Reading the
“unreadable” Marx
Il
ny’a pas de belles pensees sans belles formes.
Flaubert.
The first rule, indeed by itself
virtually a sufficient condition for good style, is to
have something to say.
Schopenhauer.
From 1850 until his death in 1880, the
French novelist Gustave Flaubert compiled a “Dictionary of Received
Ideas” as his catalogue of stupidities, inanities and misinformation.
In this word association game, “Malthus” summoned up “infamous”,
and “Louis XVI” evoked “unfortunate”.
Were we to update Flaubert by including “Marx”, the gully-trap of
clichés would be clogged with “discredited” and “unreadable”.
Other contributors to this website will
discount the “discredited” label. This article tackles the
accusation that Marx is “unreadable”. The two charges are connected.
The more that people fear that Marx is impenetrable, the harder it will
be to convince them to recover his relevance.
The way to challenge the accusation that
Marx is “unreadable” is to read him. From The
Communist Manifesto, here is the paean to the bourgeoisie that Marx
and Frederick Engels penned in 1848:
Constant revolutionizing of production,
uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all
earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of
ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all
new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is
solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned ...
To keep pace with this torrent of
transformations, Marx and Engels abbreviated their phrasing. To sketch
how this turmoil had come about, they continued to use parataxis:
The discovery of America, the rounding
of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The
East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade
with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in
commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry,
an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary
element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The second sentence is as breathtaking as
the tumult it captures in its run of snapshots.
Even as we read the passage, it seems
impossible that anyone could have condensed the expanse of capitalism
across 500 years into a statement as exhilarating as it is exact.
Marx’s admiration for the historic
achievement of the bourgeoisie as a class did not extend to their
apologists. How he would have reveled in Flaubert’s “Dictionary”!
Marx stretched language so far that, in 1860, he was probably the first
person to use “Da-Da!” to voice his own detestation of what he
called “twaddle”.
Challenged as to propriety, Marx came back: “Da Da puzzles the
Philistine and is comical … It pleases me, and it fits my system of
mockery and contempt”.
Just as the assault on Feudalism had
broken through the Scholastic mode of communication to allow Martin
Luther to render the bible in vigorous, direct and metrical German, so
did the bourgeois revolution propel the prose of Marx and Engels. To
convey the eruption of economy into society, they had to fashion a
syntax, a vocabulary and a repertoire of devices in tune with the
acceleration of life. Marshall Berman reads The Manifesto as a prose poem, as “the first great modernist work
of art”, anteceding Baudelaire’s Spleen.
Engels had got there four years earlier
when composing The Condition of
the Working Class in England
in 1844. In the 1970s, that work attracted the literary critic
Steven Marcus who knew of no contemporary summary of the industrial
revolution “that is as succinct, as wide-ranging and as coherent”.
Apart from Engels’s use of “vortex”, he made scant use of
hyperbole because “the unprecedented magnitude of the event is its own
intensifier”. Marcus placed Engels alongside Carlyle and Dickens as
writers who “were performing one of their quintessential functions:
they were taking dead writing and transforming it back into living
writing. Or we can say that they were transforming information into a
present history whose structure they were simultaneously inventing.”
Eighteenth
Brumaire
Bourgeois ideologues proved less
keen to entertain the prospect of perpetual upheaval once the
proletariat began to challenge the rule of capital from the 1820s.
History, therefore, had to come to an end, as Marx observed in 1847.
By contrast, his welcoming of the organised working class allowed him to
treat the present as history.
He delivered a notable example of this perspicacity in his account of
the rise to power between 1848 and 1852 of the French emperor, Napoleon
III. Marx’s The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is extraordinary for making so elaborate
and so penetrating an analysis on the run. The parts, like a Dickens
novel, were planned as installments to a weekly paper. The result is
much more than a model of political journalism. By keeping the conflicts
between and within classes front and central to his unraveling of
events, Marx could “demonstrate how the class struggle in France
created circumstances and relations that made it possible for a
grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part”.
The opening lines of The
Eighteenth Brumaire grace the Oxford
Dictionary of Quotations:
Hegel remarks somewhere that all events
and personages of great importance in world history occur so to speak
twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the other
time as farce.
A few lines further on, Marx observes:
People make their own history, but they
do not make it just as they please: they do not make it under
circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly
encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all
the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the
living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves
and things, in creating something that has never yet existed,
precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously
conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from
them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new
scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and borrowed
language.
Marx rounds off the first section of The Eighteenth Brumaire by dismissing Napoleon III as the farcically
bad copy of his uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte:
Finally, the scum of bourgeois society
forms the holy phalanx of order
and the hero Crapulinski installs himself in the Tuilleries as the “saviour of society”.
Here, Marx has turned to his favourite
contemporary poet, Heinrich Heine, for the figure of Crapulinski.
These three extracts indicate something
of the range in Marx’s style. The opening is aphoristic, memorable for
its puncturing of grand narrative with humour. The insertion of
“somewhere” is no lapse of memory, but a considered affront to his
erstwhile colleagues among the Young Hegelians. The middle passage is as
suggestive in imagery as it is rich in concepts, bringing to life the
vital processes on which Marx is commenting. He strengthens his
representation of history’s slide into farce by associating its actors
with the travesty of cross-dressing. Hegel saw in parody the means by
which one age returned to its past in order to criticise it. Marx saw
parody, according to Margaret Rose, as “accompanying discontinuity in
history”.
Just as revolutions are ruptures in practice, so revolutionary writers
need tropes that allow for disjunctures in thought. In the third
extract, Marx turns to earthy language to put the pretender in his
place;
the see-sawing between scum and holiness, between crap and saviour,
recalls the tumble from tragedy into farce.
Despite the care that Marx devoted to his
prose, he never pursued style for style’s sake. For him, the form of
his writing had to confirm its content and structure. The
Eighteenth Brumaire is a fabulous read because he made it an
exemplar of historical materialism. And it is exemplary because Marx’s
tone of voice is as dialectical as his assembling of evidence and his
pattern of analysis.
The German social philosopher Theodor
Adorno might have had The
Eighteenth Brumaire in mind in 1946 when he charged that
… the dialectic advances by way of
extremes, driving thoughts with the utmost consequentiality to the
point where they turn back on themselves, instead of qualifying
them…
… limitation and reservation are no
way to represent the dialectic...
If a dialectician, for example, marked
the turning-point of his advancing ideas by starting with a “But” at
each caesura, the literary scheme would give the lie to the unschematic
intention of his thought.
For Marx, the dialectic had to be
fleet-footed, or it ceased to be dialectical. Bertell Ollman writes of
the “dance of the dialectic”.
For the dialectician, there are no fixed categories, no external
essences, no Ideal Forms. Everything, always and everywhere, is in a
condition of becoming and passing away. The difficulties that this
mobility presents to readers can be limited only to the extent that
authors can make our static medium convey the transitory.
The excitement in Marx’s manner of
expression grows from his fulfilling of Schopenhauer’s contention that
the “sufficient condition for good style, is to
have something to say”.
Hence, the deepest pleasure from reading Marx flows from the substance
and structure of his thinking. The French anthropologist Claude
Levi-Strauss recalled that he “rarely broached a new sociological
problem without first stimulating my thought by rereading a few pages of
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte or the Critique of Political Economy”.
Two of the cerebral stimuli from The Eighteenth Brumaire are the ground rules that Marx offered for
intellectual history and for tracing the political formation of a class.
