanitary and Educational Clauses of the Same Their General Extension in England	483
Section l0. Modern Industry and Agriculture	505

Marx begins with some general remarks on the historical relationship of pre-capitalist and capitalist forms, which are coeval with pre-machine and machinery economies (the main distinction being that social thing I just talked about), then he takes the reader through a superficially linear development that is constantly interrupted with contradictions and opposite movements. Finally, he ends with the domestic industry and agriculture, something I'm interested in for research purposes. These sections really deal with this question: what happens to all those economic sectors that are not industrialized and not mechanized? Do they remain the same as before, pristine and untouched? Obviously not. So how are they utilized by the new pace of the machine economy?

For one, the workers are still expected to generate the quantity of raw materials adequate to the pace of machines. This might mean simply buying things from more and more farms for only one factory, but that's all right because there is no need to provide land or machines for those domestic industries, which are funded by the manufacturers themselves. The consequence is that they are de-centralized and hence weakened in any class struggle. Karl Kautsky also argued that the persistence of small household farms could be explained by the fact that, not fully given over to commodity production, such households could be exploited yet still survive by growing their own food and relying upon the unpaid labor of family members. That is, they could be underpaid because they could rely upon the pre-capitalist elements of their domestic arrangements. How does one classify this? Semi-capitalist? Petty capitalist?

Marx then ends by arguing that not only does this destroy some harmonious social metabolism between people but it also saps dry the fertility of the soil. In a way this could be seen as a pre-environmentalist Marx. In another way, a romanticist and humanist Marx. But perhaps he is just of the opinion that, like all forms of fixed capital, land will be worn out if mistreated by those who use it to produce things. And that this expense is not factored into the cost of production of raw materials, for which the farmer is paid like a wage laborer but which also requires an investment that is only expected of someone with as much money as a member of the capitalist class. That is, they are given the responsibility of miniature capitalists but only given the means of a laborer.

Division of Labor

I read this one a while ago and just reviewed some of my notes. In the larger picture, I see this chapter as a warm-up for the next chapter, the gargantuan chapter fifteen, which completes a lot of ideas that are only anticipated in this one.

As the title suggests, this chapter is mainly about division of labor, which is usually described through the idiom of manufacture. In the next chapter, Marx will go into a long discussion about the difference between tools and machines, manufacture and industry. Frankly, I don't understand the division very well, probably because it is intentionally a description of social differences and not technical changes (he writes against technological determinism) but there is still definitely a difference between machines and factories and non-machines and non-factories.

It seems that manufacture stands at the threshold of industrialization. It goes as far as possible in terms of specialization, de-skilling, conglomerating large groups of laborers under a small numbers of capitalists, etc., and only will these limits of quantity and quality be radically altered to the next level.

So just a few questions about Marx's treatment.

First, there seems to be a dual movement with regards to the way division of labor in manufacture relates to previous social formations, wherein work is already divided according to occupation, sex, groups, age, etc. While not specifically talking about India, he says that every society in history has organizations, or castes, that traditionally do a certain type of job on their own, and that these divisions of labor provide the social foundation for the oncoming changes of capitalist production. Manufacture, as a historically specific form of production, grafts itself onto prior forms. On the other hand, Marx suggests later that manufacture distinguishes itself from non-manufacture, non-division groups because it rearranges laborers to do even more specialized functions, as part of a workshop, under the same roof. Instead of a caste of watchmakers, for instance, now watchmaking is subdivided into some twenty-odd jobs that go into making a watch.

The question then is: how much of a revolutionizing force is the division of labor in the face of prior social arrangements? On the one hand, it preys upon and takes advantage of them, on the other hand, they are liberated such that, potentially, top becomes down and down becomes top. What is this historical relationship between pre-capitalist forms and the division of labor? I guess it just depends on the specific historical contexts; one could probably safely say, however, that those on the bottom of the hierarchy probably have not risen to the top of the hierarchy in capitalism. Metal chains may be loosened, but only replaced with economic ones.

