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MARXISM - Capital - Word by Word |
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[This
draft is circulated for comment, by Humphrey McQueen, 17 July 2014; it has
already benefited from our Capital
reading group and from Walter Struve’s correction of my Berlitz Deutsch, but I
do not know how to make my computer insert umlauts.] When a new planet swims
into his ken John Keats, ‘On First
Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ (1817) … method of analysis … makes the
reading of the first chapters rather arduous … the … public …may be
disheartened because they will be unable to move on at once. That is a disadvantage I am
powerless to overcome, unless it be by forewarning and forearming those readers
who zealously seek the truth. There is no royal road to science, and only those
who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of
gaining its luminous summits.[1]
If
we do not take the trouble to absorb Marx’s discoveries, we won’t get much
right about our enemy: capital. Reading the rest of the three volumes will be a
missed opportunity, though never a waste of time. To apprehend Marx’s reasoning
requires our total attention. Ten pages are about as much as most of us can
expect to absorb in a session. The density matches his subject: capital. One
danger is that the opening material is so dense that we either give up, or –
perhaps worse - keep reading and suppose that, because our eyes have travelled
across every line, we have understood what he is saying. To avoid those
misfortunes, we all need all the help we can get. Ordeal
by fire and water cannot be postponed indefinitely. How to start? First, on which English translation
should we rely? The attractions of the 1976 Penguin edition are that it is readily
available for less than $40, offers the most scholarly apparatus and alone
includes the 150-page Appendix on the ‘Results of the Immediate Process of
Production’. No translation can be pitch perfect; for instance, on page 160 the
Penguin gives Gegensatz (p. 82) as
‘antagonism’ when it would better be as ‘contrast’; on page 274, n. 4, we find ‘universal’
rather than ‘generalised’ for Verallgemeinert
(p. 184, n.41); the German for ‘swindle’ in the Penguin’s ‘If we can perform
the swindle of converting …’. (p. 221, n.31) is Verschwindlet (p. 138, n. 80) which means ‘to make disappear’, so
that Marx is not suggesting financial fraud but rather a magician’s trick;[2]
finally, ‘alienated’ is used repeatedly for Verausserung[3] when the sense is merely
‘sold’, not estranged, Entfremdung. The
M-M and the M-C-M on page 256 should be M-M’ and M-C-M’. Hence, it is reckless
to hang an interpretation or objection on a term or phrase in any English
version unless you have checked it against the German. For instance, Produktionserhaltnisse is usually given
as the ‘relations’ of production but occasionally as ‘mode’. This next segment
will work – word by word - through Marx’s opening sentence. The 1928 Everyman edition would be the
most listenable for a spoken book but has to be hunted down in second-hand
copies. My preference is to read the Everyman[4]
and use the Penguin as a ‘companion’. The compromise followed here will be to
quote from the Everyman and then from the Penguin, and then from the 1958
Moscow edition for which page numbers are included because so many commentaries
- notably David Harvey’s The Limits to Capital (1982) – reference it
or its repackaging by International Publishers and Lawrence & Wishart. No
translation has a subject index which is even halfway satisfactory. The Karl
Dietz Verlag has thirty entries for ‘crisis’: the Penguin gives three; the
Moscow has no subject index. Compiling one’s own index aids the memory and adds
to understanding.[5] In a ‘Preface’ for a 1969 translation,
the Marxist professor of Philosophy, Louis Althusser, advised shop-floor
militants to start with Part Two, ‘The Transformation of Money into Capital’,
and then proceed through to the end before attempting Part One on ‘Commodity
and Money’.[6] That is not bad advice. He
also recommended reading all of volume I ‘four or five times in succession’,
which is also excellent advice but more available to professors than to
process-workers. Nonetheless, re-reading chapter one at least four times inside
three months is the minimum effort for coming to grips with Marx’s insights and
method. The ‘Prefaces’ and ‘Postface’ by Marx and Engels repay re-reading for
every hundred pages of the main text. Alternatively, Australians might begin
with the final chapter, partly because it discusses the invasion of this
continent, but more because it underlines that class struggle is the prism
through which Marx analyses everything. No matter where you open volume one,
Marx’s wit and passion will dispel the libel that he is turgid, unreadable.[7]
However, his jokes can depend on an expanse of cultural knowledge. The Chinese
translation solves the problem by leaving them out. The notes that follow are the outcome
of my encounters with Volume One on and off for more than fifty years. They are
also one by-product of a reading group since late 2013-14. The impetus is the
implosion of capital expansion since 2007 which has led me to research the
revolution in capital that allowed for the dominance of the capitalist mode of
production no earlier than the late 1700s or early 1800s. That is another
country. This commentary begins with thoughts
on how to read by oneself, even if in preparation for a group discussion. Above
all, proceed as slowly as possible: Ø Go over the chapter line by
line. Ø Read with a pen in hand. Ø Take several weeks to get
through the first fifty pages. Ø Find one or more friends
with whom to discuss what you have read. A
science student in our group observed that he finds Marx’s presentation like a
chemistry textbook. Each sentence is a line in a formula. If you skip a step
you lose track of the proof. Therefore, it is helpful to break some sentences into
their clauses, as I shall below. That fracturing means that we lose the flow of
Marx’s argument, his dialectical logic. No one can take in everything on the
first reading. All will be well if we remember that Marx’s method of
presentation is more vital to our understanding of his analysis than is any cluster
of his data. Much would be gained and next-to-nothing lost by the insertion of
many more paragraph breaks, following Marx’s lead when he re-divided the six
chapters of the first edition into twenty-five. (The Penguin and Moscow translations
now have thirty-three). Knowing in advance where Marx is
taking us in chapter one is a help. However, it is easy to miss the signpost to
‘money’ at the start of Part One which he calls ‘Commodities and Money’. That
heading is on otherwise blank pages in the Everyman and Penguin editions, where
the text does not begin until two pages later, although the Part title does run
along the top of the Penguin left-hand pages, unlike in the other two. We won’t begin to understand ‘money’
until we have worked through the pages leading up to a brief section headed
‘The Money Form’ in the middle of this chapter. (Everyman, pp. 42-43; Penguin,
pp. 162-3; Moscow, pp. 69-70) That statement heralds a protracted analysis; for
example, chapter three is called ‘Money, or the Circulation of Commodities’.