He summarised his explorations of these issues in two key passages. The
first establishes the starting place for the history of ideas:
Just as little must one imagine that
the democratic representatives are indeed all shopkeepers or
enthusiastic supporters of shop keepers. In their education and
individual position they may be as far part from them as heaven from
earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the
fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits that the
latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven,
theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material
interest and social position drive the latter in practice. This is, in
general, the relationship between the political
and literary representatives of a class and the class they represent.
This explication of how ideas connect
with social practices confirms the materialist credentials of the
opening passages of The Eighteenth Brumaire where metaphors haunt present actors.
As a materialist, Marx recognised that
existence conditioned consciousness. Hence, class consciousness could
not fall from the sky as a disembodied idea. As a dialectician, he knew
also that existence was insufficient to generate self-consciousness.
Marx drew on the experiences of the French peasantry to illustrate why
class consciousness had to be the outcome of social practices through
organisation:
Each individual peasant family is
almost self-sufficient; it itself directly produces the major part of
its consumption and thus acquires its means of life more through
exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A smallholding,
a peasant and his family; alongside them another smallholding, another
peasant and another family. A few score of these make up a village,
and a few score of villages make up a department. In this way, the
great mass of the French nation is formed by simple addition of
homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of
potatoes.
The structure of this passage reproduces
Marx’s case: phrases are accumulated into a statement that lacks a
doing word, just as the “vast mass” of small-holders do not engage
in “manifold relations with one another”. The next step takes in a
larger social group and therefore requires an unbroken sentence.
Finally, the commentary arrives at a metaphor apposite to farm life: the
potato sack. As the class forms politically, Marx makes the units of his
prose cohere:
In so far as millions of families live
under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of
life, their interests and their culture from those of the other
classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a
class. In so far as there is merely a local interconnection among
these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests
begets no community, no national bond and no political organisation
among them, they do not form a class.
Each sentence loops around alternative
criteria for the forming of a class. Their juxtaposition gives way to a
synthesis:
They are consequently incapable of
enforcing their class interest in their own name, whether through a
parliament or through a convention.
Marx can now distill the components of
his case into eight words which continue the see-sawing: “They cannot
represent themselves, they must be represented”. From this position,
Marx strikes out to link the movement of a class into its
self-consciousness with the activity of the state:
Their representative must at the same
time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an
unlimited governmental power which protects them against the other
classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political
influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final
expression in the executive power subordinating society to itself.
The assertiveness of “therefore”
underlines Marx’s recognition of Bonapartism. Nonetheless, he has just
mocked the capacity of any government to control nature, and hence,
presumably, its ability to stem the tide of class conflict. While
acknowledging that the life circumstances among the small peasants have
allowed “Crapulinski” to ascend to the throne, Marx hints that their
unsatisfied needs will unseat him.
Aphorisms
Another way to entice readers
towards Marx has been to dangle some of the aphorisms at which he was a
dazzler, as when he observes: “Hence money may be dirt, although dirt
is not money.
Of Proudhon, he quipped: “He wants to be the synthesis – he is a
composite error”.
Marx also used aphorisms as exclamation marks at the end of an analysis,
a kind of “Eureka!” The impact of “Circulation sweats money from
every pore”
is convincing only if encountered as the outcome of his investigations
into the metamorphosis of commodities. Torn from the page, it is mere
assertion. “One capitalist always kills many”
sounds more than a tocsin after Marx has explained the thrust of
monopolising through the logic of competition.
The risk in parading Marx’s maxims is
that his meaning is rendered obvious, that is to say, is misrepresented.
Wrenched from its context, the bait can catch the opposite response to
the one after which Marx had been angling. That outcome is true of a
remark favoured by militants: “Philosophers have only interpreted the
world in various ways; the point is to change
it”.
Marx never supposed that we could change the world without interpreting
it, anymore than he believed that we can interpret the world correctly
without changing it.
Perhaps no quip from Marx is better known
than his line that “Religion is the opium of the people”. Few
assertions are more misunderstood. Placing that remark back in his 1844 Critique
of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right will reveal its significance,
and display far finer turns of phrase than is apparent from the
fragment:
Religious
distress is at the same time an expression
of real distress and a protest
against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed
creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of
spiritless conditions. It is the opium
of the people…
To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real
happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of
affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions.
Marx’s meaning, along with the rhythms
in which he expressed it, is evident once the epigram is returned to its
textual origin. That relocation refutes any supposition that he was
spurning all varieties of religious experience. Rather, he anchored his
empathy with those enduring immiseration in his materialist appreciation
that incorrect ideas are more than the product of wrong thinking.
Marx’s choice and arrangement of words
strengthened the persuasiveness of this perception. His first sentence
pivots on a conflicted concept of religion. The next carries that
dichotomy through three variations, threaded with sibilance. After their
rising inflection, the notorious remark falls as a lamentation, not a
rhetorical slap. The second paragraph repeats this pattern, its
recapitulated “illusions” again leading to a consolation. The
compassion in Marx’s comment is assured by the felicities in his
prose.
Figures
of speech
As we have seen, wordplay is as
much a part of Marx’s prose as the class struggle is pivotal to his
picture of the world. The social philosopher Vilfredo Pareto worried
that Marx’s words were like bats since one can see in them both birds
and mice.
One danger with this ambiguity is that his meaning can never be pinned
down, and so his epigones can escape criticism by alleging that their
prophet has been misunderstood – a variant of the irrefutability that
upset Popper. This possibility is unavoidable in coping with contraries,
and thus is a small price to pay for the depth of understanding that
Marx was able to provide by his appreciation of the fluidity of nature
and social relationships.
Alertness to three of Marx’s favourite
literary devices – to wit - punning, paradoxes and irony will help
with a reading the first volume of Capital
by showing how he wove his dialectical method into the texture of his
writing. One should always read Marx with an ear tuned for words,
phrases and whole passages “enclosed by intonational quotation
marks”, or trailing implied question marks.
Puns:
To associate puns with the lowest form of wit is another possible entry
in Flaubert’s dictionary. Marx used puns to bind concepts together, as
in his identifyinging the feature of alienation under the rule of
capital. He shows that alienation under capitalism is different from
other kinds of estrangement because the wage-slave has sold his capacity
to labour. In English, “alienate” means to sell and to make strange.
In German, Marx makes play on the German “ausser” to convey that
connection. [“Aus-“ in
German is the prefix for “out”, so that ein
Auslander is a foreigner.]
One can sympathise with anyone
translating passages such as:
Was fruher Sichausserlichsein,
reale Entausserung des Menschen ist nur [nun], zur Tat der
Entausserung, zur Verausserung geworden.
The Soviet edition rendered this rolling
pun:
What was previously being
external to oneself – man’s actual externalization – has
merely become the act of externalizing – the process of alienating.
The three different German words rooted
on “ausser” have been given as cognates of “external”.
Veraussern can mean “to sell one’s honour”. That medieval
concept invokes capitalist alienation where the labourer is separated
from the honour that the craftsman once put into a product, and from the
honour that he drew from its quality. In addition, the wage labourer has
sold his human capacities, his honour.
To complain about this aspect of Marx’s
style is like objecting to Shakespeare’s punning on “will” in
Sonnets 135 and 136. As Fowler has it: “Puns are good, bad and
indifferent, & only those who lack the wit to make them are unaware
of the fact”.
