[00:00] (dramatic music)
[00:13] - You only have to buy one book,
[00:15] and I'm very happy to hold it in my hands
[00:16] because it took me six years of work
[00:19] with a colleague who did
an amazing translation,
[00:22] which I checked meticulously
against the German
[00:24] and argued with him on
and off for six years.
[00:30] It's a good translation
in a number of ways
[00:32] that the other translations weren't.
[00:34] There are only really two
viable translations before this.
[00:38] I'm not gonna spend much
time talking about that,
[00:40] but this opens up the whole panoply
[00:42] of Marx's voices and styles,
[00:45] including his humor,
[00:46] his cutthroat insult capacity,
[00:51] his polemics, his storytelling,
[00:55] his myth making, and other things.
[00:59] You only have to read one book,
[01:00] but you need to read it
slowly and repeatedly,
[01:02] as maybe you noticed for today.
[01:04] It's funny to start a book
with the hardest part,
[01:08] that's something we don't usually do.
[01:09] Marx did that and then almost
instantly regretted it.
[01:12] He wrote to some friends after,
[01:14] "Maybe people should
start with Chapter 5."
[01:18] Chapter 1 is a doozy.
[01:19] It's long and it's full of
problems that Marx hadn't,
[01:24] he had worked out and
maybe just worked out
[01:28] and he hadn't found the
best mode of presentation.
[01:32] Although if you've read the "Grundrisse,"
[01:34] which he wrote in the '50s, the late '50s,
[01:37] you'll notice that this
is much better laid out
[01:40] than the "Grundrisse."
[01:43] I recommend that you read
this with other people.
[01:46] What better way to contribute
[01:49] different understandings
together and build one?
[01:53] What better way to produce solidarity?
[01:55] A lot of solidarity has
been produced over 150 years
[01:59] of reading this book.
[02:00] My colleague Michael Denning,
[02:02] has a great article which I'll post
[02:04] about workers getting together in groups
[02:07] and reading this book.
[02:11] Okay, I'm gonna say a little bit about
[02:13] what kind of course this is.
[02:14] This is a text course.
[02:16] If you're not into texts,
[02:19] I don't mean SMSs,
[02:22] this is not the course for you,
[02:24] but I imagine you're all text people
[02:26] and probably also commentary people
[02:28] given that the internet
[02:29] is just a big maybe
wasteland of commentary.
[02:32] But the practice of commentary
has really come back,
[02:35] and we are going to comment this text.
[02:37] We won't go through it line by line,
[02:38] but I will look at passages in class,
[02:40] and so you should bring
your book with you.
[02:43] If you have back problems,
[02:46] ask someone to carry it for you.
[02:49] And we will be actually opening
the book and looking down,
[02:52] so you will start to have
[02:53] repetitive worker injuries to your neck
[02:56] because you'll be going like that.
[02:58] You'll have the hunched over thing, right?
[03:01] And your arms and shoulders
will start to hurt
[03:03] because of carrying this.
[03:04] But what a good way to move through
[03:07] the pains of work
towards something better.
[03:11] I wanna start with some preliminaries
[03:15] and divide the book and our work
[03:17] into two sides, two elements.
[03:21] One is the capital system.
[03:25] This is what we'll call it.
[03:26] Capitalism, as you may
know, is a common word.
[03:30] It's something people talk about
[03:32] sometimes with a little bit
of rue and regret and anger,
[03:36] sometimes with joy and
hope and determination,
[03:42] often with some dogmatic attachments.
[03:44] But this is really a system
[03:47] and it isn't a belief,
[03:49] let's put it that way.
[03:52] It's a system that was
not given to us by Marx,
[03:54] but given to us by History,
maybe with a capital H.
[03:57] And the roots to it are complicated,
[04:00] the roots to this system
[04:02] that History has thrown up for us
[04:04] and in which we live.
[04:06] One route,
[04:08] I still think the best route,
[04:10] to get to the capitalist system
[04:11] is through what I call
the capital venture,
[04:14] which is like an entrepreneurial
exercise on Marx's part
[04:18] to understand it.
[04:20] These two go together,
[04:21] the capital system gets constructed
[04:23] in Marx's capital venture.
[04:25] It has to get constructed somewhere.
[04:27] Where does capitalism live as a whole?
[04:29] It lives here
[04:31] because you'll never see
any more than a part of it
[04:33] and you won't see it as what it is.
[04:36] So Marx made it his task
[04:38] to make it accessible to you in a book,
[04:41] and this is only Volume 1, as you know.
[04:43] Next semester, Volume 2 and then Volume 3
[04:46] and then we start
writing Volume 4 together
[04:49] in the second year.
[04:51] These three volumes out
of a planned four volumes
[04:55] are the place, the only
place you can find the system
[04:58] altogether analyzed and laid out for you
[05:01] in its functions and
parts and ways of being,
[05:06] how it affects the
people who live under it.
[05:09] The capital venture, as
opposed to the capital system,
[05:11] was given to us by Marx
[05:14] through a lot of reflection in sources
[05:20] that he took up in political economy,
[05:23] chiefly English political economy,
[05:25] in German philosophy,
[05:28] in journalism,
[05:30] in these amazing texts called
the Factory Inspector Reports,
[05:35] which he relied on,
[05:37] through the editing work
[05:38] of his daughters and his wife Jenny,
[05:41] through reflecting it back
[05:44] in the mind of and in the letters
[05:46] of his friend Friedrich Engels.
[05:50] You know, you could be named
one or two things in Germany,
[05:53] Friedrich, Karl,
[05:54] there were some Heinrichs,
[05:56] get used talking about
people by their last name.
[06:01] He among all the people that he befriended
[06:04] and then cursed out one way or the other,
[06:06] Engels was the only one
that he never divorced.
[06:11] And he passed a lot of
his ideas through Engels.
[06:13] It was a very important
philosophical friendship.
[06:19] The capital system as
a fully fledged system
[06:21] is only a few centuries old.
[06:24] You can date it from
somewhere in the 18th century,
[06:27] that all its parts are together,
[06:29] they're all working,
[06:30] and it starts to be a
machine or an organism.
[06:32] We're gonna go back and forth
between the two figures,
[06:35] a machine or an organism,
[06:37] that begins to devour its outside,
[06:42] take the outside into it ceaselessly.
[06:47] Okay, so the first basic insight
[06:50] that Marx had about the capital system
[06:51] was that it was too big and too complex
[06:55] and also to cunning
for anybody to observe.
[06:58] There was no standpoint
[07:00] from which you could
observe the capital system.
[07:03] You feel some of its effects
on your body when you work,
[07:07] when you learn how to sit still
in kindergarten, et cetera,
[07:10] you feel some of its effects
in your bank account.
[07:15] You would feel an effect if
you get evicted from your home
[07:18] in a financial crisis.
[07:19] In many ways you feel the effects,
[07:20] but you can't tell why most of the time.