Without the goal of ‘money’ in sight, the material that Marx presents can seem
like so many interesting or perplexing by-ways, what he accepts is
‘hair-splitting’.[8] -
first,
Capital is our starting place.
It cannot be our only source and not the final one for two reasons. The first
is that, in the years since Marx published, capital, through monopolising, has
become ever more like his account and he would have been the first to bring
those developments into his portrayal.[9]
The second reason is that although he read almost everything that there was to
read in several languages, the institutionalisation of scholarship since his
death has buried us under an avalanche of details which even he would have not
been able to keep up with to enrich his analysis. To ignore either of these
founts of information is to repudiate Marx’s method; -
secondly,
Marx subtitles his life’s work a ‘Critique of Political Economy’. A critique
should not deliver a catechism making it essential to adopt the mentality of
critique when grappling with Marx’s text as well as with the expansion of
capital to which he applied it. He was not always a consistent materialist, as
shown in the wobble in his distinction between the architect and the bee.[10]
(see Appendix I below) Marx admits to ‘slips’ which he had to leave uncorrected
in the second German edition because he had to devote the time available to carrying
‘out with greater scientific strictness … the derivation of value by analysis of
the equations in which every exchange value is expressed’. Elsewhere, Engels
had to correct his comrade’s commercial arithmetic.[11]
-
thirdly,
the object of inquiry is capitalism – not slavery or serfdom or
feudalism, still less socialism or communism. That narrow compass is spelt out
in Marx’s opening sentence where he confines his investigation to ‘societies in
which the capitalist mode of production prevails’. Nothing is eternal, natural
or universal. Marx has nothing to do with the metaphysical or the
supra-historical. Reality changes and, therefore, so must the concepts –
‘mental images’ - that one uses to understand both.[12]
Hence,
we have no chance of dealing with the issues of today – sustainability, the
continuing economic implosion and what is called globalisation - unless we set
out from Capital in the spirit of its
politically committed critique. How are we to cope with Marx’s
footnotes? Engels considers them a running commentary on the history of
economic thought?[13]
On a first read, it won’t do much harm to pretend they are not there; a 1993 student edition (edited by C.J. Arthur) did that and also pruned the polyglot
quotations. Or, you could read the footnotes through first by pretending the
text isn’t there. They also contain many of Marx’s best jokes. As a sampler,
try the Everyman page 57, Penguin page 176 and Moscow page 82 – which is
profound enough to be the synopsis for a book on the materialist concept of
history. From here, this commentary moves in two
complementary directions. The main set breaks Marx’s text into manageable
bites, offering explanations, reflections and suggestions. A supplementary set
of Appendices will be for readers who feel confident about delving into how
Marx was thinking – imagining – as he wrote and rewrote. They explore: A) how
he conceptualises ‘sensuous human activity’ into historical materialism; B) his
recurrent references to crises; C) how he brings his ideas and concepts to life
as characters in a drama; D) how he interprets the class nature of ideology; E)
swindles in contrast to exploitation; F) his examples and imagery from the
natural sciences, especially chemistry; G) his imagery from theology and magic;
H) what he considers to be a ‘law’ in the human sciences; and I) the architect or
bee at the start of chapter 5. rest on the misunderstanding to the
effect that Marx seeks to define where he only explains, and that one can generally
look in Marx for fixed, cut-and-dried definitions that are valid for all time.
It should go without saying that where things and their mutual relations are
conceived not as fixed but rather as changing, their mental images, too, i.e.
concepts, are also subject to change and reformulations; that they are not to
be encapsulated in rigid definitions, but rather developed in their process of
historical or logical formation. It will be clear then, why at the beginning of
Volume I, where Marx takes simple commodity production as his historical presupposition,
only later, proceeding from this basis, to come on to capital – why he proceeds
precisely there from the simple commodity and not from a conceptually and
historically secondary form, the commodity as already modified by capitalism. (Karl Marx, Capital, volume III, Penguin, London, 1981, p. 103; Progress
Publishers, Moscow, 1966, p. 13-14.) In
presenting the first English translation in 1887, Engels concedes, There is one difficulty we could not spare
the reader: the use of certain terms in a sense different from what they have,
not only in common life, but in ordinary political economy. But this was
unavoidable. 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, however, self-evident that a
theory which views modern capitalist production as a mere passing stage in the
economic history of mankind, must make use of terms different from those
habitual to writers who look upon that form of production as imperishable and
final. (Everyman, pp. lxx-lxxi; Penguin, p.