Paradox:
Marx combined punning with paradox: “Das seine Lebensausserung seine
Lebensentausserung ist”, that is, “The manifestation of his life is
the alienation of his life”.
The paradox is a pauper’s straining after dialectics. Paradoxes
abounded in the young Marx as one mark of his legacy from Idealism where
words stood in for reality. For example, he concluded The
Introduction to the Contribution to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Law: “Philosophy cannot be made a reality without the abolition of
the proletariat, the proletariat cannot be abolished without philosophy
being made a reality”.
This phrase-mongering contrasts with a comparable point which Marx made
four years later at the close of the Manifesto:
“The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a
world to win”. The bi-polar form of a paradox remains, but Marx is no
longer conjuring with categories. Instead, he is calling for the
“forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions”.
Irony:
Francis Wheen has discovered in Marx the Dean Swift of industrial
capitalism. Marx and Swift
share brilliance in irony, but they differ in tone because of opposed
social outlooks. Irony in Swift is chilling. Marx’s can be red hot.
Swift’s “A Modest Proposal for
preventing the Children of the Poor People in Ireland, from being a
Burden to their Parents or Country; and for making them beneficial to
the Publick” (1729) reasoned that those infants should be reared as
food for the English landlords whose expropriation of field and farm was
devouring the parents. “A Modest Proposal” was Swift’s attempt to
persuade his own class to alter their ways. By contrast, Marx aimed his
ironies at energising a revolution of the masses.
Irony helped Marx to reproduce his
dialectical method, as it had for Hegel who saw irony as dialectical
because it allowed for two meanings simultaneously.
An ironic comment has a kernel of subversive intent inside the shell of
innocent observation.
Like Hegel, Marx saw that irony operates
outside the logic that something must be either “A” or “non-A”.
Marx’s analysis of capital could not be contained in such mutual
exclusivities. Capital is capital only when it is expanding. To expand,
it has to be in motion, passing from its money form, through a stage of
production, into a commodity form, and then back to the money form so
that the process can start over on an enlarged scale. Money is a
shape-shifter and a form-changer.
Marx found an analogue in irony, which not every commentator gets.
Marx’s ironic voice might not have been
innate, but he had made it his own before he composed The
German Ideology of 1845, as
this prefatory note demonstrates:
Once upon a time a valiant fellow had
the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were
possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to get this notion out of their heads,
say by avowing it to be a superstitious, a religious concept, they
would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life
long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful
consequences all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence.
Marx has emphasised the fallacy of
Idealist philosophy by understatement without stepping outside the voice
of an objective observer to display his own point of view by inserting
“foolish” in front of “fellow”. The reader is left to add that
judgement.
Capital
Quoting from the most popular of
Marx’s writings to show how far they are from being unreadable was
easy. Does Capital promise equal delights? Barriers exist between Capital
and a mass readership. First, there is its length, 800 pages in volume
one alone, and another 2000 pages in the three volumes that he left
partly completed.
Above all, the difficulty with Capital is in the issues that Marx tackled. The dynamics of capital
expansion will never be glimpsed by a Murdoch columnist fixated on
Foxtel, or, for that matter, by a research assistant clipping the Financial Times each morning. Marx wrote books. He did not spray
bullets from a Microsoft power point. To approach his writings, you have
to be a prose person, not a dot.point person.
Most sympathetic guides to Capital warn the beginner away from beginning at the beginning.
In those pages, Marx presented the results of twenty years research. He
might have kept that material until the end, so that by the time we
reached its intricacies we would have been drawn towards his conclusions
and become familiar with his terms and cast of mind. Instead, he gave us
the results first. They also set forth his method of analysis.
Marx acknowledged that “the method of
analysis which I have employed … makes the reading of the first
chapters rather arduous”.
Their 100 pages cannot be recommended as in-flight entertainment. A
clear head, a pen in hand, and the preparedness to read the material at
least three times over several years are required to absorb all the
secrets that Marx uncovers. As Marx knew from experience: “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”.
At the trial of the Knave of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland, the King of Hearts admonishes the White Rabbit:
“Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then
stop”. In the case of Capital,
it is perhaps more judicious to start at the end of volume one with the
nine-page chapter on “The Modern Theory of Colonisation”.
Australians are not the only people surprised that Marx wound up with
the settlement of our continent. He tells a story about Edward Gibbon
Wakefield who proposed a plan for Systematic Colonisation to compel
workers to sell their labor power instead of setting up as farmers or
tradespeople for themselves:
Wakefield discovered that in the
Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other
means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if
there be wanting the correlative – the wage-worker, the other man
who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will. He discovered
that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons,
established by the instrumentality of things. A Mr Peel, he moans,
took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of
subsistence and of production to the amount of 50,000. This Mr Peel
even had the foresight to bring besides 3,000 persons of the
working-class, men, women, and children. Once he arrived at his
destination, “Mr Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or
fetch him water from the river.” Unhappy Mr Peel who provided for
everything except the export of English relations of production to
Swan River!
Seven pages further, the final sentence
establishes the true north of Marx’s life project. He is not concerned
with Mr Wakefield, his schemes, or the emotional quotient of Mr Peel:
The only thing that interests us is the
secret discovered in
the New World by the Political Economy of the Old World, and
proclaimed on the house-tops: that the capitalist mode of production
and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for
their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private
property: in other words, the expropriation of the labourer.
The germ of Capital’s
800 pages is in these sixty words. Almost every word that Marx wrote
after 1842 was his contribution to the struggle to check exploitation
and to end expropriation. Before reading any part of Capital,
whether for the first or the umpteenth time, it is worth returning to
these lines for orientation. Should you feel lost in the detail of
factory laws, perplexed by the delineation of use, exchange and surplus
values, or trip on the poetic allusions, remember that “class
struggle” is an anchor against being blown off course.
Three
hurdles
Although the advice to postpone
an encounter with the opening segment of Capital is sensible,
that engagement cannot be put off for ever by any serious students of
capitalism. After passing so many warning signs, readers are in for a
surprise at how smooth those early pages seem. Marx’s prose is neither
convoluted nor arcane. The sentences are not very long. The vocabulary
is well within the range of the average reader. There is no algebra. A
year-eight student could manage the sums.
Before attending to how Marx draws us
towards his discoveries, three difficulties in reading Capital
should be mentioned. They are mathematics; Hegelian methods and
language; and references to other literary works.
Mathematics:
Many of the formulae in Capital
are not algebra. Instead, they abbreviate Marx’s description of the
circuits of capital. The simplest of these notations is M-C-M+, where M
is money capital, C is Commodities, and M+ is the expanded volume of
money capital that results from the making and sale of commodities. Marx
could have kept writing these terms out in words, but hoped that a
shorthand version would be easier on his readers. One does not need to
understand any kind of mathematics to follow his notation. It involves
no calculation. The formulae are closer to equations in chemistry than
in mathematics.
Hegel:
In an 1873 re-issue of Capital,
Marx acknowledged that, in 1867, he had “openly avowed” himself
“the pupil” of Hegel at a time when professors in Germany were
contemptuous of “that mighty thinker”. Flaubert’s “Dictionary of
Received Opinion” would now place “impenetrable” after Hegel’s
name, not without justification, though he could be witty, clear and
pungent.
Ponderousness is one element in Hegel’s worst writing that Marx did
not inherit. Indeed, when Marx admitted that he had, “here and there,
in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of
expression peculiar” to Hegel, the crucial word is “coquetted”.