[07:24] The why involves the connections
that make up the whole.
[07:29] And the problem with the
whole is that it's enormous,
[07:31] has many complex parts.
[07:34] Is that its complexity is higher
[07:37] than any of the political
economists gave it credit for.
[07:40] That's why Marx had to
turn to some other logics,
[07:44] including Hegelian logic.
[07:48] And there's a third reason
why you can't observe capital,
[07:51] the capital system,
[07:52] and that is that it likes to hide.
[07:55] It really likes to hide.
[07:56] In fact, hiding is one of the ways
[07:58] that it carries out its operations.
[08:00] Its operations depend on
a certain concealment.
[08:04] It is a phenomenal logical operation too.
[08:07] Its phenomenological operations
[08:09] are essential to its economic
and social operations.
[08:13] You look at it and you see something
[08:14] that isn't the way it actually operates,
[08:17] except the way it doesn't operate
[08:19] that you're seeing is the way it operates.
[08:22] You can see where the
complexity is coming in here.
[08:25] Does that make sense?
[08:26] Marx calls these necessary
appearances or real appearances,
[08:31] and that has a couple
of consequences for us
[08:33] when we're studying capital,
[08:35] it does not make sense to call
yourself an anti-capitalist.
[08:39] You can't be anti something
you can't even encounter.
[08:43] You can't be anti something
[08:45] that even if you can encounter it
[08:46] by reading all these books,
[08:49] if you take away its appearances,
[08:53] it still operates.
[08:56] It operates anyway.
[08:58] That it's just by knowing
about it doesn't stop it.
[09:01] Just by knowing the truth
about it doesn't stop it.
[09:04] In that sense,
[09:05] it's not like Marx at
a certain early point
[09:07] fantasized about religion
[09:08] that if you showed it to be illusioned
[09:11] that people would be like,
"Well, okay, I don't need that."
[09:14] Which is not true.
[09:15] It's not true that religion's
all illusion either.
[09:19] Taking away appearances
does not hurt it mortally.
[09:26] We will talk about the capital system
[09:28] as a historical subject,
[09:31] not an object.
[09:33] It is something like a king or a god
[09:38] that does things,
[09:39] it does things to us.
[09:41] It's a funny, personified,
impersonal set of processes
[09:44] that catches up what we consider persons,
[09:47] people, humans, psyches, souls in its web
[09:52] and produces actions
through its agency in us,
[09:57] a very peculiar kind of subject,
[10:01] a historical subject.
[10:03] Marx will personify capital a lot,
[10:06] and personification is a
tool he uses for critique.
[10:09] One of the benefits of this translation,
[10:10] I can say them because I
wasn't actually the translator.
[10:13] One of the benefits of this translation
[10:15] is that the personifications
are made very clear.
[10:17] When Marx speaks in the
voice of a commodity,
[10:20] when capitalism speaks,
[10:24] you can see exactly the maneuver,
[10:27] the Marxian maneuver.
[10:28] This is the system that's in
charge and makes the decisions
[10:31] so he treats it like
the only person around,
[10:33] the only person left, capital.
[10:36] But we shouldn't capitulate to this
[10:39] and start asking it out on dates
[10:41] or feeding it dinner.
[10:43] We should be suspicious
[10:46] also because even though
Marx personifies it
[10:49] as a critical gesture,
[10:50] it is an impersonal
machine, it doesn't care,
[10:52] so it's missing some personal gestures,
[10:55] it does not care.
[10:56] It doesn't care about anything, in fact.
[11:00] It has a very high degree
of impersonal necessity,
[11:04] the system, it keeps going,
[11:05] it wants to keep going,
[11:08] but it doesn't really have affect.
[11:13] So Marx's capital venture
[11:14] is the adventure of finding the system
[11:18] and putting it on display in all its parts
[11:20] and its interactions,
[11:22] showing where the necessities
are and how they're made
[11:25] and where the contingencies are.
[11:27] Obviously, his aim is
ultimately revolutionary,
[11:31] but as you may know,
[11:32] if you've read "The Communist Manifesto"
[11:35] and you've now read the
first chapter of this,
[11:37] it's a very different tone.
[11:39] He is not calling for
people to gather together
[11:41] and overthrow anything.
[11:42] First of all, you can't see
what there is to overthrow.
[11:46] He hasn't described it yet,
[11:48] so maybe after these books are done,
[11:50] someone could come along,
[11:52] and people have come along, as you know,
[11:54] to say, "Okay, now that we see this,
[11:56] here's how we overthrow it."
[11:57] But Marx came to a point late in his life
[12:00] in which after many
revolutionary disappointments,
[12:03] many, that he wasn't gonna
work on that anymore.
[12:08] What he was gonna do
is describe the system
[12:10] in a sense to show why the revolutions
[12:13] had not been successful.
[12:15] So in that regard,
[12:17] you have to put your activist
hope a little bit to the side
[12:22] and accept this as the
most pessimistic book
[12:26] you'll ever read.
[12:28] I'm sorry to say that,
[12:29] but I like to think that
pessimism leads to realism,
[12:34] and realism can lead to real change.
[12:37] Marx certainly thought so.
[12:42] He also spends a lot of time
[12:44] putting on display the
way capitalism hides
[12:46] because that's just one of its functions.
[12:48] Does that make sense?
[12:50] You can't respond by
debunking and exposing,
[12:54] that's not a revolutionary activity.
[12:58] But it is part of the analysis
[13:00] to see how the parts that hide
[13:03] and the parts that show
[13:04] are related to one another,
[13:05] and how it motivates certain
actors in capitalism,
[13:08] like labor, like owners,
[13:10] like the apologists for capital,
[13:15] what he calls sometimes vulgar economists.
[13:19] The best way to do this is unfortunately
[13:23] I just realized that the subtitle
[13:25] didn't make it onto the cover,
[13:27] but in fact the original title for this
[13:28] was "Critique of Political Economy,"
[13:30] and then later he decided,
[13:32] "Well, this is about capital too."
[13:34] But you can see both activities
[13:37] that he wants to take care of there.
[13:39] He wants to deal with the way
[13:41] it's been thought of in the past
[13:44] and show you how capital works.
[13:48] He thought the best way
to do it was to critique
[13:51] the accounts of capital
that had come before.
[13:56] I'm gonna say this is just preliminary
[13:59] is leading us towards looking
into the first chapter, okay?
[14:04] How many of you managed to get a book?
[14:07] Yeah, it's so funny,
[14:08] this like capitalist model,
[14:09] they said, "Oh, we only
order half of the books
[14:13] because we don't know who's gonna stay."
[14:14] I said, "It's a Capital course.
[14:15] You know, they're off,
they have to be committed,
[14:17] they would never do it otherwise."
[14:19] So they claim that they're getting
[14:20] the rest of the books for next week.