As a demonstration of this question, we have a recent New York Times article featuring a man who argues that the liberalization of the economy will have precisely the latter effect without the former: that the depressed castes of India will soon be able to move up in the socio-economic ladder of the country/world precisely because of a freer economy, which allows them to get an education, save money, etc.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/world/asia/30caste.html?em

When Chandra Bhan Prasad visits his ancestral village in these feudal badlands of northern India, he dispenses the following advice to his fellow untouchables: Get rid of your cattle, because the care of animals demands children’s labor. Invest in your children’s education instead of in jewelry or land. Cities are good for Dalit outcastes like us, and so is India’s new capitalism . . . . His latest crusade is to argue that India’s economic liberalization is about to do the unthinkable: destroy the caste system. The last 17 years of new capitalism have already allowed his people, or Dalits, as they call themselves, to “escape hunger and humiliation,” he says, if not residual prejudice.

The article itself provides other opinions which counter Prasad's, suggesting that any overall trend in economic improvement cannot be discerned, apart from the individual cases which he champions. This seems intuitive to me: why would a system of economic division of labor liberate and abolish categories of work, instead of simply shifting them around or preying and deepening them? I'm sure there is plenty of literature on how British capitalism in the 18th to 20th century only deepened the economic significance of caste (in fact, I'm sure of it), and although one could argue that 21st-century-style neoliberalism is a different animal than imperialism, a spade is still a spade, capital still relies upon economic exploitation, does it not?

It does raise interesting questions about the counter-movements of division of labor under capital, however, and how some lives are improved while others are only more fastened to jobs they cannot escape from. Surely individual success stories will pop up here and there, but I'd be surprised to find in any historical epoch an instance of how there was an overall improvement for all, that is, an even rather than uneven development.

I'll end this entry here and hopefully raise other related questions in my entry for chapter fifteen.

What do you think?

I've only just now finished the gargantuan chapter fifteen, about a week and a half late, and while I don't think that it would be too difficult to catch up with the schedule and finish by the end of the first week of September, I've been thinking . . . . The David Harvey lectures have been unbelievably helpful far, and reading along with the lectures has been - based on a handful of experience - exactly the sort of thing I had in mind when starting this blog.

So I was thinking that I'll change the schedule so that it conforms to the Harvey schedule. Only four more Harvey lectures left, each one released about once a week, which means finishing Volume One at the end of September. The lectures will only cover the first volume, so why rush?

Plus, quite frankly, Volume One is where all the literature is at, so it doesn't make sense to move too quickly onto Volume Two, which I have never opened and know little about.

Throw it on a fire

I'm trying to catch up by posting on a chapter a day as often as possible (so..not always everyday).

Marx continues in chapter thirteen to speak about the transformation from individual laborers to capitalist production (historical? logical?) and a dichotomy that is best captured in this quote from chapter eleven:

Here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel, in his Logic, that at a certain point merely quantitative differences pass over by a dialectical inversion into qualitative distinctions (423).

Again, I'm going to bracket the terms Hegel and dialectics for another time and for someone else to talk about

----> [Hegel] [dialectical inversion]

Instead, I just want to point out that Marx seems to say that yes one can speak of the limits of capitalist production as passing over a quantitative threshold, but eventually we also have to pay attention to how that affects the work itself, qualitatively, and why ten workers in cooperation will make more than ten workers individually. So, the qualitative and quantitative.

