Capital Volume I: Class 5

Reading: Capital I, ch. 7-9

In my previous readings of Capital, I have glossed over some of Marx’s more subjective reactions to the economic processes he is describing, i.e. the fact that he hates them. The core purpose of Volume I is to analyze the extraction of surplus value from workers by capitalists and what it leads to. It takes significant economic analysis to get to this point and he continues with much more afterward.

But the interstices between his various economic conclusions are filled with bitter ironies and impassioned outrage at the system that he sees spreading all over the world. For example, on pages 311-312, in the process of describing how physical (constant) capital gets used up over the course of its productive lifetime, he veers into the plight of variable capital, i.e. people:

“The lifetime of an instrument of labour is thus spent in the repetition of a greater or lesser number of similar operations. The instrument suffers the same fate as the man. Every day brings a man twenty-four hours nearer his grave, although no one can tell accurately, merely by looking at a man, how many days he has still to travel on that road. This difficulty, however, does not prevent life insurance companies from using the theory of averages to draw very accurate, and what is more, very profitable conclusions about the length of a man’s life. So it is with the instruments of labour.”

At the same time as he takes the cold, calculated view of the economist, he takes the fiery and enraged view of a revolutionary. He hates the commodification of labor-power. He starts off the book by analyzing commodities to establish the fact that pervasive commodification of everything is the norm under capitalism. When he gets to labor-power his tone becomes so bitterly ironic because he thinks it is totally degrading to commodify someone’s life, to treat their vital force, their very metabolic process of existence as an object, which then allows it to be degraded. The objectification of the worker in this way allows for the exploitation and brutality of capitalism because it disappears the real horrifying experience of the worker’s life into the standardized political-economic discourse that defines our social relations under capitalism.

A bit later, he states, “While productive labour is changing the means of production into constituent elements of a new product, their value undergoes a metempsychosis. It deserts the consumed body to occupy the newly created one. But this transmigration takes place, as it were, behind the back of the actual labour in progress.” (314)

I had to look up “metempsychosis.” According to Wikipedia, it refers to the “transmigration of the soul, especially its reincarnation after death.”

We might say there are parallel critiques in Marxism: that of the immaterial religious notion of a soul distinct from the body and that of the immaterial capitalist notion of value as distinct from object. Through metempsychosis, both soul and value are preserved after the death of the material object. Marx was an atheist and rejected the immaterial notion of a soul as occult because it was a means of deceiving the working class into believing they would be rewarded after a life of exploitation. Perhaps he had similar feelings about these capitalist ideas of value: while he accepts that value exists as a reified concept that regulates capitalist social relations, he rejects it as a fundamentally false, absurd, idealist fantasy on the same level as the notion of gods or ghosts. Exchange value is a made-up concept that allows for commodity exchange—nothing more, nothing less. It has no connection to any intrinsic value. This is a fundamental principle of historical materialism: that ideas arise from the social relations of production. They are human-made—not inherent in nature.

The absurdity of commodification is most clearly seen when labor-power is commodified. The value of humans is reduced to how much it costs to keep them alive and working. Capitalism is cruel. Instead of accepting this capitalist ideology, Marx wants us to focus on the material conditions of production that, if fully exposed, show the brutal exploitation of the worker. The diversion created by commodification disappears this brutality. Religion and ideology therefore work in the same way and are expressions of idealism.

I wanted to briefly take up another topic raised by Harvey in class 4: the Soviet question. His claim is that the Soviet bureaucracy incorporated the economic logic of capitalism by accepting the labor theory of value as true and placing it at the center of their planning. He did not fully explain this because it was in answer to a question from a student, but my understanding is that Harvey believes a true socialist society would reject this logic in favor of a more expansive view of value. He believes that the Soviets misread Marx and assumed he was saying that it is a good thing that all value comes from labor and this should be fully recognized by society. Instead, what he really meant was that the entire basis of the capitalist value system should be replaced.

He may be correct that the bureaucracy did this during the Stalinist period, especially given Stalin’s false claim that the Soviet Union had achieved communism, and the shallow understanding of Marxism that the bureaucrats had. However, Lenin and Trotsky’s perspectives were quite different. Both men openly stated that what had been achieved in the Soviet Union was not communism, but the conquest by the working class of state power. This situation was summed up by Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed: “It would be truer, therefore, to name the present Soviet regime in all its contradictoriness, not a socialist regime, but a preparatory regime transitional from capitalism to socialism.” (50) It was not socialist or communist, but the capitalists no longer had control over the state. It was in the hands of the organized working class.

As such, the Soviet Union had not revolutionized the ideological superstructure that had sustained capitalism. Instead it was still operating on the basis of what Marx had predicted would be the case immediately after a revolution, “bourgeois law.” Trotsky expands on this concept: “The state assumes directly and from the very beginning a dual character: socialistic, insofar as it defends social property in the means of production; bourgeois, insofar as the distribution of life’s goods is carried out with a capitalistic measure of value and all the consequences ensuing therefrom.” (56)

From this it is clear that there was a strong awareness among the original Bolsheviks that capitalist economic relations persisted and would persist for some time until the Soviet Union developed its productive forces to a sufficient level. Lenin described that while bourgeois law would be defined by “from each according to ability, to each according to ability,” communism would be defined by “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” This move from a workers state to socialism and communism was the really tricky part and it never happened. But that is another story.

I would be curious to hear Harvey’s opinion is on how capitalist society could transition from a state of bourgeois law to one defined by his notion of a more expansive understanding of value.