111; Moscow, pp. 4-5.) Karl Marx, Capital.[14] ‘The saying that all beginnings are
difficult applies to every science’, Marx warns in his ‘Foreword’, singling out
the fourteen pages of his ‘analysis of commodities.’[15]
‘Amen’ to that. Since the difficulties are intrinsic to the matter, why did he
raise the barrier to entry by putting the outcome of his investigations at the
front? What difference to the content would Marx have made had he adopted
Althusser’s advice to readers and placed all of Part I at the end? Almost 150
years on, that is a bootless question. Despite Marx’s efforts across fifteen
years to make his first edition more approachable, he kept ‘The Commodity’ as
the lion in our path, scaring off more readers than it has enticed into the den
of inquiry. For the moment, we might pay Marx’s leonine visage the respect of
accepting that he had his reasons for keeping the ‘analysis of the commodity’ in
its pride of place. Marx elsewhere writes that the most
complete understanding of the tailbone of the ape comes when we can see what
that anatomical part has become in our species.[16]
Irrespective of the validity of that retrospective method, working back from a
more complex form is how he investigated capital. As Engels explained: Marx takes simple commodity production
as his historical presupposition, only later, proceeding from this basis, to
come on to capital – why he proceeds precisely there from the simple commodity
and not from a conceptually and historically secondary form, the commodity as
already modified by capitalism.[17]
Marx
could not set out with his discoveries already in his intellectual toolkit. On
the contrary, he had to research his way towards them, arguing with himself as
much as with previous explorers, settling those accounts in the 1,700 pages of
his Theories of Surplus-Value
(1861-63).[18] He did not exempt himself
from making missteps when he called ‘[t]he value form … simple and elementary’
yet one that ‘the human mind has been vainly trying to fathom … for more than
two thousand years’.[19]
To suppose that Marx knew where he was headed before he set out is to ascribe
god-like powers in opposition to the materialist and dialectical precept that
we learn only by doing. (This process is taken up in Appendix I on ‘Architect or
Bee’.) Marx’s reveled in images from the sciences,
sometimes mathematics, but more usually from chemistry. (Appendix F) Let loose
in a laboratory, any child can create stinks and bangs. Only by combining the
techniques of calibration with accumulated information about atomic and
molecular structures did we escape from alchemical fantasies and phlogiston. Mendeleev’s
1869 Periodic Table systematised advances in relative knowledge and allowed him
to predict unidentified elements. By the 1850s, political economy was drifting
in the opposite direction, away from the scientific bearings mapped by Petty,
Quesnay, Smith and Ricardo and into the apologetic shoals of the vulgar
economists. Marx held fast to the scientific legacy while fashioning tools to
match the unfolding of his subject matter. His tools were neither microscopes
nor chemical reagents’ but mental constructs.[20] When Marx speaks of ‘abstraction’ he
is not going airy-fairy, but proceeding from actualities, that is, abstracting
the commodity form from bibles, brandy, linen and coats, and social labour from
typesetting, distilling, weaving and tailoring. In the pursuit of concrete concepts,
Marx underpins his ‘hair-splitting’ with mountains of empirical research which his
‘power of abstraction’ preserved from the poverty of Empiricism. (see Appendix
H on laws as patterns and regularities) If science is how we get beyond
appearances to the realities of their development, then the presentation of
one’s results must invert the order of investigation. Marx and Engels pursued a science of political economy with which
to anatomise capitalism for the same reasons as they scorned utopian schemes to
dream one’s way into socialism. The wealth of societies in which the
capitalist method of production prevails, takes the form of ‘an immense
accumulation of commodities’, wherein individual commodities are the elementary
units. (Everyman, p. 3) In
our desire to find out what Marx has discovered about capital, it is natural
for first-time readers not to dwell on this sentence.[21]
It is not only the French public who have proved impatient ‘to move on at once’,
for a recent German Workbook reports that ‘[t]he first sentence is often
overlooked when reading Capital.’[22]
Be advised: a secret which Marx will soon reveal about the commodity is also
true for this sentence, since it too can appear … a commonplace sort of thing, one
easily understood … however ,,, it is a very queer thing indeed; (Everyman, pp.
43-4) … extremely obvious, trivial … but it
is a very strange thing. (Penguin, p. 163; Moscow, p. 71.) To
approach that strangeness, Marx’s German for the first sentence is followed by
two alternative translations from that in the Everyman given above: Der Reichtum der Gesellshaften, in welchen kapitalisische Produktionsweise
herrscht, erscheint als seine ‘ungeheure Warensammlung’, die einselne Ware als
seine Elementarform. (Das Kapital, I, Karl Dietz Verlag,
Berlin, 1962, p. 49) The
differences seem to be minor. The first dozen words are almost identical. Then,
in place of ‘takes the form of’, we get ‘appears as’ or ‘presents itself as’;
the Everyman has ‘form’ once but also ‘units’, whereas ‘form’ is absent from
the Moscow edition; ‘accumulation’ is varied to ‘collection’ for the Penguin.
More will be said about these differences below. Meanwhile, we can compare the first
sentence in Capital with the one that
opens Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)[23],
from which Marx takes the snippet ‘an immense accumulation of commodities’: The wealth of bourgeois society, at
first sight, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its
unit being a single commodity.[24]
Auf en ersten Blick erscheint der burgerliche Reichtum als seine ungeheure
Warensammlung, die einzelne Ware als sein elementarisches Dasein.[25] To penetrate the 2,000 pages of Marx’s
critique, we shall ponder twelve of the words in his opening sentence from the
Everyman, followed here by the Penguin and Moscow translations where they
differ: A.
Reichtum, wealth
B.
Gesellshaften societies C.
kapitalisische capitalist D.
-weise method / mode / mode
E.
Produktions- production F.
herrscht prevails G.
erscheint takes the form of /
appears as / presents itself as H.
ungeheure immense
I.
Waren- commodities J. - sammlung
accumulation / collection
/ accumulation K.
-form
units / form / unit L.
einselne individual
/ individual /
single In
short, we shall stop to think about almost every word in the sentence. Of
course, we won’t be able to appreciate their full significance until we have
worked through much more than this chapter. However, by becoming alert to the
likelihood that even everyday words carry meanings beyond the obvious summons
us back to ‘the fatiguing climb of steep paths’ that we must undertake if we
are to ‘have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.’ The
choice of ’wealth’ is tricky because it might be understood to be the same as ‘capital’.