[14:26] Marx couldn't write this book
[14:28] because he was some sort of
special kind of individual,
[14:31] although he was unique,
[14:35] a kind of unique freak.
[14:37] In fact, this book is the product
[14:38] of about 30 years of work,
[14:41] 40 if you count the very
beginning to the very end
[14:45] of his work.
[14:48] It takes an enormous
amount of sitzfleisch,
[14:50] as they say in German,
[14:53] butt flesh, that is the
ability to sit in a chair
[14:57] to do that.
[15:00] It's not that he could write this book
[15:01] because he was a special person,
[15:04] he understood the world
better than anyone else.
[15:07] And it wasn't because the capital system
[15:09] was brand new when he started to write.
[15:12] It wasn't,
[15:13] it was already 100 years old, let's say,
[15:15] as a full-fledged system.
[15:19] And on top of that, you can't really see
[15:20] what's brand new when it's brand new.
[15:22] Wait 50 years to see
what all of this garbage
[15:25] about AI is worth.
[15:27] Maybe AI will be something big,
[15:29] maybe one of these pieces of writing
[15:32] will be the key to it,
[15:33] but we won't really know for 50 years.
[15:35] And so Marx came at a perfect
time about 100 years later
[15:40] after the thing had happened
[15:42] and its first theorists had theorized it.
[15:46] So it wasn't because he
had an inspired vision,
[15:48] he was situated at a juncture.
[15:51] That juncture was when the capital system
[15:53] had consolidated itself
in the 18th century,
[15:56] had ramped up in the early 19th century
[15:58] into industrial fury,
[16:01] and the first theorists had started.
[16:04] Interestingly, capitalism was theorized
[16:08] for the first time between 1776 and 1817
[16:12] between Adam Smith's "An
Inquiry into the Nature
[16:16] and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,"
[16:17] known as "The Wealth of Nations,"
[16:19] and David Ricardo's "On the Principles
[16:21] of Political Economy
and Taxation" in 1817,
[16:24] which is strangely coeval
[16:26] with the American Revolution, 1776,
[16:29] and the opening of the New
York Stock Exchange, 1817,
[16:33] whatever you want to say
about the birth of capital
[16:35] and the US American way of life.
[16:39] It is true that those were the poles
[16:41] of the first theorization of capital
[16:44] between Smith and Ricardo,
[16:46] which Marx knew well
[16:47] and both had spawned schools
[16:50] of political economic study.
[16:54] What's the good of the
first theorists of anything?
[16:57] Well, they name the topic,
[16:59] they say it's a thing,
[17:00] and they give you a first approximation
[17:03] of what it might look like to study it.
[17:06] They invented this course,
[17:07] and Marx more than anything,
[17:10] not more than anything,
[17:11] but in addition to writing in German
[17:13] is writing in English.
[17:15] Even though in German,
[17:16] he's using the terms and the phrases
[17:18] and the grammar of English
political economy in this book.
[17:21] He does use a lot of terms in English
[17:24] and leaves them in
English in the original.
[17:28] What he liked about the
political economists
[17:30] was the unhealthy mixture
of rightness and wrongness
[17:34] in what they wrote about.
[17:37] Because when faced with
a giant impersonal system
[17:40] that's difficult to see,
[17:41] that was taking over the world,
[17:43] making labor look totally different,
[17:46] making wealth look totally different,
[17:47] making all your decision
making look different,
[17:49] making agricultural work look different,
[17:52] there was nowhere to exactly look for it
[17:55] except in the books,
[17:58] in the people who had
started to theorize it.
[18:01] So what he meant by critique,
[18:03] this is the first meaning
of critique for Marx,
[18:05] was finding the blind spots, the stubs,
[18:08] the unworked out ideas,
[18:10] the lacking logic in the
political economists.
[18:17] That's why you have "Critique
of Political Economy"
[18:19] as really an important part of the title.
[18:22] They overstated things,
they made mistakes,
[18:24] but they saw a lot.
[18:26] For example, they saw
how important labor was
[18:30] to the capital system.
[18:33] He then compared those blind spots
[18:36] to the best evidence of his day,
[18:38] which in some ways is a lot better
[18:40] than the evidence we have today.
[18:42] There aren't that many anthropologies,
[18:46] ethnographic studies of work anymore.
[18:48] There were a lot in the 20th century.
[18:53] He compared the political economists
[18:56] to newspapers, to novels,
[18:58] which you'll see he
quotes and reminds us of,
[19:01] to ethnographies of factories,
[19:03] especially the one by his
friend Friedrich Engels,
[19:06] who wrote "The Condition of
the Working Class in England"
[19:08] in 1844, and opened Marx's eyes.
[19:12] It's a great book.
[19:13] Engels, as you probably know,
[19:15] was the son of a factory owner
[19:18] who owned factories in
Germany and in England,
[19:21] and he sent the 18 or 19-year-old
Engels out to Manchester
[19:26] to work in the factory.
[19:27] And Engels was like, "Whoa,
[19:30] this is awful, dad."
[19:34] Not the only time
[19:35] that being against your
parents changed world history,
[19:40] there was Oedipus,
[19:42] but this was a very important one.
[19:47] In this book, you will notice
[19:50] that there is one set of heroes.
[19:52] It isn't Marx, it isn't even the workers,
[19:55] it is the factory inspectors.
[19:57] They are the David Copperfields
of this gothic novel.
[20:01] They went out to the factories in England
[20:03] and they wrote the most scathing reports.
[20:05] The irony of this, just so you know,
[20:07] was that the factory inspectors
[20:08] were empowered by the House of Lords,
[20:11] which was the old aristocracy
[20:12] who wanted to get the wealth back
[20:14] from the rotten capitalists.
[20:16] So if they exposed their dastardly
treatment of the workers,
[20:20] they thought they could climb back up
[20:22] to social hegemony,
[20:25] obviously didn't work,
[20:27] but the factory inspectors
provide the most scathing,
[20:31] searing, clear sighted review
[20:34] of child labor, for example,
[20:37] of long hours, of disease,
[20:40] of injury, of hopelessness,
[20:43] of the immiseration of the workers,
[20:47] no matter how much they worked,
[20:48] they couldn't feed themselves,
[20:49] of malnutrition.
[20:51] The factory inspectors are the heroes
[20:54] and they served the purpose
[20:57] of socialism unknowingly.
[21:02] Okay, so between the descriptive accounts
[21:06] and the theoretical accounts,
[21:08] with the help of a bigger
philosophical framework,
[21:11] a different logic and
a different ontology,
[21:13] which we'll talk about today,
[21:14] Marx could describe the capital system
[21:16] in a way that it still operates today.
[21:19] I will maintain this.
[21:20] You will look around and see
if that's true for yourselves.
[21:23] In essence, it still
operates in the same way
[21:25] as is described starting in Chapter 1.
[21:29] What does a capital system do?