Even at his most Hegelian, Marx never lost his cutting edge, peppering
his denunciations with raillery, lightening his expositions with
caricature.
Literary
allusions:
The learning that Marx brought to his subject exacts another entry toll.
At the close of a discussion of commodities, he asked: “Who fails here
to call to mind our good friend, Dogberry, who informs neighbour Seacoal,
that, ‘To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but reading
and writing comes by Nature’.”
The question today is who will be familiar with Dogberry as a comic
character from Shakespeare’s Much
Ado About Nothing. Volume One of Capital
includes quotations from Balzac, Cervantes, Dante, Goethe, Homer and
Sophocles, whom Marx gave in their original tongues. Shy references to a
host of other poets, dramatists and novelists embellish his critique of
political economy.
Marx studded his writings with a
comparable density of allusions to the ideas and terminologies of
philosophers, historians and political economists. For example, when he
limned life under communism where everyone would be able “to hunt in
the morning, fish in the afternoon, read cattle in the evening and
criticize after dinner”.
In the first three activities, Marx was mocking Adam Smith and almost
every vulgar economist for their “unimaginative fantasies”.
The post-prandial critical criticising was another dig at the Holy
Family of Young Hegelians. Cultural semi-literates who fail to recognise
these sources do not hesitate to berate Marx for putting forward an
insipid picture of communism as a superabundance of comforts suitable to
a country gent, or Tolstoy.
Another joy in reading Capital
comes from discovering the treasures lurking in its footnotes which, as
in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and
Fall of Roman Empire, contain several of the work’s more memorable
insights and striking formulations:
This much however, is clear, that the
Middle Ages could not live on Catholicism, nor the ancient world on
politics. On the contrary, it is the mode in which they gained a
livelihood that explains why here politics, and there Catholicism,
played the chief part. For the rest, it requires but a slight
acquaintance with the history of the Roman republic, for example, to
be aware that its secret history is the history of its landed
property. And there is Don Quixote, who long ago paid the penalty for
wrongly imagining that knight errantry was compatible with all
economic forms of society.
This blast at the ludicrousness of
Idealist historiography is a marvel of concentrated thought, delivering
more perception in its 80 words than 80 professors chorusing
“discredited” at the mention of Marx’s name could come up with in
a lifetime.
The greatest amazement from Capital is how Marx could keep so many levels of investigation going
at once. Symphonists can rarely develop more than two principal themes,
no matter how many variations they then introduce. Charles Dickens in Bleak
House (1852) depicted the Court of Chancery’s generating
multitudes of cases and devouring the lives of all who approach. Critics
who disparage the novel’s spontaneous combustion scene fail to see
that the energy of Dickens’s composition is of a piece with
spontaneous combustion. How was it possible for him to keep all the
themes, plots and sub-plots running without his brain catching fire?
Marx’s portrayal of the expansion of capital matches Bleak
House in its encompassing of energies marshaled and of forces
unleashed.
Marx and Dickens also shared a fury at
the grinding down of human capacities, especially in children. Marx
summarised official reports on the effects of 72-hour week on the
culture of children, anyone of whom could have been the model for Smike
from Nicholas Nickleby, or Jo
in Bleak House. Questioned
by the Employment Commissioners, the twelve-year old Jeremiah Haynes
responded:
We have a king (told it is a Queen),
they call her the Princess
Alexandra. Told that she married the Queen’s son. The Queen’s son
is the Princess Alexandra. A princess is a man.
Marx fills page after page with such
evidence until he takes another swipe at hypocrisy:
Meanwhile, late by night perhaps,
self-denying Mr Glass-Capital, primed with port-wine, reels out of his
club homeward droning out idiotically, “Britons never, never shall
be slaves!”
Marx will have none of Dickens’s
paternalism. Repentance no more than abstinence will redeem Mr
Glass-Capital. The ghost that is haunting his kind is not Christmas Past
but the spectre of a communist future.
The secret
novelty of Capital
To suggest that Capital
can be read as a novel is not to imply that it is fictional, still less
a faction. The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) proposed that
“the plurality of styles and levels” is “characteristic of the
novel as a genre”. As a social investigator, Marx called on all manner
of literary devices to convey the complexities that he traced through
the social relationships of capitalism. By Bakhtin’s criterion, Capital
volume one lives within the genre of novel.
Balzac hinted at a secret history of “a
scandalous kind”.
For Marx, the secret history of the Roman Republic was in “landed
property”. In capitalism, the secret rests in how the commodity form
conceals “the expropriation of the laborers”, which is the condition
for their ceaseless exploitation.
The plotline of Capital
confronts us with this secret history, and then conducts us through the
evidence. The secret about the commodity form proves to be another
multiplicity of secrets about money as another commodity; about money as
the universal equivalent for every commodity; about human capacity as a
commodity. Having established these premises, Marx can lead us to an
indictment of a system of exploitation which presents itself as one of a
fair exchange of equal values.
Marx wrote in the tradition of Realism,
not of Naturalism. He compiled details about factory conditions to
uncover the logic of the expansion of capital. Thus, although he
accumulated evidence with the assiduousness of a miser hoarding brass
farthings, he used those mites, as would a capitalist, to expand his
intellectual store “by constantly throwing it afresh into
circulation”.
The protagonist for Marx is neither a
Romantic champion such as Julian Sorel, a carpenter’s son, in
Stendahl’s Le Rouge et le Noir (1830), nor the master criminal Vautrin in
Balzac. In Capital, the
central figure is the aggregation of capital, a figure which is most
truly itself when its individual personifications behave as the
accumulation of dead labour. Here is the young Marx making those bones
speak:
Thus, what I am
and am capable of is by no
means determined by my individuality. I am
ugly, but I can buy for myself the most
beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly,
for the effect of ugliness – its deterrent power – is nullified by
money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. There I am not
lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is
honoured, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good,
therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble
of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless,
but money is the real brain
of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides,
he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has power over the
clever not more clever than the clever?
Marx has brought us close to the
grotesqueries of Rabelais as capital reproduces Gargantua’s appetites.
Capital is also like that giant
when he pours salt into the mouths of sleepers to stimulate their
thirst; the managers of capital have to inculcate desire for commodities
of every kind:
He puts himself at the service of the
other’s most depraved fancies, plays the pimp between him and his
need, excites in him morbid appetites, lies in wait for each of his
weaknesses – all so that he can then demand the cash for this
service of love.
Gargantua and Pantagruel are
flesh-and-blood creatures of a society still dependent on the soil and
on hand labor. By contrast, capital
must be depicted as an “automaton” because the operations of its
social world have become like the machines that accelerate its
expansion.
Leviathans become the apt image for the power of capital in Dickens’s
Chancery Court or Circumlocution Office, Melville’s factory ship,
Zola’s coal mine, Sinclair’s slaughterhouse and Ireland’s oil
refinery.
The anti-heroes, and thus the true heroes
of Marx’s Capital are “the
new fangled men” who are needed to master “the new-fangled forces of
society”. They too have become machine-like. They are new-fangled
because of their place in the productive order.
If ordinary people enter European fiction as degraded,
Marx represents their misery as a pre-condition for their remaking
themselves into a collective presence to take the place of Hegel’s
world historical figures.
Marx did everything a writer could to
clarify the complexities of capitalism without over-simplifying. He used
homely examples of how linen becomes a coat, or of how linen is
exchanged for a bible before the cash from that transaction is spent on
brandy.