The qualitative of course comes out strongly in Marx's description of the animality and sociality that comes with factory labor, which turns the workers from a collection of individuals into a collective whole, like an army which requires sergeants and generals to guide them en masse (not exactly sure what 'en masse' means). Here's a good example:

Whether the combined working-day, in a given case, acquires this increased productive power, because it heightens the mechanical force of labour, or extends its sphere of action over a greater space, or contracts the field of production relatively to the scale of production, or at the critical moment sets large masses of labour to work, or excites emulation between individuals and raises their animal spirits, or impresses on the similar operations carried on by a number of men the stamp of continuity and many-sidedness, or performs simultaneously different operations, or economises the means of production by use in common, or lends to individual labour the character of average social labour whichever of these be the cause of the increase, the special productive power of the combined working-day is, under all circumstances, the social productive power of labour, or the productive power of social labour. This power is due to co-operation itself. When the labourer co-operates systematically with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species (447).

Again, Marx, a humanist. He thinks there is some foundational value in labor, something like species-being, which appeared in his earlier work but only pops up periodically in the present text. Marx emphasizes that this new collective creation, rather than being multi-headed or lead by one of the workers themselves, is in advance appropriated by capital. Formally, of course, having bought the workers' labour-power in advance, capital appears to rightfully own the fruits of the cooperation process. As Marx talked about in chapter six, a temporal ruse is played wherein the worker is forced to give up any claim on its labor's use-value and only settle for wages, that is, its exchange-value.

Significantly, he notes on page 449 that because the logic of capital knows that the more workers, the more productivity, it will demand more workers, and as more workers are united, the more they will need to be disciplined. In other words, we begin to get some hints of class struggle and labor politics, as opposed to an exclusive focus on the capitalist class as the only active agent in this narrative.

The quantitative stuff is directly addressed on the first page (439), where he speaks of the first capitalist production being one where manufacture merely grows out of handicraft trades, distinguished only "by the greater number of workers simultaneously employed by the same individual capital. It is merely an enlargement of the workshop of the master craftsman of the guilds" (439). And then the qualitative stuff kicks in.

What I'm interested with this quantitative stuff, though, is not the quantitative part itself but rather what is going on at this early, early stage, which is when Marx sets the point at which capitalism tears itself apart from non-capitalist production. As he says, "a large number of workers working together, at the same time, in one place ... in order to produce the same sort of commodity under the command of the same capitalist, constitutes the starting-point of capitalist production. This is true both historically and conceptually" (439).

This quote seems to confirm what we discussed a million times so far, that Marx's text is crazy obsessed with history without, at the same time, being a purely historical text but rather one trying to figure the fuck out what is the logic of the temporal progression of capitalist production. Capitalist production, which, remember, was more or less incredibly, intensely developed by the time Marx starting writing Capital, which means he was in a similar boat we are in.

And even though capitalist production becomes far more complicated than the initial manufacture trades, Marx wants to emphasize that machinery, division of labor and all the other techniques are ephemeral (remember, competition), and the only real lasting foundation that signifies capitalist production is cooperation, or, scale of production. It remains because, deep down, that is the base: "Co-operation remains the fundamental form of the capitalist mode of production" (454). So, although concerned with the historical developments of machinery and rationalization of production in his time, Marx is not a technological determinist, even though he may be sort of an economic one. It's important to remember that capitalist production is above all marked by its social formation, not by its technical components.

Final note, and this is a quote that I completely missed while reading but only noticed from listening to the Harvey. On page 448, we see the first traces of a distinction that becomes sort of a big deal in later debates: the distinction between formal and real subsumption. The connection to the rest of the chapter, or chapters, is that there seems to be a temporal movement from formal to real subsumption. The formal part sort of sits somewhere between the quantitative to qualititative movement, and real subsumption is the final stage of social reification. I guess in my mind it looks like this:

quantitative enlargement --> formal subsumption (selling of labour-power) --> qualitative structural changes (division of labor, animality kicks in, etc.) --> real subsumption (total discipline of work force, worker becomes only an extension of the logic of capital)

Anyway here's the quote:

We also saw that at first, the subjection of labour to capital was only a formal result of the fact, that the labourer, instead of working for himself, works for and consequently under the capitalist. By the co-operation of numerous wage-labourers, the sway of capital develops into a requisite for carrying on the labour-process itself, into a real requisite of production. That a capitalist should command on the field of production, is now as indispensable as that a general should command on the field of battle (448).