[21:32] We wanna talk about it in a
way that isn't just logical,
[21:35] that isn't just about its contradictions
[21:38] in the sense that it doesn't make sense.
[21:40] Oftentimes you think, "This
just doesn't make sense."
[21:45] It's not a matter of making sense,
[21:46] but the toxic effect it has
on people who live under it.
[21:51] Capitalism is a strange,
[21:52] the capital system is a strange mix
[21:55] of a toxin and a remedy.
[21:57] Sometimes it poisons you
[22:00] and then offers you the cure,
[22:02] which poisons you even worse,
[22:05] as we know.
[22:07] It feeds and clothes most of the planet,
[22:09] we have to concede this right away.
[22:12] There isn't a way you
could snap your fingers
[22:14] and have some central organization
[22:16] that suddenly took over the distribution,
[22:20] production of food and
all other necessities,
[22:24] but this comes at a cost
[22:27] of poisoning sociality according to Marx,
[22:30] that's called wage labor,
[22:32] that's the poison of human sociology.
[22:37] It generates unprecedented wealth,
[22:41] but it distributes that wealth
[22:42] in terribly uneven and
frankly preposterous ways
[22:46] that makes no sense
[22:47] and it redounds on our lives
[22:50] to the extent that we
have to do crazy things
[22:54] just to survive.
[22:55] It gives work to billions
[22:57] and is constantly about to
throw millions out of work,
[23:01] and you never know whether you're the one
[23:02] who's gonna be thrown out of work today
[23:04] or you're gonna be promoted.
[23:07] Right now in any present,
[23:09] you are in this precarious position,
[23:11] so much so,
[23:12] and that is kept from you
[23:15] in the form of our language and ideation
[23:18] where you say,
[23:19] I run one of the colleges here
[23:21] and students are always worried
about, "Will I get a job?"
[23:24] I'm like, "Get a job?
[23:25] You're giving them some,
they're getting you."
[23:28] Obviously, it doesn't work that way,
[23:30] but we believe we're
lucky when we get a job
[23:32] and we believe we should
not only have that job
[23:34] and give them everything but love it.
[23:37] You must love your work.
[23:42] As Marx says, "You're free.
[23:44] Free to sell your or die."
[23:49] The capital system divides
everything up in a different way
[23:52] and it conquers.
[23:54] It forms classes, social classes,
[23:57] it re-skills labor in the factory,
[24:00] it de-skills labor in factories,
[24:03] it occupies lands and peoples,
[24:05] it extracts resources,
[24:06] all this stuff we know.
[24:07] It uses race, gender, ethnicity,
[24:10] country of origin to distribute
wealth in different ways,
[24:15] unevenly, and not just wealth but labor.
[24:18] We should think not only of the
distribution of the outcome,
[24:22] but the distribution of the input,
[24:26] so labor.
[24:27] And the affective
distribution of suffering
[24:29] is another thing we should consider.
[24:32] "Capital is what makes live and lets die,"
[24:34] to quote Foucault.
[24:37] It builds and destroys,
[24:39] it gives rise to immense
technological change
[24:42] such that you might be dreaming
[24:44] of what's the technology
from your childhood
[24:48] that's no longer around?
[24:49] The DVD.
[24:50] You might be dreaming of the DVD at night,
[24:52] but you'll never see one in the day
[24:54] that has been totally
vanquished from the Earth,
[24:57] that technology.
[24:59] And we know the ways in
which it makes life on Earth
[25:01] precarious to the point of extinction.
[25:07] It builds and destroys.
[25:09] It is, to quote Wendy Brown
in her preface to the book,
[25:13] "World making and world destroying."
[25:20] There's much more we
can say about the ills
[25:23] and the goods of capital,
[25:25] but maybe we can do that
as we go through the book.
[25:30] Let's open the book
[25:31] or open your PDF
[25:35] and begin to look at it.
[25:37] I wanna start today
[25:40] from the first sentences,
[25:44] very famous sentences,
[25:47] but we need to look into it a little more.
[25:55] "The wealth of society is dominated
[25:57] by the capitalist mode of production,
[25:59] appears in the form
[26:00] of an enormous accumulation
of commodities."
[26:03] There Marx is quoting himself.
[26:06] Why not? He's an authority.
[26:08] "The individual commodity appears
[26:10] as the elementary form of that wealth.
[26:12] Hence, our investigation begins
by analyzing the commodity."
[26:16] Let's just take a look at these words
[26:17] because they will help us
figure out where Marx is going,
[26:21] starting with wealth.
[26:24] What is wealth?
[26:25] Anyone wanna bore me
[26:29] an explanation?
[26:35] Shout it out.
[26:39] I got a room full of people
[26:41] either who are so wealthy
they never thought about it
[26:44] or so poor they're too
mad to say anything.
[26:46] Yeah.
[26:48] - An accumulation of capital.
[26:51] - No.
[26:52] Yes, no.
[26:53] Yes and no.
[26:55] It is certainly an accumulation,
[26:57] but wealth is not capital.
[26:58] Wealth is a pre-capitalist form,
[27:00] an extra capitalist form.
[27:02] We call things wealth under capital,
[27:05] but wealth is simply an
accumulation of possessions
[27:09] and maybe you could say an
accumulation of possessions
[27:11] that have some purchasing power
[27:13] that allow you to get something else.
[27:16] Capital is not wealth,
[27:30] it is a term that belongs
to a different system.
[27:33] For example, it comes from the system
[27:36] where you think of the wellbeing
of the whole community.
[27:39] In fact, the word comes
from the word weal or well,
[27:42] which means to not be ill,
[27:46] to keep your health.
[27:48] And is used frequently in the 18th century
[27:52] in the compound commonwealth.
[27:54] There's no such thing as common capital.
[27:56] You couldn't say common capital.
[27:58] So when we say wealth management,
[28:00] they're really not thinking
of the meaning of the term.
[28:02] It is another form of appearance,
[28:06] a way of talking about it.
[28:07] And Marx would say this is
not a necessary form of,
[28:10] this is misleading way to talk about it.
[28:13] And you'll see that he talks about
[28:16] what he calls the vulgar economists
[28:18] or the bourgeois economists
[28:19] in these terms all the time.
[28:21] They're not taking up
[28:22] capital's necessary forms of appearance
[28:24] where value appears as money, for example.
[28:28] What they're doing is deceiving you
[28:30] and they're just (indistinct)
[28:31] because they're deceived themselves.
[28:33] Capital is not wealth.
[28:35] When your wealth is being managed,
[28:37] it's being used as capital, not wealth.
[28:40] And we're going to get to what capital is.
[28:42] Capital has a whole other operation.
[28:45] You notice in the first sentence,
[28:46] the wealth of society
[28:47] is dominated by the
capitalist mode of production.
[28:52] He talks about societies
[28:54] and he talks about something
that takes them over
[28:58] at a certain moment in a certain way
[29:01] under certain conditions.
