Reading: Capital I, ch. 4-6; Capital II, ch. 1; Capital I, “Appendix: Results of the Immediate Process of Production”; Capital I, ch. 19-21; Grundrisse, pp. 239-272; Limits to Capital, pp. 20-24
This week’s reading brought to the front of my mind Marx’s dialectical method. Throughout the book, he uses a plethora of literary devices to make his point: metaphors, personification, reference to ghosts, etc. Some might say this is a strange approach for a materialist. Shouldn’t he concern himself with the material processes of production and not the ideas in people’s heads?
My sense is that he is trying to make the unconscious conscious. In Marxist terms, ideology or false consciousness is the unconscious. Ideology is a view of the world that is unconscious of the material processes that define it. It uses false concepts to conceal scary or painful experiences and it labels them as taboo, experiences that, if we were to see them and talk about them on a daily basis, we might be prompted to make a change. So, ideology and unconsciousness are ways we have of preventing change.
There is an undertone throughout the book of attempting to overturn this ideology and expose it for what it is. He accepts all our bourgeois projections and fantasies as real projections and then delves into the secret abode of production to show how they are really just false notions.
At the same time, much of his use of personification is to show that there is a certain logic to the system, that the process of capital as self-valorizing value dominates all participants, from the worker to the capitalist. It envelops all in its expansionary maelstrom and takes on a sort of autonomy. The system of social relations dominates the conscious wills of the people involved.
But on the topic of ideology, there are some excellent passages in Appendix: Results of the Immediate Process of Production. Specifically, he exposes the flat, decontextualized ideological conceptualizations of the bourgeois economists, including David Ricardo by contrasting his notion of the process of capital to their notion of capital as a bunch of things that are brought together in production: raw materials, labor and means of production. The bourgeois understanding is that any time these three elements come together, there is capital formation. This would imply that capital is present in slave, feudal or individual modes of production in addition to the capitalist mode. But in fact, Marx explains, these elements only constitute capital if they are labored on in the capitalist production process, i.e. the self-valorization process unique to the capitalist mode of production whereby labor expands value and capitalists appropriate a portion of it for themselves. The purpose of this bourgeois obfuscation is to disappear the unique exploitative nature of the capitalist valorization process and to equate this process with all other forms of the labor process.
Drawing out this point, he argues that bourgeois economists consciously view the production process in its purely physical terms, i.e. workers act on inert material to produce a product. But if you consider the social relationships of production, the real action is by the physical means of production upon the worker. Again, we can see Marx’s use of dialectics here. The bourgeois notion of capital mentioned above is a manifestation of ideology: it converts an exploitative process into one that is an expression of freedom, i.e. free worker comes to the market and freely sells his labor to the free capitalist who freely exchanges the fruits of the labor for money. Nothing wrong here, right? But Marx argues that the relationships between the people involved in the production process are more important than the things themselves. Bourgeois economics leaves out the relationships and just focuses on isolated things. This goes to the fact that the worker is not in fact free to sell his labor-power on the market. He has to. He has no choice. If he were free, then yes, he would be the one who controls the labor process. But since he is not free, and he is in fact forced into it by circumstance, the labor process controls him:
“The situation looks quite different in the valorization process. Here it is not the worker who makes use of the means of production, but the means of production that make use of the worker… objective labour maintains and fortifies itself by drawing off living labour; it is thus that it becomes value valorizing itself, capital, and functions as such. The means of production become no more than leeches drawing off as large an amount of living labour as they can. Living labour for its part ceases to be anything more than a means by which to increase, and thereby capitalize, already existing values… Consequently it spells the impoverishment of the worker who creates value as value alien to himself.” (988)
Marx’s technique of contextualization, placing these supposedly free individuals into their social contexts, applies to today’s “riots” and “looting.” We are often shown decontextualized, isolated images of people breaking windows, stealing merchandise or throwing rocks at police. We are told by the capitalist media that these free individuals have made the wrong choice of engaging in violence. But placed in the context of the social relationships of production, we can see that they are reacting to a society that dominates, impoverishes and exploits them and whose police terrorize them when they express their frustration. The notion that all individuals are free and somehow immune to the social conditions in which they exist is the height of bourgeois ignorance. In simple Marxist terms, being determines consciousness.
World of Lenidzky 