Years later, in his Critique of the Gotha
Programme, Marx reminded certain German socialists that ‘[l]abour is not the source of all wealth’, after
they had forgotten the resources supplied free from nature.[26]
Those gifts are useless to humankind with some expenditure of human labour to
turn them into use use-values. Gesellshaft is not just any kind of
society. In English, we use ‘society’ for the whole of social life but also for
clubs and societies. German has a comparable distinction along with two words: Gemeinshaft and Gesellshaft. Since the 1880s, their coupling has carried a potent
contrast for social thinkers. In 1887, Ferdinand Toennies published Gemeinshaft und Gesellshaft which became a classic text once sociologists seized on
the distinction between Gemeinshaft as community
and Gesellshaft as association to
distinguish traditional, organic connections from those deliberately created.
Like three generations of German scholars, Toennies was trying to make sense of
the upheavals that overtook Germany in the second half of the nineteenth
century. His usage came twenty years after Marx wrote Capital, so we cannot read their pairing back into its vocabulary.
Nonetheless, Marx sometimes does use each term to convey meanings akin to the
spirit of Toennies. Marx’s choice of Gesellshaften in the first sentence points to his recognition that
the kind of society he is dealing with is not natural, eternal and universal.
From the early 1840s, Marx recognised that societies, like individuals, were
the outcomes of social processes, changing themselves through a mix of co-operation
and conflict. He ridiculed the fictions about society being the result of a
social contract between pre-formed individuals and he poured scorn on the
‘unimaginative conceits of eighteenth-century Robinsonades’ who conjured
economic systems from the isolated figure of Crusoe.[27]
If Gesellshaften suggests that capitalism
is more like a consciously-formed association than a natural community –Gemeinshaft - it would be wrong to
conclude that Marx had imagined capitalism’s coming into existence after a vote
by an executive committee of the bourgeoisie. His materialist conception of
history accepts that the 150-years of to-ing and froing through which English
law got around to permitting joint-stock companies with limited liability borders
on Gemeinschaft whereas the decisions
of the investors who took advantage of that legal change to set up the likes of
Imperial Chemical Industries are indisputably cases of Gesellschaft. Marx differentiates ‘society’ from
‘mode’ when he says that a mode of production ‘prevails’ in a society. One implication is that the society and the mode are
not one and the same. In other words, there must be more to society than its
dominant mode of production. That, in turn, means that there will also be more
to explain. For a start, how do they interact?[28]
Does one drive changes in the other, and if so, are the interchanges
reciprocal, and in what ways? The significance of ‘mode’ is about to give us a
lot more to puzzle over.
Marx introduces one of the key terms
with which he needs to operate. As with the remarks about ‘wealth’ and
‘societies’, bear in mind that he has thought his way through to accounts of
capital and of a capitalist. It won’t spoil the ending to let on that
capitalists turn out to be the personifications of capital. Should they cease
to behave in that way, they cease to be capitalists.[29]
Wage-slaves are the embodiment of the labour-power that we must sell to them if
we are to survive since we lack productive property. Hence, capitalists and
wage-slaves can exist only in an antagonistic unity so that the one is void
without the other. Capital has several manifestations: plant
and equipment, vendible commodities, money and labour-power which has been sold
(alienated). Marx considers these under the overlapping categories of constant,
fixed, fluid and variable.[30]
The significance of each form changes with changes within and between systems
of production. Marx’s objective is to identify what is unique about capitalism,
namely, its need to expand from within. Unlike vulgar economists and bourgeois
historians, Marx does not picture capitalism as a mish-mash of markets, money,
profit, industrialisation and growth,[31]
tossing whatever takes their fancy into a pot after the manner of the witches
in Macbeth: Surge in
trade, divided skill, Navvy’s
spade, exchange of bill, Engine’s
steam, and low piece-rate Goldsmith’s
loan and factory gate For
a mode of powerful trouble. Like
a hell-broth boil and bubble. No
recipe can explain the revolution in capital. For Marx, capitalism has to be
distinguished by its structured dynamics, primarily through the subordination
of labour to feed relentless expansion. D. -weise
method /mode /
mode As
a noun, ‘die Weise’ is ‘way, manner,
fashion’. Among
Marxists and Marxologists, ‘mode’ is weighed down with a conceptual burden. In
addition to the contrast between society and mode, Marx elsewhere distinguishes
‘mode of production’ from ‘means of production’, ‘forces of production’ and
‘social relations of production’; he also writes about a production process
consisting of the interlock of labour- and valorisation processes. Many
disputes rage over the relationship of ‘method/mode’ to all the others.
Technological determinists claim that changes in the means or forces drive
changes in the method/mode and influence the ‘social relations’. Others of that
ilk are content to say that changes in the ‘mode’ affect – perhaps effect –
changes in the social relations. They all claim that Marx agrees with them. G.A. Cohen and William H. Shaw from
1978 built a sophisticated technological determinism for the genesis of
capitalism after purging Marxism of its muddles with a stiff dose of logical positivism.
Championing a no-bullshit Marx, Cohen believes that because ‘[a] mode of
production is a way of producing’, it cannot be identical with an economic structure,
for a mode is a way or manner, not a set of relations. The economic structure
is not a way of producing, but a framework of power in which producing occurs.