[29:05] We have to be wary of thinking of capital
[29:07] as something that is natural
[29:10] that exists longer in history.
[29:12] Capital itself as a technique
is a kind of social technique
[29:17] for taking money, putting it to work
[29:20] and getting more money out of it,
[29:21] it's a contract in which you
take a certain amount of value
[29:24] and you say, "I'll give this to you now
[29:26] if you give me more later
along with the original."
[29:29] That started to be a social
technique in the 15th century,
[29:34] so still not that old
when it comes down to it,
[29:37] certainly much younger than wealth.
[29:41] Anyone in the European context
in the last 2,000 years
[29:45] could amass possessions
[29:50] and then use them as they wanted to.
[29:52] The idea that they would then grow
[29:54] is an absurd and very new idea,
[29:59] new to the tune of about 500 years.
[30:04] The wealth of society
[30:05] is dominated by the
capitalist mode of production.
[30:08] Wealth gets transformed
[30:11] when capitalist ways
[30:14] of doing things take over.
[30:17] It's no longer wealth,
[30:18] it gets translated,
[30:19] as many, many things do under this system.
[30:22] It takes old things.
[30:23] That is why the persistence
[30:25] of old ways of understanding them,
[30:27] as in the political economists,
[30:28] is worrisome because the names carry over
[30:31] other social systems
[30:32] and ignore the newness of this system.
[30:40] What is a mode of production?
[30:41] Let's talk about that.
[30:43] So we talk about wealth,
[30:45] dominate is important
[30:46] because Marx is already thinking here
[30:50] that there's power involved,
[30:53] that the mode
[30:56] or the way of living
[30:57] or the form of life
[30:59] takes over and kicks other things out.
[31:02] You will see in later chapters,
[31:03] especially in the original
accumulation chapters,
[31:06] how that happened through violence and law
[31:10] and deceit and treachery.
[31:14] So it came to be,
[31:16] it came to hegemony or
came to power, capital,
[31:20] through a domineering way.
[31:23] I don't think it's the
case that every social form
[31:25] comes to be through domination,
[31:28] through taking over and
kicking everything out,
[31:30] but capital has that quality,
[31:32] and historically it had that quality.
[31:34] It was like, to personify it,
[31:37] "You're out of here.
[31:38] The rest of you are out of here.
[31:39] We're gonna marshal all our resources
[31:41] to push out collective
farming or feudal relations."
[31:46] It dominates.
[31:48] So the trace of power
goes through capital,
[31:50] even though he doesn't have
an analysis of the state,
[31:54] there are power relations at stake.
[31:57] In fact, the main relation,
[31:59] the capital relation,
[32:01] is something you'll get to down the line,
[32:03] which is the core of his analysis,
[32:06] the core of his critique.
[32:07] This is what exactly the
political economists missed.
[32:11] And the thing that remains
steadfast in our capitalism,
[32:15] even though some of the forms
of exchange have changed,
[32:20] the commodities, of course, have changed,
[32:22] is the capital relation,
[32:23] and that is a relation of extortion
[32:26] in which the owners hold
back the means of production
[32:31] from the very ones who can
use the means of production
[32:34] and force them to sign a
contract to give over their labor
[32:36] and its product to the owners.
[32:40] That's the capital relation,
[32:42] and it's a relation of domination.
[32:45] So keep your eye on domination
[32:48] and other modes of power,
including extortion.
[32:51] Mode of production
[32:52] is a term that comes up a
lot in Marxist discourse.
[32:55] You probably will notice
[32:57] that I don't give that dogmatic view
[33:02] of Marxist discourse,
[33:03] maybe some of you are
better at it than I am.
[33:06] For a long time I was
saying, "I'm not a Marxist."
[33:08] You know, Marx said this famously,
[33:10] his son-in-law, Paul Lafargue quotes,
[33:12] "Je ne suis pas marxiste."
[33:16] But you know strategically
in the right moment
[33:18] you're like, "I'm a Marxist."
[33:24] We leave that question open,
[33:25] and you'll leave that
question open for yourselves
[33:27] where you fall on this.
[33:29] But mode of production is
a typical phrase in Marxism
[33:33] and it implies a number of things.
[33:35] First of all, it implies that
production is not natural.
[33:39] You don't always make
things in the same way.
[33:42] It has modes,
[33:43] so it is modal or modular
[33:48] or plastic or elastic.
[33:50] And one of the ways you
could do a revolution,
[33:53] one of the ways capitalism
does its revolutions
[33:55] is by plastifying the mode of production,
[33:59] changing the mode of production
[34:01] from hand work to machine
work to digital work.
[34:05] That is a transformation
of the mode of production.
[34:08] There are potentially
[34:12] modes of production
[34:13] and transformations of
the modes of production
[34:15] that could lead out of
the capital relation,
[34:18] that's possible.
[34:19] It upholds it as we think about it.
[34:22] And capital is very good,
[34:24] the capital system,
[34:24] Mr. Capital. Mrs. Capital, Sir Capital,
[34:27] what should we call it?
[34:28] King Capital? King Capital.
[34:30] King Capital,
[34:33] we are writing a kind of fairytale,
[34:35] King Capital excels
[34:38] in changing the mode of production
[34:41] to increase profit
[34:46] and not to decrease profit
[34:49] is why kind of hand work movements fail
[34:54] as big movements.
[34:57] Okay, what other words
are we dealing with here?
[35:03] Appears in,
[35:04] you'll notice that the first four chapters
[35:07] are about appearances.
[35:09] It starts very close to you
[35:11] in the thing that appears
to you first every day.
[35:14] What's the thing that appears
to you first every day?
[35:16] It's not your toothbrush anymore,
[35:18] it's here like this.
[35:19] He's like, "This is how
capitalism appears to me."
[35:22] It's a very,
[35:24] it's materialist in a sense
[35:25] that you're looking at
the actual things you use,
[35:28] Marx starts with this in the book,
[35:31] but it's something you can't see
[35:34] because iPhone is a perfect
[35:35] or a smartphone is a perfect example
[35:36] because it's so close to your face
[35:39] you can't see it for what it is.
[35:42] You can't see it as a commodity, for sure,
[35:44] while you're using it.
[35:45] You also can't see its constitution.
[35:48] It is constituted by all its connections
[35:50] to everything else in the world:
[35:51] what made it,
[35:54] its parts, the labor, the ideas,
[35:57] the history of technology
that led up to it.
[35:59] Actually, Marx says
somewhere, "If you take a pen
[36:04] and you started to enumerate
[36:05] all the labor that went into it,
[36:07] you would become nauseous very quickly,"
[36:10] because in fact every made object
[36:11] is connected to every bit of work
[36:14] that was ever done in human history
[36:15] plus all of nature and
evolution back to the Big Bang.
[36:20] These are the kinds of thoughts
[36:21] we're dealing with in this class.
