short essay questions

EAS 248

K.Kawashima

Notes #1 1. Reading Marx’s Capital, Preface to the First German Edition

The Preface to the first edition of Capital is important because it explains the specific object of Marx’s study, as well as his method. The specific object of his study is the “capitalist mode of production, and the forms of intercourse (Verkehr) that correspond to it.” This announces to the reader that Marx’s study is going to study (a) capitalist production and (b) capitalist exchange or “intercourse”, which also connotes “commerce”, “trade”, and “traffic”. The “totality” of Marx’s study in Capital is thus capitalist production and the forms of exchange that correspond to production. To understand Capital, we have to understand that capitalist mode of production (CMP) is inseparable from capitalist exchange, and vice versa. If we only pay attention to one over the other, then we will miss the ultimate purpose of Marx’s study.

Second, in the Preface, notice how Marx discusses his methodology. Interestingly, he says his method borrows from the natural sciences, and not from economic science or even social science. He says that he will study the CMP and its forms of exchange in its “pure form”. (In the original German, the phrase is closer to “typical form”). In this sense, Marx is telling us that he is NOT studying capital in its historical development, but rather the CMP and its forms of exchange in a theoretically purified manner, combined, then, with historical illustrations from England. Capitalism in England provides the primary historical illustrations for Marx because it is in England that capital not only becomes industrial for the first time, but because industrial capital reveals an historical epoch of capitalism as a world-historical system. As we will discuss later, what marks this epoch is the commodification of labour power, or the transformation of labour power into a commodity.

It is absolutely crucial to understand, therefore, that in Capital, Marx is not presenting a history of capitalism in England. Rather, Marx’s is studying the CMP and its forms of exchange in a theoretically distilled form, as if it was protected from historical changes, as if it could be grasped as a pure image, frozen in time. Marx will then give this formal analysis historical examples from England, but the point is that the image he provides is not to be mistaken for actual, real history. Rather, the image he gives is a theoretical bannister to grasp when analyzing a specific, historical and concrete situation.

On classes and individuals: As Marx says,

To prevent possible misunderstanding, let me say this. I do not by any means depct the capitalist and the landowner in rosy colours. But individuals are dealt with here only insofar as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers [Trager] of particular class-relations and interests. My standpoint, from which the development of the economic formation of society is viewed as as process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he remains, socially speaking, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.”

In writing Capital, Marx treats the individual as a bearer of particular class relations and interests, but also a result or effect of these class relations. The individual itself is not responsible for these relations; rather, the individual is used as a bearer [Trager] to make and solidify relations between classes and their interests. (Foucault would later show how apparatuses of power constantly “individuate” populations, precisely so as to produce “disciplined”, individual bearers of these relations, i.e, the question of the subject.)

For Marx, the inner interconnections of the CMP and its forms of exchange cannot be thought apart from individuals, and yet these individuals are always bearers of class relations, precisely through their participation in the CMP and its forms of exchange. As a theoretical whole, Marx’s goal in Capital is to rigorously construct a “pure image” of capital in terms of its “inner laws of motion”, which all become inter- connected in a vast, theoretical totality.

The political question is how to treat this theoretical totality? Here, Marx emphatically opposes the classical, bourgeois political economists. As Marx once wrote, in a letter to Kugelman in the summer of 1858, when the classical political economists (e.g., Adam Smith and Ricardo, especially), and especially their “vulgar” followers, discovered the inner interconnected of laws of motion of capital, a distinctly un- scientific outlook led them to believe that these laws were the ultimate and eternally natural expression of economic life itself, precluding any thought of its transitoriness or possibility to change. Marx’s political intervention erupts here by asking, if this is the case, then why have science at all? Why, especially, have the science of history at all? As Marx wrote:

The vulgar economist thinks he has made a great discovery when, in light of the revelation of the inner interconnection...he holds fast to appearance, and takes it for the ultimate. Why, then, have science at all?....Once interconnection is grasped, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions collapses before their collapse in practice. Here, therefore, it is absolutely in the interest of the ruling classes to perpetuate a senseless confusion. And for what other purpose are the sycophantic babblers paid, who have no other scientific trump to play save that, in political economy, one should not think at all?