Whatever correlations obtain between structure and mode, they are not one.[32] Shaw
also resiles from any equation by recognising the bifurcated meanings that Marx
allots to ‘mode’: one is for ‘the restricted technical nature or manner of
producing’; the other, as in the opening sentence to Capital, ‘involves the production of commodities, a certain manner
of obtaining surplus, labor-time determination of value, a tendency to expand
the productive forces, and so on.’[33]
If so, then ‘mode’ means ‘all of the above’. The standard reduction of Marx to
technological determinist repeats an aphorism from The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) that ‘the hand-mill gives you
society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial
capitalist’. Seven pages later, Marx returns to this contrast: Labour is organised, is divided,
differently according the instruments it has at its disposal. The hand-mill
presupposes a different division of labour from the steam-mill. [34] Marx
was not wrong to connect hand-mills with feudalism and steam-mills with the
industrial capitalist but in neither instance was the connection causal. The
doyen of Marxist scholars of feudal times, R. H. Hilton, pointed out that barons
and Abbotts ‘tried to force their tenants to grind only at the lord’s water-mill
and not to use their own hand-mills. The hand-mill became a symbol of resistance
to seigniorial exploitation’.[35]
For its part, the steam-mill proved a laggard in the emergence of industrial
capitalists with only 250,000 hp operating around 1830, and much of that to
pump out mines. Machino-facture was powered by water-mills or animals,
including humans. Although not half way through the
first sentence of Capital, we are
about to double-back to its 1867 ‘Preface’ to see how much more we can discern
of Marx’s intentions towards Produktionsweise: The subject of study in the present
work is the capitalist method of production, and the relations of production
and exchange appropriate to that method. (Everyman, p. xlviii) What I have to examine in this work is
the capitalist mode of production, and the relations of production and forms of
intercourse [Verkehrsverhaltnisse]
that correspond to it. (Penguin, p. 90) In this work I have to examine the
capitalist mode of production, and the conditions of production and exchange
corresponding to that mode. (Moscow, p. 8) Was ich in diesem Werk zu erforschen habe, ist die kapitalistische
Produktionsweise und die ihr entsprechenden Produktions- und
Verkehrsverhaltnisse. (p.
12) If
we compare the three English versions of the ‘Foreword’ with the original and
then with Capital’s opening sentence,
we find several inconsistencies in the translations. The ‘-weise’ in Marx’s opening sentence is rendered as ‘method’ by the
Everyman while the other pair prefer ‘mode’. The lines of divergence widen in
the versions of the ‘Foreword’ when we come to ‘-verhaltnisse’ in Produktionverhaltsnisse
and Verkehrsverhaltnisse. For Produktionverhaltsnisse, the Everyman
and Penguin go with ‘relations of production’ while Moscow uses ‘conditions of
production’. When it comes to Verkehrsverhaltnisse,
however, the Everyman extends ‘relations of’ to cover ‘exchange’ and the Moscow
similarly extends ‘conditions of’. The standout is the Penguin which replaces
‘relations of’ with ‘forms of” and ‘exchange’ with ‘intercourse’, before
signaling its uncertainty by inserting ‘(Verkehrsverhaltnisse)’.
The choice of ‘intercourse’ throws everything into the ring. One dictionary
translation gives Verkehrsverhaltnisse
as ‘street traffic’, which is not a bad way of thinking about the multifarious
elements in commerce with its need for transport, financing and levels of
merchandising. But the loss of ‘exchange’ cuts Marx’s intention off from the
cornerstone of his critique, namely, ‘exchange-value’. One need not reek of Marxology to know
that ‘mode’ gained its privileged place in conventional wisdoms thanks to the
much worried-over ‘Preface’ to A
Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. In the disputed paragraph,
Produktionsverhaltnisse appears six
times and Produktionsweise only
twice. On both occasions, the Moscow translation gives ‘-weise’ as ‘mode’ before rendering the final ‘-verhaltnisse’ also as ‘mode’. In the previous five instances, the
translator has given ‘-verhaltnisse’ as
‘relations’. One explanation for the inconsistency in the third appearance of
‘mode’ is that ‘bourgeois’ immediately precedes both the second Produktionsweise and the last Produktionverhaltsnisse, three lines
below. Why the sight of ‘burgerliche’
should induce that switch I cannot say. Throughout a two-page paragraph, Marx
is free with his application of ‘-verhaltnisse’
to compound nouns such as Lebensverhaltnissen,
which Moscow gives as ‘conditions of life’. We have seen that ‘conditions’ is
Moscow’s usual preference for Produktionsnisse
in the ‘Preface’ to Capital. Possible sources for the divergent
meanings merit attention. Is the problem confined to the translations? Or do we need – this once – to
take a leaf from the book of analytical Marxists and spend time on refining our
terms? Let’s limit our difficulties to Produktions-verhaltnisse/-weise
and leave the puzzles around Verkehrsverhaltnisse
to one side. Let us make a second simplifying assumption and accept -verhaltnisse for relations and -weise for mode. Like dutiful logical
positivists, we open a dictionary, never forgetting that dictionaries do not
tell us what words mean, but only how they have been used. What do we find when
we look up ‘mode’ in the Complete Oxford English Dictionary organised on
historical principles? For some reason, ‘mode of production’ is not among the
hundreds of examples that the editors have drawn from music, grammar, logic and
fashion. The only usages that come close to how Marxists have understood ‘mode
of production’ are grouped under ‘4. a. A way or manner in which something is
done or takes place; a method of procedure in an activity, business, etc.’ Closing the dictionary, we acknowledge
that exegesis has allowed us to spotlight a substantial question, but not
answer it: if the ‘mode’ of production is not the same as the ‘relations’ of
production, what is it? It is easy enough to distinguish the German for ‘mode of
production’ Produktionsweise from the
German word for ‘means of production’, Produktionsmittel,
and from Produktivekrafte for ‘forces
of production’. In the lively processes of production, can means, forces and methods
remain so distinct? Given the tangle around ‘mode’, it
seems rash to stick with the Everyman’s choice of ‘method’. Yet the prospect of
having to choose between English terms has re-opened the debate over whether