[36:23] The world of commodities
[36:25] is an immense accumulation
[36:28] of diverse things,
[36:30] and Marx will say, "There's
one way to hold onto them."
[36:33] Capitalism does this.
[36:35] It holds onto them by value.
[36:37] That's the thing they all
have in common for capitalism.
[36:39] But if you look at the
world of commodities,
[36:42] it is dizzying.
[36:44] Someone sent me recently
a Rosa Parks bikini.
[36:50] Okay, they didn't send me the bikini,
[36:51] they send me a link to the bikini,
[36:53] which is like 19.95,
[36:55] but you can commodify anything,
[36:58] everything can be commodified.
[37:00] We'll talk about the
processes of commodification,
[37:03] but if you look at one commodity,
[37:07] you don't see its commodity character,
[37:10] you don't see its relationship to labor
[37:11] and the history of all labor,
[37:15] and you don't see its relations
to the immense diversity,
[37:18] the mind-boggling, infinite,
potentially infinite diversity
[37:22] of all the commodities that are out there.
[37:24] Very hard to see.
[37:25] We're gonna be enumerating this.
[37:31] Where are we?
[37:33] Appears in the form of.
[37:34] Marx sticks with a kind of Aristotelian
[37:37] philosophical distinction
between form and matter
[37:40] or form and material.
[37:41] This comes up a lot,
[37:42] but he's gonna switch around
what those things are.
[37:44] And unlike Aristotle,
[37:47] form is not natural,
[37:48] it's not given by God or born with nature.
[37:51] The forms of things,
[37:52] capitalism, the capital system,
[37:55] specializes in transformation of forms,
[38:00] which you will have seen
in Section 3 of Chapter 1,
[38:04] which we will talk about on Friday.
[38:07] Form of, this is a very
important phrase to hold onto,
[38:10] you will see something
that you want to understand
[38:13] changing its form a lot.
[38:14] It takes the form of this
and the form of that, right?
[38:17] Don't be nervous about it.
[38:19] If the material content of the commodity
[38:22] is use or use value,
[38:26] its form is exchange value.
[38:30] A very strange way of
understanding things,
[38:32] he takes this from Hegel,
[38:33] really moves it around to
make us able to understand
[38:38] this world of commodities.
[38:43] It takes the form of an enormous
[38:45] accumulation of commodities.
[38:46] Well, this is a very flat phrase,
[38:48] enormous accumulation of commodities.
[38:51] What's an accumulation?
[38:55] Nothing, it's just a bunch of things.
[38:57] It's a bunch of things with
no relation to one another.
[39:00] That's what wealth is and accumulation,
[39:02] that hides the fact that all
those things are related.
[39:05] Somebody made them,
[39:06] somebody bought them,
[39:08] somebody sold them,
[39:09] somebody extracted the
materials from the Earth,
[39:11] the Earth produced those materials,
[39:12] the Earth is gonna get back
[39:14] the disjecta membra of that thing
[39:17] in some form that ruins it, most likely.
[39:22] All of the relations are
gone in an accumulation,
[39:24] so this is the first appearance,
[39:27] two first appearances
[39:29] that this is the elementary
form, the commodity,
[39:33] and that it shows up
[39:35] as an enormous accumulation
of them, right?
[39:39] Especially if you are,
[39:41] you know, when my partner
Catalina came from Argentina
[39:44] and we went to Target,
[39:46] maybe if some of you come from
a less consumerized culture,
[39:51] she was like, she couldn't believe it,
[39:53] she just walked around like.
[39:55] Now we bring everyone who comes to visit
[39:56] for the first time to Target
[39:57] or one of those places.
[40:00] I don't go into Walmart,
[40:01] but I imagine it's even bigger,
[40:03] and you're just like, "It's astounding.
[40:05] It looks like an immense accumulation.
[40:06] It's just like it grew,
it's like paradise.
[40:10] A very fluorescent paradise."
[40:15] But it is not an accumulation
[40:17] and it doesn't have an elementary form.
[40:21] It's a set of dynamic
relations in which people live,
[40:25] expend their energies and die.
[40:28] Nourish themselves,
interact with one another,
[40:31] it's not an economy, it's a social system.
[40:34] This is the main aim of this book
[40:36] is to say economy has its place,
[40:40] but we need to move beyond
economistic thinking
[40:43] towards what Marx calls social thinking.
[40:46] We can see what that is.
[40:50] (hums) We're getting there.
[40:54] The main mode,
[40:57] especially in these first
chapters, is analysis.
[41:01] Just to say what analysis is.
[41:02] It's very hard to read this book.
[41:04] It switches around a lot.
[41:06] You'll find he'll be
telling a joke one minute,
[41:08] he'll be doing dialectics another minute,
[41:10] what's dialectics?
[41:11] We'll talk about that.
[41:14] But the first chapters are about analysis
[41:17] because he thinks he can
take you to the falsity
[41:21] of what you think a commodity is
[41:23] and your relationship to it
[41:25] by breaking it down into its parts,
[41:27] which is what analyzing is.
[41:29] So he does a lot of
operations in this book,
[41:33] critique of the political economists,
[41:35] analysis of what we take
to be the basic forms.
[41:38] He will do dialectics,
[41:40] which is a synthetic operation
[41:41] so that we can get from
the elementary form
[41:44] and its false appearance
as an accumulation
[41:47] to the whole,
[41:49] which is the only perspective
[41:50] from which to understand capital.
[41:53] So if you feel lost at the beginning,
[41:55] I think it's the best
way to start the book
[41:57] for people who are reading
it 150 years later.
[42:02] Why?
[42:02] Because it starts exactly
[42:04] with the false position that you're in
[42:06] and moves you very slow.
[42:07] This is what he thought he was doing,
[42:09] moves you slowly to the whole,
[42:10] which is the only perspective
[42:12] from which to know that
these are false appearances
[42:15] because the iPhone is a the product,
[42:19] I mean, so much you could
say about the iPhone.
[42:21] I always tell students,
[42:22] "You should do an analysis of the iPhone."
[42:24] I'm sure there are good ones.
[42:25] If you know one, send it to me
[42:31] because it is a temporary,
[42:34] in so many ways,
[42:36] embodiment of drives of the system.
[42:42] And only when you know
the system and its drives
[42:45] can you understand how
this is just a part.
[42:52] False to look at it as a thing.
[42:55] Commodities are not things.
[42:57] Oh, we didn't talk about commodity.
[43:00] What is a commodity?
[43:01] And then I'm gonna open up to questions.
[43:03] Does that sound good?
[43:06] Yes? Okay.
[43:10] By analyzing the commodity, right?
[43:12] So that's already a kind of false move.
[43:14] What you would wanna do is
start with the capital system.
[43:16] I would be like, "What's that?
[43:19] There's no capital system,
[43:20] there's no system.
[43:21] I just go to work,
[43:22] I have this thing,
[43:23] I go shopping, right?"