The more things change

Reading these two chapters (twelve and thirteen) [note: this is actually just about chapter twelve] as well as the following handful dispels for me the myth that volume one is Marx's abstract philosophy and volumes two and three represent the nuts and bolts of his economics. Sure, he prattles on about the commodity form, social averages, alienation, etc. but there is a very historically specific description about what capitalist production is and is not and what elements are necessary before one can call a phenomenon capitalist in nature. Later writers who extrapolate on concepts like alienation, fetishism and commoditization really need to re-arrange Marx's priorities, because at this point those concepts seem incidental to his larger concern of explaining political economy. Someone like Lukacs could claim that someone might not be directly involved in capitalist production, either as a capitalist owner nor as a wage-earning worker, but because they live in a reified social universe, they are part of capital-ism. I don't see any hint of that sort of move in Marx's text so far (well, chapter one). As I recall, other chapters later on will revisit the first chapter's themes, and that is something worth keeping in mind.

Anyway, I made some promises in my last post to talk about a few things in this one, but . . . . lots of promises were made, you know? Well, to begin with, I can't talk about chapter twelve without talking about the laws of competition, which Marx has circled around a bit for a while and further addresses here. My comment in the last post about the constantly self-revolutionizing properties of capitalist production are spelled out nicely in the 430s. What is interesting about the discussion is that Marx on the one hand is talking about how individual capitalists are compelled to act (innovate in order to get surplus-value, imitate in order to survive) but those individuals are completely predictable from the standpoint of the class they belong to (or, the logic undergirding their industry). As Harvey makes clear in his talk, Marx here historicizes invention and innovation to show how not only have good inventions been a nice boost to capitalist production but also how they are built into its very movement. And it's true; has there ever been any other moment in history when something called a "research and development" department existed? The social net of competition more or less brings every competitor in a single industry into close proximity, so that once a general industry-standard-equilibrium has been reached, the very next competitor to come up with an edge will steal business from everyone else, unless they follow suit and adopt that same technology:

On the other hand, however, this extra surplus-value vanishes as soon as the new method of production is generalized, for them the difference between the individual value of the cheapened commodity and its social value vanishes. The law of the determination of value by labour-time makes itself felt to the individual capitalist who applies the new method of production by compelling him to sell his goods under their social value; this same law, acting as a coercive law of competition, forces his competitors to adopt the new method. The general rate of surplus-value is therefore ultimately affected by the whole process only when the increase in the productivity of labour has seized upon those branches of production and cheapened those commodities that contribute towards the necessary means of subsistence, and are therefore elements of the value of labour-power (436).

That's a lot to handle.

It is important to note, however, that even though capitalist production breeds innovation and greater productivity, it does not necessarily raise the wages of workers. That is because, as the quote shows, value is generally determined by socially necessary labor time. If I pay workers ten dollars to make ten widgets a day, just because I have new technology that will help them make twenty widgets a day does not mean I am going to pay then twenty dollars from now on, right? Because the use-value and exchange-value of labour-power are separated in the commodity of labour-power, increased use-value does not equal increased exchange-value. The workers are paid the same, while the capitalist, by selling more widgets, probably at a marked-down price, reaps more surplus-value. Hence the importance not simply of tracking the whole mass of stuff available or the increased wages of workers but of tracking REAL WAGES, that is, wages adjusted to account for the share of wages in relation to total wealth.

I think competition is an important concept, definitely worth tracking here on out. It seems that competition is really the heart of capitalist production, the motor, the ghost in the shell, etc. This leads to two consequences, at least. First, it means capitalist production is anonymous. Competition is just like passing a baton from one competitor to another, no leader is invulnerable, anyone (technically) would overthrow the existing hierarchy at any moment. The intern3ts thing has really demonstrated this sharply (friendster? webcrawler? lycos? R.I.P.).