technical change or class struggle is the motive force in the reproduction of
human life. The meaning we give to ‘mode of production’ therefore is far from
being of concern only to speculative philosophisers content to interpret
reality. How to link the instruments of production with class power is part of
the hour-by-hour conflicts between capital and wage-labour. After fifty-five years of sprouting
about ‘the capitalist mode of production’ it has been a shock, if not a
complete surprise, for me to realise that ‘mode’ can, like any threadbare
overcoat, cover a multitude of sins. Cohen is 300 per cent correct to say that
because Marx used ‘mode of production’ in various ways, ‘Marxists should not
employ it unexplicated in the statement of central theses’,[36]
an injunction which these pages seek to serve. We must be no less careful to
check translations for their consistency of ‘-weise’ for ‘mode’ and ‘-verhaltnisse’
for ‘relations/conditions’, a test which Cohen has been known to fail. E. Produktions- production Marx
does not start with an account of production, although he elsewhere stresses
that production is the ground for all life.[37]
Instead, he begins from exchange, the process through which a use-value can
become a ‘commodity’. That metamorphosis is not the same as the consumption of
the use-value. We can buy a use-value and thus make it a commodity before
casting it aside without putting it to any use; or we can use it up, giving it
some purpose beyond gratifying a whim through its purchase. Either way, the
item will cease to be a use-value and thus cannot again become an exchange-value
in the form of a commodity until after the processes of nature have reclaimed
its material constituents, making them available to be remade into a new
use-value which might become a commodity if it is produced under the appropriate
conditions/relations. A debate rages about which comes
first: production or consumption? This
quest is easily solved for Marx who recognised consumption as ‘a phase of
production’.[38] That answer does not
address itself to whether analysis should begin from production or from
consumption. The proponents of starting from consumption are out to avoid the
labour theory of value and hence to deny that exploitation occurs through an
equal exchange in the subordination of wage-labour to capital. For the moment,
it is enough to realise that starting from consumption is not innocent. Marx
does not discuss the production of surplus-value for a further 126 pages. ‘Prevails’ sounds too soft since Herr is master, and also Lord;
dominates is closer, or ‘prevails over’. Hence, I’ve amended the Everyman
sentence by putting ‘over’ in place of ‘in’: The wealth of societies over
which the capitalist method of production prevails appears as an ‘immense
collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary
form. This
variation strengthens a distinction between society and mode, between relations
and methods. Is that a valid move, or does it sunder their twofold natures,
that dialectical character ‘of something
contained in the commodity but distinguishable from it’?[39]
‘Appears’
is used twice in the Penguin translation but
erscheint is in the original only once. Should erscheint be translated as ‘appears as’? Does ‘appears’ mean
‘seems to be’, or does it mean ‘arrives on the scene’? In English, ‘appears ’
conveys both ‘seems to be’ and ‘turns up as’. This ambiguity might mislead
those embarking on a study of Capital.
The German means ‘as if it were’, which Everyman puts to as ‘takes the form
of’. Two pages on, Marx puts inverted
commas around Erscheinungsform which
the Penguin translates as ‘form of appearance’ (p. 125) while the Everyman (p.
5) and the Moscow (p. 37) treat Erscheinungs-
in a philosophical context as ‘phenomenon’ and give it as ‘ “phenomenal form”,
of something contained in the commodity but distinguishable from it.’ This
twofold sense is less explicit in the Penguin which has ‘the “form of
appearance”, of a content distinguishable from it.’[40] Moreover, ‘appears’ is an odd way for
Marx to open since his entire method – like that of all science - is to
distinguish appearance from reality. Hence, a translation should emphasise that
the way in which the wealth of the world ‘seems to us to be’ is not likely to
be how it is. In place of ‘appears’, the passage should convey ‘seems to us’.
The opening is again amended to read: The wealth of societies over
which the capitalist method of production prevails presents itself as ‘an
immense accumulation of commodities’; the individual commodity is its
elementary form. Thus
far, I have altered ‘in which’ to ‘over which’, and ‘appears’ to ‘presents
itself as’. As
a noun, Das Ungeheure is a monster
and, figuratively, an ogre. Marx and his German readers would have been aware
of this implicit criticism of a society over which the capitalist mode prevails,
an association he spells out when he later refers to ‘capital’ as ‘an animated
monster’.[41] The invocation of a mythical
creature is the first of a host of images which the materialist Marx will
conjure from the realms of enchantment. (see Appendix G) I.
Waren- commodity Since
the concept of ‘commodity’ is what the chapter sets out to explore, the running
commentary on Marx’s next fifty pages must wait its turn. One point merits
attention in advance. In the second paragraph, Marx tells us that A commodity
is primarily an external object, a thing whose qualities enable it, in one way
or another, to satisfy human wants.
(Everyman, p. 3) The commodity is, first of all, an
external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever
kind. (Penguin, p. 125) A commodity is, in the first place, an
object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some
sort of another. (Moscow, p. 35) Die Ware ist
zunachst ein ausserer Gegenstand, ein Ding, das durch seine Eigenschaften
menschliche Bedurfnisse irgendeiner Art befriedigt. (Dietz, p.49[42]) At
first glance, this statement looks wrong because it defines the commodity as a
use-value with no mention of exchange-value.[43]
The sentence therefore needs to be understood as saying that a commodity has to
be a use-value before it can become an exchange-value. The phrase ‘first of
all’ is not asserting primacy - not ‘above all’ - but a temporal order –
‘before all’. The adverb zunachst
derives from zuerst, erst for ‘first. In addition, we could accuse Marx of
slipping in the line of reasoning that he wants us to accept by his choice of
‘commodities’ to represent the constituents of ‘wealth’. It is doubtful whether
anyone who is not a professional economist first thinks of ‘wealth’ in terms of
‘commodities’. ‘Commodities’ is not the word to pop into most people’s heads.