His materialist approach to history as the activity of living people
encouraged his dramatic flair. Although he presented capitalists as the
personifications of capital, he knew that he had to treat these
“actors … as individuals”.
Hence, he told tales about “Mr Moneybags” or “Mr Glass-Capital”.
Marx’s core task was to explain the
expansion of capital in the aggregate, what he called “social
capital”, as distinct from individual capitals. The fun that he had
with fables about Mr Moneybags ran second to the delight he took in
mocking writers who represented capitalism from the standpoint of “our
friend Robinson” Crusoe. Capitalists got workers to produce exchange
values. Crusoe, the complete homo
faber, made nothing but use values for himself. He has provided for
himself before Friday arrives. The approach
of the vulgar economists equated the operations of the capitalists’
system with its ideological mask as individualism.
Capital, for Marx, was a social relationship before it was anything
else. Marx created fables to convey actual relationships whereas the
Robinsonards treated Defoe’s fiction as the model for reality. The
real-life captains of industry were imprisoned in the iron cage of
capital’s expansion, not marooned on an island.
No more than the meanest child labourer
could escape from her travails by wishing herself into a Dickensian plot
is the capitalist able to choose the circuits of capital around which he
must chase a fortune:
If social capital experiences a
revolution in value, it may happen that the capital of the individual
capitalist succumbs to it and fails, because it cannot adapt itself to
the conditions of this movement of values. The more acute and frequent
such revolutions in value become, the more does the automatic movement
of the now independent value operate with the elemental force of a
natural process, against the foresight and calculation of the
individual capitalist.
The excitement that Marx brings to his
account of the accumulation of capital is possible because of the space
he accepts between tendential laws and entrepreneurship, fate and
risk-taking, or what he calls “a Faustian conflict between the passion
for accumulation, and the desire for enjoyment”.
Marx used story-telling to illuminate this reality.
Polyvocalism:
Bakhtin found “laughter” and “polyglossia” to be of “decisive
importance” in making “possible the genre of the novel”.
Capital is heir to both qualities, contributing to their enrichment.
The tonal range in the laughter has been indicated. Now it is time to
illustrate how Marx creates dialogue to convince his audience that the
story he is relating represents their actual conditions.
In a chapter examining the labor-process,
Marx grappled with the puzzle at the center of the expansion of capital,
and therefore he had to convey the most difficult concept. He had to get
across how capitalists paid their workers the full value of their
capacity to add value, while at same time paying those laborers less
than the total value of the commodities they produced. Marx restated his
case in the negative by falling into conversation with a capitalist
“friend” who had just failed to turn a profit. This unhappy fellow
has been offered no more for the cotton that his operatives have spun
than the fifteen shillings it cost him to have them produce it.
Unlike Mr Peel, this capitalist cannot
lay the blame for his unhappiness on the absence of the capitalist
relations of production. What has gone wrong? His failure to profit
leaves him staring “in astonishment” before he gathers his knowledge
of “vulgar economy” to exclaim:
“Oh, but I advanced my money for the
express purpose of making more money”.
After the capitalist has entered his
first plea, Marx assumes the voice of a judge from on high:
The way to Hell is paved with good
intentions, and he might just as easily have intended to make money,
without producing at all.
The loser now threatens
all sorts of things. He won’t be caught napping again. In future he
will buy the commodities in the market, instead of manufacturing them
himself.
We have heard from the capitalist again,
but in the third person. Marx reappears to ask and to state the obvious,
also in the third person:
But if all his brother capitalists were
to do the same, where would he find his commodities in the market? And
his money he cannot eat.
Next, the capitalist “tries
persuasion”:
“Consider
my abstinence; I might have played ducks and drakes with the 15
shillings; but instead of that I consumed it productively, and made
yarn with it”.
The capitalist has returned in his own
colloquial voice. Unmoved, Marx addresses his remarks to some unseen
third party:
Very well. And by way of reward he is
now in possession of good yarn instead of a bad conscience; … Let
him therefore console himself with the reflection that virtue is its
own reward.
This verdict is no comfort to the
appellant, who “becomes importunate”:
He says: “The yarn is no use to me; I
produced it for sale”.
Marx gives more unwelcome advice from the
stance of a disinterested commentator:
In that case let him sell it, or still
better, let him for the future produce only things for satisfying his
personal wants …
This
interchange continues the switch between direct speech and commentary. The
capitalist gets no more satisfaction from Dr Marx than he has had from
the market. Small wonder the capitalist “friend” now “gets
obstinate”, flinging forth rhetorical questions:
Can the laborer, merely with his arms
and his legs, produce commodities out of nothing? Did I not supply him
with the materials, by means of which, and in which alone, his labor
could be embodied? And as the greater part of society consists of such
ne’er do-wells, have I not rendered society incalculable service by
my instruments of production, my cotton and my spindles, and not only
society but the laborer also, whom in addition I have provided with
the necessities of life? And am I to be allowed nothing in return for
all this service?
Where will this eloquence get him? Marx
no longer addresses himself to his “friend”, but to the reader of Capital:
Well, but has not the laborer rendered
him the equivalent service of changing his cotton and spindle into
yarn? … The capitalist paid to the laborer a value of 3
shillings, and the laborer gave him back an exact equivalent in the
value of 3 shillings, added by him to the cotton: he gave him value
for value.
Marx has spoken as the author of Capital rather than as the author of this fable within Capital.
Our friend, up to this time so
purse-proud, suddenly assumed the modest demeanour of his own workman
and exclaims: “Have I myself not worked? Have I not performed the
labour of superintendence and of overlooking the spinner? And does this
labor, too, create value?” His overlooker and his manager try to hide
their smiles.
Marx assumes that readers who have
reached this point in his analysis will realise that the tasks that the
capitalist claims to have performed himself were done by his smirking
employees. The smiles that Marx hopes that his fable by now will have
provoked in his readers are here brought to the surface by this silent
chorus of overseers. Even without having read a line of Capital,
those foremen know that their disciplining of labor time differs
qualitatively from its application by laborers in the creation of
additional values. By this stage, not even the capitalist can keep a
straight face:
Meanwhile, after a hearty laugh, he
re-assumed his usual mien.
Though he chanted to us the whole creed
of the economists, in reality, he says, he would not give a brass
farthing for it. He leaves this and all such like subterfuges and
juggling tricks to the professors of Political Economy, who are paid for
it.
Throughout, Marx has been using his
“friend” to express his own scorn for those professors. Marx had
reached that valuation from his critiquing of their “subterfuges and
juggling tricks”. The capitalist, on the other hand, is sprouting what
passes for common sense among his kind:
He himself is a practical man; and
though he does not always consider what he says outside his business,
yet in his business he knows what he is about.
Marx leaves us with the capitalist at his
own assessment. Marx knows otherwise. The anecdote would never have been
possible had the capitalist known what he was about “in his
business”. After all, he has failed to realise a profit.
The sole author of all these words has
been Dr Marx. Yet, not all the views expressed are his.
The capitalist speaks in his own defence only to convict himself. His
offence is not that he has exploited his workers, but that he has failed
to do so. Through this negative, Marx has revealed the positive secret
of capital.
Marx has subverted the Socratic dialogue
by having his “friend” arrive at the truth about surplus value
through rehearsing the conditions of his existence as a personification
of capital. Instead of Marx’s presenting himself as a Socratic
interlocutor, he confronts the capitalist with the steps of practice
that have led to his failure to profit.