[43:24] I know somebody picked this,
[43:26] but you don't know all the
steps that happened in between,
[43:28] including the pressures on the farmers
[43:31] to put out a certain amount
[43:32] and to buy genetically modified seeds
[43:35] that are copyrighted, et cetera.
[43:38] You have to know the whole system
[43:40] to be able to understand
even one of its phenomena.
[43:43] So he starts with one of its phenomena
[43:44] to show you that you can't understand it
[43:46] without moving well beyond it.
[43:49] A commodity is, this is important,
[43:53] it's like a spoiler,
[43:55] it's like we've got to the end of,
[43:58] what did I watch recently?
[44:01] We just watched "Stranger
Things" for like the 10th time.
[44:03] It's like you get to started with the end
[44:04] of the first season of
"Stranger Things," right?
[44:07] So here it is,
[44:08] a commodity is a product
produced for exchange.
[44:19] Oh, that was a long exposition
[44:22] of the first two
sentences, three sentences.
[44:27] How about some questions?
[44:34] - You said that something,
[44:36] I don't know what it was,
[44:37] that doesn't have an elementary form.
[44:38] You said something doesn't
have an elementary form,
[44:40] maybe accumulation,
[44:41] you just explain what you meant by that?
[44:43] - Yeah, the capital system
has no elementary forms.
[44:46] Marx does not think that
at least social forms,
[44:50] and actually if you think about
the science he was reading
[44:53] in the 19th century, also natural forms,
[44:56] start from elements
which then build them up.
[44:59] That's something you might think of
[45:01] in physics or in chemistry,
[45:04] but it's also false.
[45:06] We break out the table of elements,
[45:08] but when you look at a compound,
[45:10] it has all of these characteristics
[45:13] that aren't reducible to their elements.
[45:15] So I would say that the capital system
[45:17] is not reducible to its elements
[45:19] and it's not explainable by its elements.
[45:22] For that reason, he turns to Hegel
[45:25] and you need a mode of discourse
[45:28] that starts from the whole
[45:31] because the parts all existed
[45:32] in one form or another
beforehand in history.
[45:35] There was money,
[45:36] there was exchange,
[45:38] there were dirty merchants
trying to get more for less.
[45:42] There was exploitation, for sure,
[45:45] there was extortion.
[45:47] It's only this whole that puts
them in a certain position
[45:51] and makes them do certain
things vis-a-vis one another.
[45:55] Why do we need an iPhone?
[45:57] Because of the way work turns out really,
[46:00] or because you're far away from home
[46:02] because of the way work turns out really,
[46:06] or because students need to
contact me while I'm walking.
[46:10] I don't know why that is.
[46:14] Only explainable by the whole.
[46:15] But that's a real conundrum
for a scientist of capital
[46:18] because how do you explain
the whole as a whole?
[46:23] To explain the whole as a whole.
[46:24] Describe the whole as a whole.
[46:27] Yeah.
[46:28] - I was wondering if you
could talk a little bit about
[46:30] translation means and its use
in this version of the text
[46:34] because I noticed you referenced
[46:36] in bold, black and key rule,
[46:38] but used writing, machine, journaling,
[46:40] you were image it by
many times crazy a bit-
[46:42] - Yes.
- Into English.
[46:44] And there was one phrase particular,
[46:46] the power of production
[46:48] or the productiony power,
[46:50] I've lost it on (indistinct)
productive power.
[46:53] - Yes.
- But I wonder if it
[46:53] could also be read as
like productive potential
[46:56] and how much something
like that would shift
[46:59] capitalism of indifferently seen.
[47:02] - It's a great question,
[47:03] a question about translation
and Marxist language,
[47:07] how much English changes it
[47:09] and how many other languages
Marx was working with.
[47:12] Marx knew, I don't know,
six or seven languages.
[47:16] He was a 19th century intellectual,
[47:18] that's what you did.
[47:19] Aren't we weak in comparison?
[47:22] I encourage you to go out.
[47:23] I managed like five,
[47:27] but many of them badly.
[47:28] I encourage you to go out,
[47:30] and he could read in all of them
[47:31] and quote in all of them
and remember all of them,
[47:33] it was really astounding,
really astounding.
[47:38] About how translation affects the text,
[47:42] it of course has a big effect.
[47:44] And let's take the word
term you mentioned,
[47:46] produktivkraft, productive power,
[47:49] or arbeitskraft, labor power.
[47:53] Not only are those
[47:57] hard to understand conceptually,
[48:00] but Marx is actually inventing
labor power as a term.
[48:04] In fact, he considered that
to be his biggest contribution
[48:07] or one of his biggest contributions,
[48:09] the idea that there is this
thing called labor power.
[48:13] I think it would be going
beyond the translation
[48:17] to imagine that that would be
something like a potential,
[48:23] but that doesn't make it wrong,
[48:25] that would be an interpretation.
[48:26] Marx was very precise with
his terms most of the time,
[48:33] but he did have a bit of
an Aristotelian background,
[48:36] so he likes matter and form,
[48:38] and he also likes
potentiality and actuality
[48:43] as a set of terms that
describe how things work.
[48:46] And it is true that when
you sell your labor power,
[48:48] you're selling a potential.
[48:49] And the big joke on workers
[48:53] is a terrible way to put it,
[48:55] the big deception is you
sell them your labor power,
[48:58] but they're getting your actual labor.
[49:01] So you have a certain
quantity of labor power,
[49:02] like, "I could do this much, here it is."
[49:04] But then you go in there
[49:05] and they're like, "Well,
sorry, you're doing this much,"
[49:07] you're actually doing a lot more.
[49:09] So labor power is a tool of capitalism
[49:12] to make it work out such that
more comes from the same.
[49:17] So you could do a good
interpretation of arbeitskraft
[49:21] or produktivkraft as a kind of potential
[49:25] that when it's actualized is
different than its potential,
[49:28] so that would be also moving
beyond Aristotle or Hegel.
[49:32] Yeah.
[49:33] - I had a question
about the different ways
[49:35] that bridged Marxist writing
[49:36] because you mentioned he
was also very a satirist
[49:39] and also wrote stern and
also political economists,
[49:42] so like how does the
style itself try to work
[49:45] oh, would capital against (indistinct)?
[49:47] - Yes.
[49:48] Oh, that's a great question.
[49:50] I've thought about this a lot,
[49:51] and you should think of Marx
and Engels as genre geniuses.
[49:57] These were like the Rupert Murdochs
[49:59] of the left in the 19th century.
[50:01] They tried everything
[50:03] to liberate labor,
[50:07] first to bring about liberal changes
[50:09] and also to move towards socialism.
[50:10] They tried every genre imaginable.
[50:12] One of them you know, "The Manifesto,"
[50:14] another one you might know the
"Thesis," remember that text?
[50:18] Famous text, "Theses on Feuerbach."
[50:21] They wrote letters, they gave speeches.