Most of us would be more likely to start from the words in Marx’s second paragraph
where he writes of an ‘external object. A thing which through its qualities
satisfies human needs of whatever kind’. An agglomeration of things, or
use-values, is how wealth ‘seems’ to most of us at first thought. On that
assumption, the opening passage would read: The wealth of societies over
which the capitalist method of production prevails presents itself as an
immense accumulation of useful objects: the individual thing being its
elementary form. This
rearrangement in no way challenges Marx’s line of argument. Rather, it leads us
back one layer into everyday thought before taking the first of many thousands
of steps away from such common sense and towards science through his critique
of political economy. His task is to carry us past our initial impressions of a
pile of useful objects and onto the scientific level of ‘commodities’. From this re-ordered version, we can
ask what is odd about these ‘things’ when they occur within the capitalist
mode? The preliminary answer is that they are commodities. The next question
becomes: what is a commodity under those conditions? And that is what the
chapter deals with. J. -sammlung collection
/
accumulation Either
is accurate yet the Penguin’s choice of ‘accumulation’ foreshadows Marx’s use
of that term for the dynamic of the capitalist system: ‘Accumulate! Accumulate!
That is Moses and all the Prophets.’[44] Hence, ‘collection’ precludes any confusion
with the conceptual significance of ‘accumulation’. Now the sentence reads: The wealth of societies over
which the capitalist mode of production prevails presents itself as an
immense collection of useful objects: the individual thing being its
elementary form. ‘Form’
probably occurs more than any other term in this chapter but it does not take
the lead until after it is in a sub-heading: 3.
THE FORM OF VALUE, OR EXCHANGE-VALUE (Everyman, p. 17; Moscow, p. 47), or 3. THE
VALUE-FORM, OR EXCHANGE-VALUE (Penguin, p. 138) Is
there a substantive difference between ‘form of value’ and ‘value-form’?
Whether there is or not, it is not helpful of the Penguin to use ‘form’ for
both everyday expressions such as ‘takes the form of’ and for a component in Marx’s
concept of ‘value-form’. ‘Form’ is another term overladen with
philosophical baggage, not all of it from Plato, for whom ‘things’ are, at
best, the bad copies we make of Ideal forms.[45] The
choice of individual would be unexceptional were it not that few words carry
more baggage in bourgeois culture than ‘individual’, so that it might be
sharper to follow the Moscow edition and use ‘single’. The wealth of societies in which the
capitalist method of production prevails, takes the form of ‘an immense
accumulation of commodities’, wherein individual commodities are the elementary
units. A sequence
of emendations has resulted in: The wealth of societies over
which the capitalist method of production prevails presents itself as ‘an
immense collection of useful objects’; the single thing is
its elementary unit. What
damage can this reformulation do to Marx’s intention? None at all if the new
sentence is installed as a prelude to the point that Marx makes in his
subsequent sentences. The only change in substance as opposed to style has been
to replace ‘commodities’ with ‘useful objects’. The re-write challenges Marx’s
use of ‘therefore’, a tendentious move compounded when the Everyman and the
Moscow editions insert ‘must’ in front of ‘therefore’ when that imperative
voice is not in the German: Unsere Untersuchung beginnt daher mit der Analyse der Ware. (p. 49) Throughout
the rest of Part I, Marx takes care to spell out each step in his analysis, so
much so that it can seem tedious. His failure to take that degree of trouble
here is perhaps because he is as impatient as he feared his readers might be to
get to the substance, and also because he had satisfied himself on this point
in A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy, from which he lifted the contested phrase. As we move further into chapter one,
the attention we have given to ‘minutiae’ – again, Marx’s term – will help to
keep us focused on the ‘tissue’ of both his analysis and of commodity form; we
can thereby expect that some of the complexities set out above will be
unraveled. That process prepares us for the logic of dialectical reasoning
which is the main barrier between our ‘common sense’ way of reading and how
Marx’s brain was working as he wrote, rewrote and rewrote his ‘Critique of
Political Economy’. [1] Karl Marx, Capital, I, Penguin, London, 1976, p. 104; not in the Everyman, London, 1957; Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1958, p. 21. The first English translation appeared in 1887, supervised by Engels. It formed the foundation the Soviet edition which is still useful for its Appendices; the German edition used here is Karl Marx, Das Kapital, I, Karl Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1962; the opening sentence is the same as the 1867 original apart from the spelling of Ware as Waare, facsimile, Gerstenberg Verlag, Hildesheim, 1980, p. 3. [2] schwindlet can mean ‘dizzy’ or ‘giddy’ as well as swindle. The Moscow translation sails around the difficulty: ‘If we start from the notion that all commodities together form ….’ (p. 124, n.). As is so often the case, the Everyman edition puts it best: ‘If we choose to fancy that the world of commodities ….’. (p. 104, n.2) The Penguin does not repeat its mistake but translates verschwindende (p. 151) as ‘come onto the scene’. (p. 235). For more on Marx’s distinction between swindle and exploitation see Appendix E. [3] One must
sympathise with any translator faciing Marx’s plays on ‘ausser’. It helps to know that aus- in German is the prefix for ‘out’,
so that Auslander is foreigner. Here
is an extreme example of Marx’s punning from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: ‘Was fruher Sichausserlichsein, reale Entausserung des Menschen ist nur
(nun), zur Tat der Entausserung, zur Verausserung geworden’, (Karl Marx, Fruhe Schriften, I, Cotta-Verlag,
Stuggart, 1960, p. 586.) This
rolling pun, in which three different words have been rendered as variants on
external, has been unstitched as ‘What previously was being external to
oneself, actual externalisation of mankind, is (now) only the act of
externalising, the process of alienating’, (Marx-Engels
Collected Works, volume 3, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1975, p. 292.)
