Introductory remarks on Part Two of Karl Marx’s Capital, volume one

(This was posted to the Introduction to Marxism mailing list, an online class. For more information go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marxism_class/.)

Before getting into Part two of Capital, which deals with the generation of capital (or to use Marx’s notation M-C-M’), I want to offer some prefatory comments on how this relates to the real world–particularly with respect to the word capital.

In the parlance of the bourgeois academy and press, capital is pretty much associated with the funds necessary to produce commodities, or with the factories, mines, etc. that are used to produce such commodities. A manufacturer goes to Goldman-Sachs to raise capital; alternatively, capital indicates all of the inputs necessary to produce goods. In this respect, labor is a constituent part of the production. A capitalist brings together money, machines and workers in order to compete in the marketplace and make the kind of profits that will keep share holders happy. In this scheme of things, a worker, a photocopier and a potted plant amount to the same thing. It was Marx’s distinction to challenge this schema and to put the worker at the center.

Bourgeois economics also obfuscates the class distinction between worker and capitalist by representing workers as incipient capitalists. Since both capitalist and worker have the capacity to work, there is only a difference in degree between a Bill Gates and some lowly programmer working for Microsoft. Bourgeois society presents itself as a kind of grand competition in which everybody competes to become king of the mountain. This is deeply engrained in the popular culture as television shows like Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice” would indicate.

Furthermore, bourgeois sociology plays an important role in sustaining these illusions by representing class in terms of income. A “middle class” person is defined by a certain salary even though this criterion might be satisfied by both a shopkeeper (a true middle class person) and a truck-driving member of the Teamsters Union making $80,000 per year. It is no big surprise that given the hegemony of bourgeois ideology that the truck-driver often hopes to own their own rig so that they too can crawl their way to the top. When my own computer programming trade was much more in demand 30 years ago, I found myself more often than not in a desk next to somebody who was running his or her own little subcontracting business in the hopes that they could eventually live entirely off the profits generated by their sideline. This often went hand in hand with real estate investments. Needless to say, when downsizing began to thin the ranks of the programming field some years later, there was never an attempt to organize a trade union since middle-class individualism so permeated the programming ranks.

Even when bourgeois economics distinguished between the social role of capitalist and worker, it failed to acknowledge the intrinsic antagonism between the two. Ricardo, who developed a kind of labor theory of value without teeth, portrayed the two classes as having mutual interests in the development of “wealth” in chapter five (”Of Wages”) of “On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation .”

Ricardo writes, “When wages rise, it is generally because the increase of wealth and capital have occasioned a new demand for labour, which will, infallibly be attended with an increased production of commodities.” But in order for this happy state of affairs to transpire, “wages should be left to the fair and free competition of the market, and should never be controlled by the interference of the legislature.” And what could get in the way of this “fair and free competition of the market”? Well, for one there are the Poor Laws, which Ricardo described as follows:

The clear and direct tendency of the poor laws, is in direct opposition to these obvious principles: it is not, as the legislature benevolently intended, to amend the condition of the poor, but to deteriorate the condition of both poor and rich; instead of making the poor rich, they are calculated to make the rich poor; and whilst the present laws are in force, it is quite in the natural order of things that the fund for the maintenance of the poor should progressively increase, till it has absorbed all the net revenue of the country, or at least so much of it as the state shall leave to us, after satisfying its own never failing demands for the public expenditure.

Considering the fact that Bill Clinton was largely responsible for dismantling our modern Poor Laws in the form of the Welfare system and that Obama considers “tax money wasted by a welfare agency” or on the Pentagon to be equivalent, it appears that Ricardo’s hostility to the poor is still with us.

Marx wrote “The German Ideology ” in 1845 in a bid to help men and women “revolt” against “the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away.” Primarily, this meant establishing materialism as a guide to understanding the world, as opposed to the dominant idealist trend in German philosophy. To start with, it was necessary to understand that humanity distinguished itself from animals as soon as it “began to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.”

It was clear that unlike Ricardo, Marx saw the creation of the “means of subsistence” as a bitter struggle between the two major classes of society in which the workers were always getting shafted. As a young man, Marx’s apparent sympathy for the proletariat was a function of his own psychology and personality just as much as was the case for Che Guevara, who decided to devote his life to the Latin American working class after discovering their terrible poverty riding across Latin America on his beat up Triumph motorcycle in 1952.

In the section titled “The Real Basis of Ideology”, Marx writes about the rise of a working class. While there is no reference to M-C-M’, it is obvious that he views the capitalist system as benefiting only those who own the means of production, who in effect become the new aristocracy on the basis of a wage relationship rather than through the seizure of a portion of a serf’s crop:

Simultaneously with the beginning of manufactures there was a period of vagabondage caused by the abolition of the feudal bodies of retainers, the disbanding of the swollen armies which had flocked to serve the kings against their vassals, the improvement of agriculture, and the transformation of great strips of tillage into pasture land. From this alone it is clear how this vagabondage is strictly connected with the disintegration of the feudal system. As early as the thirteenth century we find isolated epochs of this kind, but only at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth does this vagabondage make a general and permanent appearance. These vagabonds, who were so numerous that, for instance, Henry VIII of England had 72,000 of them hanged, were only prevailed upon to work with the greatest difficulty and through the most extreme necessity, and then only after long resistance. The rapid rise of manufactures, particularly in England, absorbed them gradually.

In 1845, the son of a textile manufacturer named Frederic Engels was drawing identical conclusions about the mutual antagonism of worker and capitalist in a work called “Conditions of the Working Class in England ” that also evoked Che’s “Motorcycle Diaries”. Engels wrote:

On Monday, Jan. 15th, 1844, two boys were brought before the police magistrate because, being in a starving condition, they had stolen and immediately devoured a half-cooked calf’s foot from a shop. The magistrate felt called upon to investigate the case further, and received the following details from the policeman: The mother of the two boys was the widow of an ex-soldier, afterwards policeman, and had had a very hard time since the death of her husband, to provide for her nine children. She lived at No. 2 Pool’s Place, Quaker Court, Spitalfields, in the utmost poverty. When the policeman came to her, he found her with six of her children literally huddled together in a little back room, with no furniture but two old rush-bottomed chairs with the seats gone, a small table with two legs broken, a broken cup, and a small dish. On the hearth was scarcely a spark of fire, and in one corner lay as many old rags as would fill a woman’s apron, which served the whole family as a bed. For bed clothing they had only their scanty day clothing. The poor woman told him that she had been forced to sell her bedstead the year before to buy food. Her bedding she had pawned with the victualler for food. In short, everything had gone for food. The magistrate ordered the woman a considerable provision from the poor-box.

Suffice it to say that David Ricardo’s writings were innocent of such observations. Whether he was aware of them and deliberately chose not to write about them is a matter for scholars to decide. The power of denial runs very deep in bourgeois society, as commentary on the occupation of Iraq from neoconservative hawks to weak-kneed liberals reflects.

Our intellectual and political tradition, taking a stand against “the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings” of bourgeois society operates on a totally different basis. In order to help place ourselves better in that tradition, I will be posting some readings and some questions for discussion on Part two of Karl Marx’s Capital.