The humour that Marx has built throughout
the passage depends on the instability in the speaking positions of both
Marx and his friend. Marx is, by turns, reporter, judge, and critic of
political economy. The capitalist appears astonished, threatening,
persuasive, importunate, obstinate, modest, laughing. Despite his dodges
and masks, his performance has had but one theme. Unlike Shylock, he
demands only “My ducats”, caring not for his daughter, justice,
religion or the law.
Marx has reproduced in his analysis of
capital the Babel of voices in a stratified society. He has orchestrated
the voices of his “friend”, but also interpreted them by putting his
pleas for profit into their context of capitalist exploitation. Marx has
not only put them into his friend’s mouth, but has made his account of
the logic of capital accumulation – namely Capital
- speak through his creature. The ventriloquism is from off-stage, with
both Marx and the capitalist taking turns as its mouthpieces.
Abstinence:
One strand in the capitalist’s claim for a profit was “his
abstinence”. This justification provided Marx with life-long
opportunities for mocking the professorial subterfuge that profit is the
reward that the capitalist earns for his not having spent his money on
consumer goods:
It has never occurred to the vulgar
economist to make the simple reflection, that every human action may
be viewed, as “abstinence” from its opposite. Eating is abstinence
from fasting, walking, abstinence from standing still, working,
abstinence from idling, idling, abstinence from working, &c.
The unhappiness that the capitalist must
undergo for the sake of “abstinence” becomes too much for Marx to
bear:
The simple dictates of humanity
therefore plainly enjoin the release of the capitalist from this
martyrdom and temptation, in the same as that the Georgian slave-owner
was lately delivered, by the abolition of slavery, from the painful
dilemma, whether to squander the surplus-product, lashed out of his
niggers, entirely in champagne, or whether to reconvert a part of it
into more niggers and more land.
The more honest supporters of abstinence
as a claim on profit had to admit that the children of these
self-deniers had no right to inherit their fathers’ fortunes because
the offspring had foregone none of the pleasures.
The Mirror
Image: Because Marx recognised that capital is a social
relationship, he sought images to convey that multi-sidedness. The
mirror and reflection were two obvious tropes, yet too obvious to
satisfy:
It is a sign of crudity and lack of
comprehension that organically coherent factors are brought into
haphazard relation with one another, i.e., into a simple reflex
connection.
As we have seen, Marx extended his
rejection of reflection to history. In The
Eighteenth Brumaire,
revolutionaries recognise themselves only after they have donned the
“drag” to appear as some historical other. Similarly, he argued that
petty-bourgeois thinkers do not reflect the thinking of shop-keepers.
Their relationship is the active one of the intellectuals’ not
proceeding in their theoretical practices further than the shopkeepers
do in business.
Yet the mirror could be a more acceptable
figure of speech if used as a simile rather than a metaphor:
Money … reads all prices backwards,
and thus as it were mirrors
itself in the bodies of all other commodities (Emphasis added.)
The distancing that Marx has achieved
here by the use of the conditional will not serve in all cases. A
looking glass cannot convey human behaviour as the “real, sensuous
activity” that Marx took as the root of his materialist dialectics:
The chief defect of all previous
materialism … is that things, reality, sensuousness are conceived
only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous
human activity, practice, not subjectively.
Marx needed an active processing agent
for his imagery. Here, the Soviet translation came closer: “Money …
depicts itself”, rather than “mirrors itself”.
Better still, the eye let Marx represent
the active aspect of the relationships between people and objects. The
eye was available as the apposite figure of speech only because of what
had happened with the actual eye in history:
The eye has become a human
eye, just as its object has
become a social, human
object – an object made by man for man.
Under capitalism, the use value of the
eye undergoes a transformation parallel to that experienced by all the
objects created by humankind. While use values are becoming exchange
values, the eye is being re-made into the sense mechanism that most
stimulates desire for them.
The crucial case, and the hardest to
represent, is that of the commodity form, the workings of which the
untutored eye cannot discern:
From the mere look of a piece of money,
we cannot tell what breed of commodity has been transformed into it.
In their money-form all commodities look alike.
Marx infuses this conceptual connection
between commodities and money into an evocation of urban energies of
which Balzac or Dickens would have been proud:
The busiest streets of London are
crowded with shops whose show cases display all the riches of the
world, Indian shawls, American revolvers, Chinese porcelain, Parisian
corsets, furs from Russia and species from the tropics, but all of
these worldly things bear odious, white paper labels with Arabic
numerals and then laconic symbols £. s. d. This is how commodities
are presented in circulation.
From this description, Marx moves to a
sensuous image in which “the prices” become the “wooing glances
cast at money by commodities”.
Commodities create a mirror-effect when
their differences, real or apparent, are perceived by potential
consumers. The contrast between a castle and the adjoining cottage
becomes a source of desire for a bigger house:
A house may be large or small; as long
as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social
demands for a dwelling. But let a palace arise beside the little
house, and it shrinks from a little house to a hut. The little house
shows now that its owner has only very slight or no demands to make;
and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the
neighbouring palace grows to an equal or even greater extend, the
occupant of the relatively small house will feel more an more
uncomfortable, dissatisfied and cramped within its four walls.
The contrasts are reflected through the
eye, that is to say, received into the brain. By exciting consumption,
the eye holds a mirror to the production-consumption of commodities.
Learning to expand one’s needs through
the perception of contrasts in the use values that we already possess
did not come into the world with capitalism. Rather, the proliferation
of use values into ever more exchange values was able to build on a
process at the heart of hominisation:
In a certain sense, a man is in the
same situation as a commodity. As he neither enters into the world in
possession of a mirror … a man first sees and recognises himself in
another man. Peter only relates to himself as a man through his
relation to another man, Paul, in whom he recognises his likeness.
With this, however, Paul also becomes from head to toe, in his
physical form as Paul, the form of appearance of the species man for
Peter.
The mirror-phase is limited neither to
infancy nor to the origins of our species, though it acquired a vaster
domain with the spread of capitalist relations.
Neither money nor commodities is alive.
Yet, it is integral to Marx’s picture of the capitalist world that
they appear to be so. A carpenter fashions wood into a table. As soon as
he offers this everyday thing for sale, “it steps forth as a
commodity, [and] is changed into something transcendent”. Marx has to
explain how a physical object acquires the imperceptible qualities of
the social relationship between capital and wage-labour. He again turns
to the experience of sight:
… light from an object is perceived
by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the
objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of
seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one
thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a
physical relation between physical things. But it is different with
commodities. There, the existence of the things qua commodities, and
the value-relation between the products of labour which stamps them as
commodities, have absolutely no connexion with their physical
properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There is
a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes,
the fantastic form of a relation between things.
The fetishism of commodities is the knot
that must be untied to unravel the secret of the expansion of capital,
and hence to follow the exposition of this engorgement through the plot
of Capital.
Conclusion
Most socialists have not been
Marxists, or aspired to be. It is lunacy of a high order to insist that
the only people who will be allowed to participate in the overthrow of
capitalism are those who subscribe to this or that version of the law of
the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. It is no less true that no
one can remain a Marxist without being a socialist. Before Marxism is
anything, it is a critique of capitalism. There can be no Marx for the
master class. No one who has made peace with that regime of exploitation
can use the methods, insights or rhetoric developed by Marx and Engels,
not even to explain the longevity of the system that they spent their
lives interpreting, in various ways, in order to hasten its end.