Secondly, it also provides a link - some link, something - to the literature about cycles and booms and busts. Schumpeter is getting hot now because we are heading to another depression, but for real Marxists, there's also Mandel and Kondratieff. Competition sort of explains it, doesn't it? If there is no single force pushing things forward but simply a series of new leaders asserting themselves ahead of the pack, then growth is not smooth and linear but bumpy. And for competition to work, it has to be somewhat unregulated, and although it has become more regulated over time, the unregulated element of it helps explain why crises occur (which, I think will come up in volume three) and hence the 'bust' in 'boom and bust' or the downturn in the cycle.

While it is not our intention here to consider the way in which the immanent laws of capitalist production manifest themselves in the external movement of the individuals capitals, assert themselves as the coercive laws of competition, and therefore enter into the consciousness of the individual capitalist as the motives which drive him forward, this much is clear: a scientific analysis of competition is possible only if we can grasp the inner nature of capital, just as the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies are intelligible only to someone who is acquainted with their real motions, which are not perceptible to the senses (433).

So if we accept Marx's observations on competition, do we also have to endorse the language of laws and scientific, immanent movements? Maybe it is not such a bad thing. Take this quote:

This result [of gaining surplus-labor without changing productivity], however, could be attained only by pushing the wage of the worker down below the value of his labour-power .... Despite the important part which this method plays in practice, we are excluded from considering it here by our assumption that all commodities, including labour-power, are bought and sold at their full value (431).

In other words, if Marx is going to prove that capitalist production exploits its workers, he can't just show that some people cheat, because that would excuse the system itself and just scapegoat the bad apples. Marx needs to show that even if the laws of Smith, Ricardo, et al. are followed perfectly, exploitation would still happen, due to the actual nature of the laws of capitalist production. In this sense, yes, it is necessary to speak of laws and immanent natures.

In Capitalist Society . . .

"It is no longer the worker who employs the means of production, but the means of production which employ the worker" (425).

Sorry, that one was too good to pass up.

This chapter begins with an explication of the rate of exploitation, which generally boils down to

Re (Rsv) = s/v; Re * V = S

Or, the rate of exploitation = surplus-capital over the amount of variable capital invested per worker; and the rate of exploitation multiplied by the total amount of variable capital invested equals the total amount of surplus capital you get in return.

This will become more important in the next chapter, but for now Marx begins with some dry observations about the dimensions and limits to these variables. Some are basic algebra, like if you have a higher rate but lower amount of variable capital invested, you could still wind up with the same amount of surplus capital as before. The limits are important, both because they point towards the possible ways in which the capitalists are able to increase the Re/Rsv but also because they illuminate other elements of capital's dynamic.

As I will talk about more in the next post, Marx is moving into a mode of speaking about capital as something with internal laws. Whether that is a good or bad thing, I'll leave open. But make no mistake, he thinks there is a unidirectional path to capital's logic, which, of course, he attributes to capital itself: "capitalist production presupposes the increase of wealth" (423).

Some of the limits to capital Marx outlines are:

Productivity. Or, the rate of surplus-value. You can only squeeze as much from a single worker as the current technology allows you to. This will be foundational for the next few chapters.

Time. Obviously, 24 hours, but beyond that legal time restrictions. But even beyond that, Marx notes, a capitalist will learn that there is an optimum balance of not exhausting your workers but also using EXACTLY all of their labor-power during their waking hours. What may appear as humane (not working them for 20 hours each day) is in fact, economical.

Population. You can't employ more workers than are alive. In fact, most of the time, Marx shows, it is in capital's interest to employ less than are available. This is because the most productive arrangements tend to use less workers to gain more profit, plus -- some foreshadowing -- wages can be kept low if there is no shortage of labor.