[50:22] Marx was up in 1871 in La
Commune on the barricades
[50:26] giving a speech to the Communards.
[50:30] He gave founding speeches,
[50:31] which included a lot of
theory at the inauguration
[50:34] of the International
Working Men's Association.
[50:37] They sent sometimes shameful,
[50:42] insulting letters about
other people to one another.
[50:45] They really tried everything.
[50:46] He wrote, of course, he was a journalist
[50:47] and he wrote hundreds of articles.
[50:49] They wrote encyclopedia entries,
[50:52] Engels writes long entries about arms
[50:56] and how they're useful
for popular uprisings.
[50:58] He has a great article on the rifle.
[51:01] So they were trying everything,
[51:02] and in this text, Marx
is doing the same thing.
[51:05] I mean, what's the difference
if you take capitalism
[51:08] that bourgeoisie down by logic
[51:10] or you take them down by yelling at them,
[51:12] doesn't matter,
[51:13] so he tried everything
[51:15] and I think that goes to an
important theoretical point,
[51:18] which is even though he found
ways to analyze the system,
[51:22] he did not find the way
that it would disintegrate.
[51:28] And he was constantly trying
all the way up to the end,
[51:31] including in his last years
[51:35] learning calculus
[51:36] so that he could better
understand business cycles.
[51:41] Yeah.
[51:42] - So, you began the
lecture you said to be wary
[51:46] thinking of capital as natural,
[51:48] but you also brought up how,
[51:50] at least from ours,
[51:51] what matters about capital
[51:52] is less about quadruple contradictions
[51:54] and more about the negative effects
[51:56] of the people way under it.
[51:58] I guess like two questions.
[52:00] One, maybe when God is just like,
[52:02] "What do you mean by natural?
[52:03] Is history natural?"
[52:04] But also assuming that people
[52:06] can set their by natural (indistinct),
[52:09] why does it matter whether capital is at?
[52:11] - That's a great question.
[52:13] The question was
[52:16] why did I say capital is not natural
[52:19] or the capital system is not natural?
[52:21] And the question is why does it matter?
[52:26] And for Marx it mattered,
[52:28] first of all, within the theory
that there's a separation
[52:32] between social things and natural things.
[52:36] Social things modify natural things.
[52:41] He was aware,
[52:42] in fact, he read Darwin's
"Origin of Species,"
[52:46] and there's a footnote to it, praising it.
[52:49] He was aware that nature
was being understood
[52:51] itself as having a history
[52:54] and as being a kind of
self-modifying thing.
[52:58] One word for that is organism,
[52:59] self-sustaining, self-modifying,
[53:02] and that's a word that Marx
likes to use for capital too.
[53:06] But this has to be separate and malleable
[53:08] in a different way than nature.
[53:11] Social things, in fact, they
have to be made by humans.
[53:16] So history for Marx,
[53:18] you could have natural history,
[53:20] but social history was the history
[53:22] of the way human beings
make their means for living
[53:27] and produce for themselves
their wants and needs.
[53:30] Only if it's not natural for him
[53:32] in the sense of being fixed
[53:34] and given outside of human activities,
[53:38] only if it's not natural,
is it criticizable for him.
[53:41] Things that are natural or not
thought of as criticizable,
[53:44] you know, criticize a comet,
[53:48] criticize a tiger,
[53:51] criticize a tectonic plate,
[53:54] and then come back and tell me about it.
[53:55] Yes.
[53:56] - Do you find it more helpful
[53:58] or more insightful to read "Capital"
[54:00] as kind of an accumulation,
[54:02] I guess, of Marx's previous styles,
[54:04] be that German idealism
[54:07] or journalism or what have you?
[54:10] Or do you find it more
helpful to kind of read it
[54:12] as a turning away to something new,
[54:15] to a (indistinct)?
[54:19] - The question is about Marxist styles,
[54:22] is it a kind of compendium
of previous styles
[54:25] or is it something new?
[54:27] He had been working in political
economy since about 1843.
[54:31] He writes the first draft of this in 1867.
[54:34] The first draft of this set of drafts,
[54:37] the Latin American
[54:40] Marx philosopher Enrique Dussel
[54:43] calculates that this book
[54:45] is about 1/72nd of all the
manuscripts he produced
[54:48] around the "Capital" project.
[54:51] The "Capital" project is huge.
[54:54] It goes on and on.
[54:54] It starts from the "Grundrisse"
[54:56] and ends with notes he
was making towards changes
[54:59] all the way up into the late '70s.
[55:03] So the project was ongoing,
[55:05] and my sense is as he got
more of an understanding
[55:09] of the intractability of capitalism,
[55:13] he started to marshal
more of his own forces.
[55:16] I think it's great that
he had all this practice
[55:19] in different genres.
[55:20] For example, he wrote hundreds of articles
[55:22] for the New York Daily Tribune in English,
[55:26] which were during the Civil War
[55:29] reports of Europe's
reactions to the Civil War.
[55:32] Marx was a staunch abolitionist,
[55:35] and so this was important work for him,
[55:39] but it trained him in
approaching things of the day
[55:43] with a certain kind of attitude.
[55:46] And you'll find that
all throughout the book,
[55:48] especially in Chapter
8 on the working day.
[55:51] So I think what I would like
to say is he saw this task
[55:55] as requiring these specific resources
[55:58] at these specific times
[56:00] to understand, for example, how capital
[56:03] as an organism that eats its limits,
[56:08] how it does this,
[56:09] you have to look at worker struggles
[56:11] and you need to do that
in a documentary fashion.
[56:14] And that's Chapter 8,
[56:14] it's 100 pages, I'm sorry,
[56:16] I think we're doing it in a week.
[56:18] It'll be like a history class there
[56:20] or give up philosophy
[56:21] and you read all these
accounts of what it was like
[56:23] and how they fought and how
the legislation changed.
[56:26] And what he does is demonstrate to you
[56:27] that even if you get
a shorter working day,
[56:29] they're gonna get their pound of flesh,
[56:32] and they did.
[56:33] So he uses this historical
documentary style
[56:37] to make a point he couldn't
have made theoretically,
[56:39] or had he made it theoretically
[56:41] it would be like reading Hegel,
[56:43] you'd be like, "Is that really true?"
[56:47] Here's what I recommend, buy this book.
[56:51] Really it's mainly supporting
the Academic Press.
[56:55] We begged them to come out
with a paperback first,
[56:57] but they have to make their money back.
[56:59] But buy the book, it's a great book,
[57:01] and we will continue with Chapter 1
[57:04] all the way through Monday.
[57:06] Don't forget that Friday is Monday,
[57:08] so we will meet back here Friday at 11:35.
[57:11] And thank you all for coming.
[57:13] I hope you've liked this.
[57:19] (gentle music)
[57:21] (switch clicking)
[57:22] (air whooshing)
(suspenseful music)