As a materialist, Marx had no time for
those who approached his writings as sacred texts. As a revolutionary,
he would never have judged our understanding of him by our ability to
retrieve what he had intended, like Medieval Schoolmen. From the
standpoints of revolutionary politics and materialist historiography,
his test would be whether what he had written conforms to the realities
of capitalist development, or to the experiences that socialists had
acquired about how to overthrow the state. Only by grappling with those
practical ideas can we begin the even more taxing effort needed to
create a socialist society.
Further
References
Gabriel Egan, Shakespeare
and Marx, OUP, Oxford, 2004.
Stanley Edgar Hyman, The Tangled
Bank, Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers, New
York, 1962.
Pamela Hansford Johnson, “The Literary Achievement of Marx”, The
Modern Quarterly, New Series, 2, Summer 1947, pp. 239-44.
Giosue Ghisalberti, “Tragedy and Repetition in Marx’s The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, Clio,
26 (4), Summer 1997, pp. 411-26.
Thomas M. Kemple, Reading Marx
Writing, Melodrama, the Market and the “Grundrisse”, Stanford
University Press, Stanford, 1995.
Franz Mehring, “Karl Marx and Metaphor”, D. Ryazanoff (ed.), Karl
Marx: Man, Thinker and Revolutionist, London, 1927, pp. 95-101.
Michael Paul Rogin, “Herman Melville’s Eighteenth Brumaire”, Subversive
Genealogy, The Politics and Art and Herman Melville, University of
California Press, Berkeley, 1979, pp. 155-86.
Allen Speight, Hegel, Literature
and the Problem of Agency, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
2001.
Dirk J. Struik (ed.), The Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, New World, New York, 1964.
Dirk J. Struik (ed.), Birth of the
Communist Manifesto, New World, New York, 1971.
Humphrey McQueen is a freelance historian
writing from Canberra.
Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard
and Pecuchet, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976, pp. 289ff.
A recent biographer, Francis Wheen, deplored “the mad circular
argument one hears from people who haven’t ventured even as far as
page two. ‘Capital is
all hooey’. ‘And how do you know it’s hooey?’ ‘Because
it’s not worth reading’.” Francis Wheen, Karl
Marx, Fourth Estate, London, 1999, p. 299.
Karl
Marx Frederick Engels
Collected Works (MECW),
volume 6, Lawrence & Wishart, London, MECW,
1976, p. 487.
The propulsion through the opening section of the Manifesto
is so convincing that it can sweep the reader past the warning that
Marx had placed above the portal: class struggle can end with “the
common ruin of the contending classes”. Marx drew on his knowledge
of the Ancient world to deny inevitable progress from any
purpose-driven view of history.
Karl Popper’s obsession
with his version of historicism blinded him to this
contra-teleological strand in Marx, whom he otherwise admired for
his humanity and his contributions to social and historical
knowledge, The Open Society
and Its Enemies, RKP, London, 1966; for Popper’s praise of
Marx’s “lasting merit”, see p. 88.
Karl Marx, Theories
of Surplus Value, Part I, Foreign Languages Publishing House (FLPH),
Moscow, pp. 89 and 94.
Letter from Helmut
Hirsch to Encounter,
November 1980, p. 92.
Marshall Berman, All
that is Solid Melts Into Air, Simon and Schuster, New York,
1982, pp. 102 and 121.
Steven Marcus, Engels,
Manchester and the Working Class, Norton, New York, 1974, pp.
139, 137 and 108.
Georg Lukacs, History
and Class Consciousness, Merlin, London, 1971, p. 224.
Karl Marx, The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Progress Publishers,
Moscow, 1954, p. 6.
Karl Marx, “The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, MECW, 11, 1979, pp. 103-4.
Margaret Rose, Reading
the young Marx and Engels, Croom Helm, London, 1978, pp. 84
& 131. In their correspondence, Engels wrote to Marx of
the “Goldshit” in the Australian colonies, 23 September 1851,
Henry Mayer (ed.), Marx,
Engels and Australia, Sydney Studies in Politics 5, Cheshire,
Melbourne, 1964, p. 104.
Theodor Adorno, Minima
Moralia, NLB, London, 1974, pp. 85-86.
Bertell Ollman, Dance
of the Dialectic, Steps in Marx’s Method, University of
Illinois Press, Urbana, 2003.
Arthur
Schopenhauer, Essays and
Aphorisms, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1970, p. 203.
Claude
Levi-Strauss, Tristes
Tropiques, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976, p. 70.
This interplay of thinking with doing explains how those children of
the bourgeoisie, Marx and Engels, could become proletarian
intellectuals. Their case was less remarkable than that of Honore de
Balzac (1799-1850), whose sequence of novels, The
Human Comedy, Engels described as “a constant elegy to the
irretrievable decay of good society; his sympathies are all with the
class doomed to extinction”. Yet, as Engels went on to explain, he
and Marx admired Balzac above all other contemporary novelists:
his satire
is never keener, his irony never more bitter, than when he sets in
motion the very men and women with whom he sympathises most deeply
– the nobles … That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his
own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the
necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles, and described
them as people deserving no better fate … that I consider one of
the greatest triumphs of Realism. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Selected Correspondence, FLPH,
Moscow, 1953, pp. 479-80.
MECW,
11. 1979, pp. 187-88.
Karl Marx, Capital,
I, FLPH, Moscow, 1958, p. 109; Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976, p. 204.
In 1867, Marx alleged that “The English Established Church, e.g.,
will more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on
1/39 of its income”. Capital, I, p. 10; Penguin, p. 92. The stand-alone witticisms in
Marx and Engels have a Shavian ring, which leaves one wondering how
much George Bernard Shaw learned from them about punch lines.
Capital, I, p. 113;
Penguin, p. 208.
Capital,
I, p. 763; Penguin, p. 929.
MECW, 3, 1975, pp. 175-76.
Our appreciation of the complexity of Marx’s comment on religion
will be deepened by adding knowledge of medical practices from
around 1840 when opiates were not taken merely to put their users to
sleep, but to deaden the pain, physical and psychological. Opiates
allowed workers to continue their battles for existence, offering
comfort, not oblivion, sustenance not slumber. It was in this
ambivalent sense that Marx referred to religion as an opiate. An
appreciation of the history of pharmacy is but one example of the
care that must be exercised when interpreting any text.
A similar point can be made about Nietzsche’s “God is
Dead”. The messenger is a madman who at once adds that he has
arrived too soon. Anyway, the shocking aspect of his annunciation is
not that God is dead, because the death and rebirth of gods are
integral to religious thinking, including Christianity. The horror
was the subsequent claim that “God remains dead”, leaving
humanity without the promise of resurrection, see The
Gay Science, New York, Vintage, 1974, p. 181.
Bertell Ollman, Alienation,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1976, p. 3.
M. M. Bakhtin, The
Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays, University of Texas Press,
Austin, 1981, p. 75.
MECW,
3, 1975, p. 291; Karl Marx, Fruhe
Schriften, I, Cotta-Verlag, Stuggart, 1960,
p. 586.
The translations deserve
attention. Bertell Ollman has suggested that “conditions” is
closer than “determines” to Marx’s meaning. Marxists could do
with an investigationi comparable to Darius Gray Ornston (ed.), Translating Freud, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1992.
H. W. Fowler, A
Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Omega, Ware, Herts., 1984,
p. 474.
MECW,
3, p. 299; Fruhe Schriften, I, p. 598.
Rose, Reading
the young Marx and Engels, p.
141.