After outlining such limits, Marx then shifts into a more broadly philosophical and historical mode. Apropos some of the history discussions we have been having, let me raise another rhetorical question that Harvey raises in his class on chapter one: A) is Marx making a historical argument? or B) is he making a logical argument? Does he think this is how capitalism really developed? Or is he merely conjecturing based upon the appearances of capital at the present? Althusser would clearly side with the latter, and I also think that one could say, C) both of the above: he thought he was giving a real history but in reality was just guessing blindly.

The point is that the A) position probably can't be sustained or taken seriously as it was for about 100 years after Capital was written. Mainly because, EVEN IF he intended to, he could not tell a very accurate world history. Nonetheless, the inner logic of capital and the way in which it unravels history retrospectively is, of course, no small concern to the modern historian. These are questions we will have to deal with (assuming we are all good critical thinkers + good or at least competent archive-ers on the level).

In Marx's brief history of capitalism -- one of many he gives -- a few things stand out:

First, he says that in a given time and place, there is a minimum requirement for becoming a capitalist. To become a capitalist, you need enough capital to start a firm of a certain scale which can buy others' labor power and generate surplus-value. In other words, the opposite of an individual working for itself, in a steady state.

Second, he says this is historically specific. The minimums and maximums change over time, dictated by the dynamics of competition (next chapter), and thus ..... there is NO TRANSHISTORICAL DEFINITION OF CAPITALIST PRODUCTION. Think you can make a profit by operating gigantic, coal-powered handlooms today? Try it, and you will fail miserably. This is what Marx means when he constantly suggests that capitalism continually revolutionizes itself.

But then, think about this: if capitalist production continually produces its own multiple beginnings (stages, if you will), then how could one ever speak of the beginning of capitalist production? And how could one ever say that the beginning of capitalist production is a thing of the past (primitive accumulation chapter)?

Third (or fourth), it also strikes me that in the model that Marx has laid out, if an individual working or making money for itself at a given period, designated 'capitalist' by historians and commentators, does not actually have the initial capital to pay for the means of production or to hire the labor-power of many others, then doesn't that mean there is the possibility of non-capitalist production in a capitalist society? Simple observation I know, but something to remember underneath all the abstract goo about modernity and capitalist modernity. This is probably what inspires so many anthropological studies of alternative economies, mixed economies, proto-capitalisms, or, perhaps worse, J.K. Gibson-Grahamisms (no, they're not awful, I'm just feeling reactionary right now).

//addendum: to finish this incomplete thought... the question becomes, what do we make of non-capitalist production (and attendant social relations) in a space dominated by capitalist production? Are these exceptions really exceptions, or do they serve a purpose that somehow sustains capitalist production? Kautsky argued in the Agrarian Question that it was small, petty-producers, who effectively earned less value than even the market value of labor-power, sustained by the fact that they could produce for themselves half the time -- these people actually benefited capitalist production by providing cheap products for workers with little to no cost to the capitalist class. That's one example, I'm sure others have made similar arguments. It is perhaps too broad a question to answer, but it is something to consider. Can one really just pull out of a world of capitalist production, or are you somehow still a part of it? If you define things differently (say, capitalism as marked by the domination of abstract time) one could say one never escapes capital, even if you are unemployed, so long as you follow the logic of time as an empty conduit through which value is created (in which case being unemployed just means you are losing money). I guess in a predictable way, this just goes back to the question of how one defines capitalism (Marx didn't; he only defined capitalist production) and whether it is marked primarily by the way one relates oneself to objects of consumption or marked by one's position in a chain of production. That's a simplification, I know, but two dominant interpretations. End addendum//