Elsewhere, Marx combined punning with paradox: ‘Des Lebensausserung seine Lebensentausserung ist’, (Fruhe Schriften, p. 598) which unravels
as ‘The manifestation of his life is the alienation of his life’, (M-ECW, v. 3, p. 299). [4] For criticisms of this translation, and replies see Labour Monthly, July 1929, pp. 446-8, and www.surplusvalue.org.au [5] Some help comes from ???? Marx Dictionary, Continuum, London, ????; and L Gerard Bekerman, Marx and Engels, A Conceptual Concordance, Blackwell, Oxford, 1983, though its index is even scantier. [6] Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and other essays, NLB, London, 1971, pp. 79-80 and 77. [7] My essay ‘The “Unreadable” Marx’, www.surplusvalue.org.au [8] Marx, Capital, Everyman, p. xlviii; Penguin, p. 90; Moscow, p. 8. [9] F. Engels, ‘Preface’, Karl Marx, Capital, III, Penguin, London, 1981, p. 97; Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1959, p. 7. [10] Marx, Capital, I, Everyman, pp. 169-70; Penguin, p. 284; Moscow, p. 178. [11] Marx, Capital, I, Penguin, p. 94; Moscow, p. 12; F. Engels, ‘Preface’, Karl Marx, Capital, III, Penguin, London, 1981, p. 109; Progress Publishers, 1966, Moscow, p. 20. [12] Engels, ‘Preface’, Capital, III, Penguin, p. 103; Moscow,
pp. 13-14. [13] Marx, Capital, I, Everyman, p. lxiii; Penguin, pp. 108 and 112: Moscow, pp. 5 and 24-5; for example, the notes in the Everyman, pp. 54-6; Penguin pp. 173-5; and Moscow, pp. 80-82. [14] Marx, Capital, I, Everyman, p. 107; Penguin, p. 224; Moscow, p. 127 where it is in French. [15] Marx, Capital, I, Everyman, p. xlvii; Penguin, p. 89; Moscow, p. 7. [16] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1970, p. 211. [17] Karl Marx, Capital, volume III, Penguin, London, 1981, p. 103; Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1966, p. 13-14. [18] Allen Oakley, Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, Intellectual Sources and Evolution, Volume 2, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1985. [19] Marx, Capital, I, Everyman, p. xlviii; Penguin, p. 90; Moscow, p. 8. [20] Marx, Capital, I, Everyman, p. xlviii; Penguin, p. 90; Moscow, p. 8. [21] Trevor Dean contrasts the attention given to openings by literary critics with their neglect among historiographers, ‘How Historians Begin: Openings in Historial Discourse’, History, 2010, pp. 399-417. [22] Valeria Bruschi et al., Polylux Marx, A ‘Capital’ Workbook in Slides, Volume One, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2013, p. 27. [23] Marx is pissed off that his first sustained venture against political economy had disappeared without trace. In this chapter, he refers to it nine times, more than any other source. [24] Marx, A Contribution etc., p. 27. [25] Karl lMarx, Zur Kritik der politischen Okonomie, Cotumax, Berlin, 2010, p. 9. [26] Karl Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Volume Three, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1970, p. 13. [27] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973, p. 83. [28] In The
Great Transformation (Beacon Books, Boston, 1946), Karl Polanyi writes of
how markets used to be embedded in societies but, under capitalism, society
became embedded in the market. [29] Marx, Capital, I, Everyman, pp. 1 and 60; Penguin, pp. 92 and 179; Moscow, pp. 10 and 85; Dietz, pp. 16 and 100; for the Faustian bargain between accumulation and pleasure, Everyman, p. 653; Penguin, p. 741; Moscow, p. 594; Dietz, p. 620. [30] See my “Refining capital’, www.surplusvalue.org.au [31] For a recent trove of such muddle-headedness see Larry Neal and Jeffrey G. Williamson (eds), The Cambridge History of Capitalism, volume I, The Rise of Capitalism: from Ancient Origins to 1848, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014, and my review article on www.surplusvalue.org.au [32] G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, A Defence, The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1978, p. 79. [33] William H. Shaw, Marx’s Theory of History, Stanford
University Press, Stanford, 1978, pp. 31-32. [34] Karl Marx, ‘The Poverty of Philosophy’, Marx-Engels Collected Works, volume 6, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1976, pp. 166 and 183. [35] Rodney Hilton, ‘Feudalism in Europe: Problems for Historical Materialists’, New Left Review, 147, October 1984, pp. 87-88. [36] Cohen, p. 79. This is not the
place to spell out disagreements with Cohen. Suffice it to say that the state
as an instrument of class dictatorship and for war-making is underdeveloped. [37] Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, pp. 188ff. [39] Marx, Capital, I, Everyman, p. 5; Penguin, p. 125; Moscow, p. 37. [40] Drawing on an epistemological critique of Kant and Hegel, Igor Hanzel chastises the Penguin for error and inconsistency in giving ‘Erscheinung’ as both ‘form of appearance’, which is wrong, and ‘form of manifestation’, ‘Mistranslations of “Schein” and “Erscheinung”: The structure of Chapter 1 of Capital, Volume I’, Science & Society, 74 (4), October 2010, pp. 519-23. [41] Marx, Capital, I, Everyman, p. 189; Penguin, p. 302; Moscow, p. 195; ‘ein beseeltes Ungerheuer’, Dietz, p. 208. [42] Again the wording is the same as in 1867, with Waare for Ware but also irgend einer instead of irgendeiner. [43] Marx presently admits that the sentence is
‘incorrect. A commodity is a use-value, (or a useful object) and value. It
manifests itself as this twofold thing as soon as its value has a phenomenal
form of its own, the form of exchange value, differing from the bodily form,
and it never has this form when regarded in isolation, but only when it is
brought into a value relation (an exchange relation) with some other commodity,
one of a different kind. As long as we recognise this, the foregoing locution
does no harm, and serves as a conveniently terse way of phrasing.’ (Marx, Capital, I, Everyman, p. 32; Penguin, p.
152; Moscow, p. 60.) For the validity of this excuse see ‘Against definitions’
on his site. [45] Plato, The Republic. Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1955, pp. 422ff. [46] Thomas M. Kemple, Reading Marx Writing, Melodrama, the Market, and the ‘Grundrisse’, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1995, chapter 1.
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