Capital,
II, pp. 105-6; Penguin, II, p. 185.
Anitra Nelson, Marx’s
concept of money: the God of commodities, Routledge, New York,
1999. Because Nelson is deaf to dialectics, she complains that Marx
does not have a concept of money but rather a “theory of the money
commodity”. She divides her time between nit-picking and thinking
up Marx’s motives. (pp. 92-93). The intentionalist fallacy
encouraged her to suppose that she can see into Marx’s thinking,
which is the more risible given that she neither gets his jokes, nor
is aware that he is being ironical. Her literalism is of a piece
with her insensitivity to process. For an astute reading of Marx on
money see Suzanne de Brunhoff, Urizen Books, New York, 1976.
Notwithstanding this restraint, Marx was not afraid to be robust, as
in this sardonic onslaught:
Switzerland
is the center of attraction for hysterical virgins over thirty, for
the pale buds of the finishing school who are keen on the chaste by
so effective love-making of the fleet hunters of the Chamois. In the
original agricultural cantons the people live like animals, and are
as bovine as their oxen. It is necessary, very necessary, that this
last refuge of brutal primitive Germanism, of barbarians of bigotry,
of patriarchal naiveté and purity of morals, of agricultural
stability and of loyalty to death – available to the highest
bidder – should at last be destroyed.
This
“birthplace of freedom” is nothing else but the center of
barbarism, of brutality, bigotry, hypocritical “purity” …
Internal affairs are exhausted in making cheese, chastity, and
yodeling … abroad, the only claim of the Swiss is that of being
hired mercenaries.
Here, the rolling thunder comes with
its flashes of ridicule. To strike at his target of hypocrisy, Marx
reaches for the directness and rhythms of Luther’s bible. This
barrage could be Luther’s excoriating the Papacy.
The French Marxist Louis Althusser was but one in a line of
commentators to warn those opening Capital
to skip the first 100 pages, that is, Part I on “Commodities and
Money”, until after they had read the next 600. He further advised
them to delay reading the 30 pages of Part V, see Louis Althusser, Lenin
and Philosophy, NLB, London, 1971, pp. 79-86.
Engels had offered parallel advice on how to approach volumes II and
III, Selected Correspondence,
pp. 566-68.
Capital,
I, p. 21; Penguin, p. 104.
Capital,
I, p. 21; Penguin, p. 104.
Capital,
I, p. 766; Penguin, p. 933.
Capital,
I, p. 774; Penguin, p. 940.
Karl Marx, Capital, II,
FLPH, Moscow, 1957, pp. 284-5; Penguin, II, pp. 359-60.
Many of us have been comforted to learn from Engels that Marx,
although adept at algebra, including differential calculus, “did
not get the knack of handling figures, particularly commercial
arithmetic”. Marx kept notebooks on differential calculus. The
notion of approaching a result by ever smaller increments without
ever reaching that end, that is, asymptotically, appealed to Marx as
a means to express the dialectic, the process of change, see Mathematics
Manuscripts of Karl Marx, New Park, London, 1983.
To dispel the lopsidedness of that judgement, let Hegel also speak
in his own defence. Just before the end of his life in 1831, he
responded to the debates leading up to the First Reform Bill in the
British parliament: “Nowhere more than in England is the prejudice
so fixed and so naïve that if birth and wealth give a man office
they also give him brains”. “The English Reform Bill”, T. M.
Knox and Z. A. Pelczynski, Hegel’s
Political Writings, OUP, Oxford, 1964, p. 311.
Capital,
I, p. 83 and 425n; Penguin, pp. 177and 551n.
S. S. Prawer, Karl
Marx and World Literature, OUP, Oxford, 1978.
The Soviet editions did not provide translations, though the Penguin
series does. Working one’s way through the explanatory footnotes
is a short course in cultural literacy. Marx advised one militant to
learn Spanish, as he had done, by reading Don
Quixote. The Moscow editions provided much of the necessary
detail, culminating in the Marx-Engels
Collected Works from 1975. Dirk Struik’s editing of the Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts and The
Communist Manifesto was exemplary for his commentaries and
scholarly apparatuses. The Penguin-New Left Editions from the 1970s
also deserve to be consulted, both for their translations and their
explanatory notes, which supply translations for Marx’s
quotations.
The Penguin editor, Ben Fowkes, missed this jibe at Richard
Wagner’s 1849 manifesto, “The Art-Work of the Future”:
“Nobody – not even a practitioner of Zukunftsmusik* – can live on the products of the future …”.
The asterisked footnote misinterprets Zukunftsmusik
as “castles in the air, or dreams which may or may not be
realized,” p. 272; The Moscow edition, Capital,
p. 169, made no attempt to explain this
rare reference to music in Marx, which he repeated in Volume
II, Moscow, p. 493.
MECW, 5, p. 47.
Marx. Contribution
to the Critique of Political Economy, p. 188.
James Buchan, Frozen
Desire, Picador, London, 1997, p. 202.
Capital,
I, p. 83n; Penguin, p. 176n.
Capital,
I, p. 259n; Penguin, p. 370n.
Capital,
I, p. 264n; Penguin, p. 375n.
Bakhtin, p. 41n.
Honore Balzac, Lost
Illusions, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971, p. 641.
Capital,
I, p. 774; Penguin, p. 940.
Capital,
I, p. 153; Penguin, p. 254.
MECW,
3, p. 324.
MECW,
3, p. 307.
Capital,
I, p. 403; Penguin, p. 526.
MECW,
6, 1976, pp. 176, 186-8.
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis
The Representation of Reality
in Western Literature, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, 1953, p. 481.
Capital,
I, pp. 105, 112-13; Penguin, pp. 200 and 205-8.
Capital,
I, p. 162, Penguin, p. 265; Capital,
II, pp. 105-6; Penguin, II, p. 185; Capital,
III, pp. 289-91; Penguin, III, pp. 403-5.
Capital,
I, p. 76-77; Penguin, pp. 169-71.
Karl Marx, Capital,
II, FLPH, Moscow, 1957, pp. 105-6; Penguin, II, pp. 185-86.
Capital,
I, p. 594; Penguin, p. 741.
Bakhtin, p, 50.
Capital,
I, pp. 191-93; Penguin, pp. 298-300.
Bakhtin, pp.
48-49.
A disciple of Auerbach’s Mimesis
could explicate the structure and texture of Capital
to reveal alternative representations of reality. That scholar would
need to make a comparison with the tropes of Adam Smith’s The
Wealth of Nations (1776). This treatment would disturb
Auerbach’s categories.
In The House of All Nations
(1938), Christina Stead gave a fictional representation of money
capital.
Capital,
I, pp. 593, 596-7n; Penguin, pp. 741 and 744n.
Capital, I, pp. 597-98;
Penguin, p. 745.
Maurice Dobb, Political
Economy and Capitalism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1944,
pp. 137-47
Karl Marx, A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Progress
Publishers, Moscow, 1970, p. 193.
Capital,
I, p. 110; Penguin, p. 205.
MECW,
5, p. 3.
MECW, 3, p. 300.
Capital,
I, p. 110; Penguin, p. 204.
Marx, Contribution
to the Critique of Political Economy, p. 87; Capital,
II, p. 103; Penguin, p. 183.
Capital,
I, p. 110; Penguin, p. 205.
MECW,
9, 1977, p. 216.
Capital,
I, p. 52n; Penguin, p. 144n.
Capital,
I, pp. 72-73; Penguin, pp. 163-64.
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