Finally, it is worth noting that in this abstract formula, Marx relies upon logical limits to the rate of exploitation, a minimum for the division between capitalist and non-capitalist production, and absolute averages to determine productivity ("We assume throughout, not only that the value of an average labour-power is constant, but that the workers employed by a capitalist are reduced to average workers" (418)). Is this an instance of Marx insisting upon using the language and logic of classical political economy to criticize it from within? Or is it proof of his rigorous scientific framework, where social activity must be abstracted into anonymous equations? Probably both, but I think that, unless we are willing to discard Marx for being outdated and too Darwinian, we should be more interested in the first possibility. Namely because it reveals a truth about the inner logic of capital itself: because of the dynamics of competition (what I believe classical political economy calls the invisible hand), productive activity is constantly compared, homogenized and scrutinized to extreme degrees, just like the way in which the commodity form treats those products of labor as comparable, homogenized objects of scrutiny. It is interesting to note that, although Marx seems to open Capital with a critique of the commodity form, it is clear by now that he relies upon the abstractions of the commodity form in order to make his argument.

Seriously

I haven't fallen behind with reading, I'm just negligent with posting. But I have plans to change that. Big, big plans.

As it is, let me avoid a pile-up of observations for my next post by mentioning something that struck me while watching the first Harvey video from the Harvey website. He ends by making a very sharp observation: Marx basically agrees with the neoclassical economists on a lot of positions. On the dynamics of economic logic and on the almost metaphysical existence of some invisible force making decisions through the proxy of the capitalist class. In the more recent chapters, I have been struck by how Marx's footnotes are no longer long arguments, tirades, historical examples but simply small quotes from bourgeoisie, classical economics to support a contention. He more or less ASSUMES a lot of the logic of those he criticizes, which, as Harvey points out, leads to a lot of confusion and messiness on both Marx's part and the reader's. This book is not an anti-economics tirade (how could you turn that into 4,000 pages?) but rather one that takes a body of work at its word and then tries to mess around with it with great detail and subtlety, showing how, by looking at the same process from a different perspective, different explanations emerge for the same appearances. Isn't that interesting?

For Max

I could easily post small replies to each of Max's latest posts, but might as well just write another one. I just read through the latest set of his, and each one resonated with me and gave rise to new questions in my mind.

Let's keep it simple and keep it in list format:

Time and Humanism

Regarding the EP Thompson reference, which I have yet to fully read, you're right on that there is a humanism lurking behind the idea that wages and labor-time were an interruption in the otherwise leisurely, pre-capitalist lifeworld of the worker. However, even those writers who do not seek recourse in a mythical, non-alienated past must still make comparisons between the time of capitalism and the time of pre-capitalism. You cite Postone, but Postone famously talks about pre-clock time Europe and China. And Marx himself is always making implicit references to the world before capitalism. What is the alternative?

Perhaps this leaks out into larger questions that continue to pop up periodically in the text and in our posts. What to do about humanism? There are moments where Marx suggests an originary human subject upon which to base his critique, but if we are interested in interpreting Marx in a non-humanistic way, what other foundation is there for this critique? Simply the fair distribution of value to the exploited workers? Or is this even about the working class anymore?

Dialectics

I have a hard time understanding the pairs and pairs of categories Max outlines in Chapter 7 and 8. Perhaps this is just the need for a little clarity. As I am reading it, the dialectic roughly falls along these lines

Use-value Exchange-value
Labor Valorization
Variable Capital Constant Capital
Subjective Objective

Does this look right? And if so, where does this take us? What does it do for our understanding of this process so far? I generally this observation is very, very smart, and I'm impressed by it, but then my second instinct is to ask what is the importance of this reading, which feels so important?

If nothing else it aligns everything back to Chapter one, where use-value seemed to stand in for the subjective, pre-capitalist, pre-objective, pre-exchange historical forms.

Also, I'm not sure why constant capital is treated as part of objective/valorization/exchange-value, however, because if it were to be split along the lines of production and consumption, it would fall on the side of production, no?

Chapter Nine: Labour (Living and Dead) and Time

This chapter seems straightforward in its logical exposition of what Marx has already distinguished as capital’s constitutive components – constant capital (dead-labor, or means of production) and variable capital (socially-necessary labour and surplus labor[time]).