As Marx says, when the inner interconnections of the world of capital can be identified and discovered, “All theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions collapses before their collapse in practice.” What collapses? Belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions.

This collapse of belief in the necessity of existing conditions “structurally” gives rise to a belief in the possibility and necessity of revolution, of revolutionizing “the capitalist mode of production and the forms of intercourse corresponding to it.” This is what the ruling classes fear, and thus it is in their class interests to “perpetuate a senseless confusion.” The possibility and necessity of revolution, and the belief in a new system that emerges from within the contradictory being of capitalism, shows that, “within the ruling classes themselves, the foreboding is emerging that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and constantly engaged in a process of change.” (Preface, 93 Penguin).

The paradoxical nature of Marx’s method resides in the fact that he must present the CMP and its forms of exchange as an a-historical “logic”, precisely in order to show how this logic comes into being as an historical being, as a finite being, and, as such, as an historical being inevitably bound to death. For Marx (and especially for Lenin after him), this death can only be achieved in the historical process of organized revolution.

Key words: a) capitalist mode of production b) forms of exchange corresponding to capitalist production c) the method of the natural sciences and “scientific” method d) historical illustration from England e) belief f) “necessity” (of existing conditions) g) (possibility and necessity of) revolution

2. Chapter 1, “The Commodity”

The key question animating these opening pages of Capital is the question of value. Capitalism is an economic system that is constantly producing, and reproducing, values. the question is then how do these values come into being?

The answer to this question is found in Marx’s analysis of the commodity-form, which is the “cell” of the capitalist “organism.” The commodity is thus not simply a thing, but a form, which has two components, use-value and exchange-value. As Marx will show in Chapter 1, these two components of the commodity-form reveal that the commodity contains a social relation of exchange of “equivalents”, a relation that is nonetheless “hidden” within the commodity-as-product-of-labour, as a “thing”. Thus, the use-value of any given commodity is nothing unless it can be exchanged with an equivalent value. That is, the value of a commodity resides not simply in the labour time required to produce it. It must also be exchanged for an equivalent form of value, which will eventually be shown to become the “money-form”. Marx therefore logically unfolds the chains of equivalence between commodities in order to eventually show how the form of money itself derives from the form of the commodity. This logical movement can be expressed in Marx’s analysis of “forms of value”:

a) the simple, isolated, contingent form of value: 1 coat = 20 yards of linen

Here, the coat represents the “relative form of value” while the 20 yards of linen

represents the “equivalent form of value”. The value of 1 coat is “expressed” not in itself, but rather in the body of the 20 yards of linen. This equation is “uni-directional”, meaning that this equation always begins from what we can call the “position of selling”, which always occupies the position of the “relative form of value”.

b) the expanded form of value: 1 coat = 20 yards of linen = 1/4 pound of iron = x amount

of C = y amount of D, etc.. c) The General Form of Value: 1 coat, 10 lbs of tea, 40 lbs of coffee, 1 quarter of corn, etc. all = 20 yards of linen d) The Money Form 1 coat, 10 lbs of tea, 40 lbs of coffee, 1 quarter of corn, etc. all = 2 ounces of gold

The point of this logical “unfolding” of the commodity-form in terms of chains of equivalence is to show how the FORM OF MONEY is really the logical result of the circulation and exchange of COMMODITIES. Money, therefore, is not thinkable without the commodity-form; money derives from the commodity-form, and is not independent of it.

In sum, Marx begins his formal analysis of the commodity with the distinction between use-value and exchange value. This distinction is then mapped onto the distinction between the “relative form of value” (1 coat) and the “equivalent form of value” (20 yards of linen). Whatever commodity occupies the “equivalent form of value” is already, “structurally” the position of the money-form.

Marx then says that the formula of commodity circulation is C-M-C (or Commodity- Money-Commodity).

The general formula of capital, however, is M-C-M’, in which M’ = m + △m. This is also the formula of “merchant capital”.