The distinction Marx made between the consumption of dead-labor’s use-value and the valorization of capital’s investment by means of living-labour’s productive capacity - not only it’s necessary ability to bring ‘to life’ dead-labor but also the unpaid component of labour-time (surplus-value) - is extended now into the rate of surplus-value, which is largely understood through time (labour-time, and Marx’s critique of Senior’s “last-hour”). In this regard, it might be interesting to bring in E.P. Thompson’s observations on time and work-discipline…which also can lead into Marx’s discussion of the ‘work-day.’

For Thompson, the problem is posed as: “how far, and in what ways, did [the] shift in time-sense [increasingly determined by industrial production] affect labour discipline, and how far did it influence the inward apprehension of time of working people. (57)”

He begins, in the familiar humanist move, with laying out what the relationship between time-sense and production might have been before capitalism:

“a community in which task-orientation is common appears to show least demarcation between ‘work’ and ‘life’. Social intercourse and labour are intermingled – the working-day lengthens or contracts according to the task – and there is no great sense of conflict between labour and ‘passing the time of day.... to men accustomed to labour timed by the clock, this attitude to labour appears to be wasteful and lacking in urgency. (60)”

This echoes the common rhetorical device of positing an organic life-world before the violence of capitalism’s alienation and abstraction (think Lukacs as well).

Once the distinction between those who labor and those who manage/put others to work (i.e. industrial production) appears then you have a radical change (differentiation) in the experience of time:

“As soon as actual hands are employed the shift from task-orientation to timed labour is marked.” (61) and “those who are employed experience a distinction between their employer’s time and their ‘own’ time. And the employer must use the time of his labour, and see it is not wasted….(61)”

Temporality is experienced (and determines social classes) differently; something akin to a sociology of temporality. Anyhoo, linking this then to the section from Marx that Andy cited earlier:

[Marx] “the greater part of the eighteenth century, up to the epoch of large-scale industry, capital in England had not succeeded in gaining control of the worker's whole week by paying the weekly value of his labour-power ... the fact that they could live for a whole week on the wage of four days did not appear to the workers to be a sufficient reason for working for the capitalist for the other two days (Capital, p. 385).”

Thompson’s analysis of 19th Century England reiterates Marx’s observation:

“Enclosure and the growing labour-surplus at the end of the eighteenth century tightened the screw for those who were in regular employment; they were faced with the alternative of partial employment and the poor law, or submission to a more exacting labour discipline. It is a question, not of new techniques, but of a greater sense of time-thrift among the improving capitalist employers. (78)”

Class exploitation is refracted through the social-differentiation and experience of time, although this still seems to be a class-driven process (rather than abstract labour time as the subject – a la Postone). But what is most interesting is that this is not just an explanatory narrative of time, discipline and social class, but also of the socio-political imaginations that were cofigured along with social-time/work-discipline:

“The first generation of factory workers were taught by their masters the importance of time; the second generation formed their short-time committees in the ten-hour movement; the third generation struck for overtime or time-and-a-half. (86)”

Thus labour-politics is largely understood as a battle for TIME. This, I think, can tie into the section from Marx that Andy cited and also what will appear in the next chapter on the workday…….

To finish this out, Thompson ends with these following thoughts:

“If we maintain a Puritan time-valuation, a commodity-valuation, then it is a question of how this time is put to use, or how it is exploited by the leisure industries. But if the purposive notation of time-use becomes less compulsive, then men might have to re-learn some of the arts of living lost in the industrial revolution: how to fill the interstices of their days with enriched, more leisurely, personal and social relations; how to break down once more the barriers between work and life. (95)”

“If men are to meet both the demands of a highly-synchronized automated industry, and of greatly enlarged areas of ‘free time’, they must somehow combine in a new synthesis elements of the old and of the new, finding an imagery based neither upon the seasons nor upon the market but upon human occasions. (96)”

Here is the citation if anyone wants to download from Jstor:
E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” in Past and Present, No. 38 (Dec., 1967)