WEBVTT

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(dramatic music)

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- You only have to buy one book,

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and I'm very happy to hold it in my hands

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because it took me six years of work

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with a colleague who did
an amazing translation,

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which I checked meticulously
against the German

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and argued with him on
and off for six years.

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It's a good translation
in a number of ways

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that the other translations weren't.

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There are only really two
viable translations before this.

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I'm not gonna spend much
time talking about that,

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but this opens up the whole panoply

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of Marx's voices and styles,

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including his humor,

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his cutthroat insult capacity,

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his polemics, his storytelling,

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his myth making, and other things.

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You only have to read one book,

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but you need to read it
slowly and repeatedly,

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as maybe you noticed for today.

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It's funny to start a book
with the hardest part,

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that's something we don't usually do.

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Marx did that and then almost
instantly regretted it.

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He wrote to some friends after,

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"Maybe people should
start with Chapter 5."

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Chapter 1 is a doozy.

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It's long and it's full of
problems that Marx hadn't,

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he had worked out and
maybe just worked out

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and he hadn't found the
best mode of presentation.

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Although if you've read the "Grundrisse,"

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which he wrote in the '50s, the late '50s,

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you'll notice that this
is much better laid out

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than the "Grundrisse."

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I recommend that you read
this with other people.

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What better way to contribute

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different understandings
together and build one?

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What better way to produce solidarity?

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A lot of solidarity has
been produced over 150 years

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of reading this book.

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My colleague Michael Denning,

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has a great article which I'll post

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about workers getting together in groups

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and reading this book.

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Okay, I'm gonna say a little bit about

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what kind of course this is.

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This is a text course.

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If you're not into texts,

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I don't mean SMSs,

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this is not the course for you,

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but I imagine you're all text people

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and probably also commentary people

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given that the internet

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is just a big maybe
wasteland of commentary.

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But the practice of commentary
has really come back,

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and we are going to comment this text.

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We won't go through it line by line,

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but I will look at passages in class,

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and so you should bring
your book with you.

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If you have back problems,

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ask someone to carry it for you.

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And we will be actually opening
the book and looking down,

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so you will start to have

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repetitive worker injuries to your neck

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because you'll be going like that.

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You'll have the hunched over thing, right?

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And your arms and shoulders
will start to hurt

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because of carrying this.

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But what a good way to move through

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the pains of work
towards something better.

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I wanna start with some preliminaries

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and divide the book and our work

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into two sides, two elements.

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One is the capital system.

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This is what we'll call it.

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Capitalism, as you may
know, is a common word.

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It's something people talk about

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sometimes with a little bit
of rue and regret and anger,

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sometimes with joy and
hope and determination,

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often with some dogmatic attachments.

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But this is really a system

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and it isn't a belief,

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let's put it that way.

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It's a system that was
not given to us by Marx,

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but given to us by History,
maybe with a capital H.

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And the roots to it are complicated,

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the roots to this system

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that History has thrown up for us

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and in which we live.

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One route,

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I still think the best route,

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to get to the capitalist system

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is through what I call
the capital venture,

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which is like an entrepreneurial
exercise on Marx's part

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to understand it.

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These two go together,

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the capital system gets constructed

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in Marx's capital venture.

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It has to get constructed somewhere.

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Where does capitalism live as a whole?

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It lives here

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because you'll never see
any more than a part of it

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and you won't see it as what it is.

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So Marx made it his task

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to make it accessible to you in a book,

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and this is only Volume 1, as you know.

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Next semester, Volume 2 and then Volume 3

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and then we start
writing Volume 4 together

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in the second year.

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These three volumes out
of a planned four volumes

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are the place, the only
place you can find the system

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altogether analyzed and laid out for you

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in its functions and
parts and ways of being,

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how it affects the
people who live under it.

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The capital venture, as
opposed to the capital system,

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was given to us by Marx

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through a lot of reflection in sources

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that he took up in political economy,

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chiefly English political economy,

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in German philosophy,

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in journalism,

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in these amazing texts called
the Factory Inspector Reports,

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which he relied on,

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through the editing work

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of his daughters and his wife Jenny,

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through reflecting it back

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in the mind of and in the letters

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of his friend Friedrich Engels.

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You know, you could be named
one or two things in Germany,

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Friedrich, Karl,

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there were some Heinrichs,

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get used talking about
people by their last name.

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He among all the people that he befriended

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and then cursed out one way or the other,

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Engels was the only one
that he never divorced.

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And he passed a lot of
his ideas through Engels.

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It was a very important
philosophical friendship.

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The capital system as
a fully fledged system

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is only a few centuries old.

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You can date it from
somewhere in the 18th century,

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that all its parts are together,

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they're all working,

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and it starts to be a
machine or an organism.

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We're gonna go back and forth
between the two figures,

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a machine or an organism,

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that begins to devour its outside,

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take the outside into it ceaselessly.

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Okay, so the first basic insight

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that Marx had about the capital system

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was that it was too big and too complex

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and also to cunning
for anybody to observe.

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There was no standpoint

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from which you could
observe the capital system.

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You feel some of its effects
on your body when you work,

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when you learn how to sit still
in kindergarten, et cetera,

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you feel some of its effects
in your bank account.

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You would feel an effect if
you get evicted from your home

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in a financial crisis.

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In many ways you feel the effects,

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but you can't tell why most of the time.

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The why involves the connections
that make up the whole.

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And the problem with the
whole is that it's enormous,

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has many complex parts.

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Is that its complexity is higher

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than any of the political
economists gave it credit for.

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That's why Marx had to
turn to some other logics,

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including Hegelian logic.

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And there's a third reason
why you can't observe capital,

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the capital system,

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and that is that it likes to hide.

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It really likes to hide.

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In fact, hiding is one of the ways

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that it carries out its operations.

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Its operations depend on
a certain concealment.

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It is a phenomenal logical operation too.

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Its phenomenological operations

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are essential to its economic
and social operations.

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You look at it and you see something

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that isn't the way it actually operates,

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except the way it doesn't operate

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that you're seeing is the way it operates.

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You can see where the
complexity is coming in here.

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Does that make sense?

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Marx calls these necessary
appearances or real appearances,

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and that has a couple
of consequences for us

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when we're studying capital,

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it does not make sense to call
yourself an anti-capitalist.

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You can't be anti something
you can't even encounter.

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You can't be anti something

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that even if you can encounter it

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by reading all these books,

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if you take away its appearances,

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it still operates.

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It operates anyway.

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That it's just by knowing
about it doesn't stop it.

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Just by knowing the truth
about it doesn't stop it.

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In that sense,

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it's not like Marx at
a certain early point

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fantasized about religion

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that if you showed it to be illusioned

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that people would be like,
"Well, okay, I don't need that."

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Which is not true.

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It's not true that religion's
all illusion either.

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Taking away appearances
does not hurt it mortally.

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We will talk about the capital system

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as a historical subject,

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not an object.

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It is something like a king or a god

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that does things,

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it does things to us.

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It's a funny, personified,
impersonal set of processes

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that catches up what we consider persons,

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people, humans, psyches, souls in its web

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and produces actions
through its agency in us,

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a very peculiar kind of subject,

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a historical subject.

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Marx will personify capital a lot,

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and personification is a
tool he uses for critique.

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One of the benefits of this translation,

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I can say them because I
wasn't actually the translator.

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One of the benefits of this translation

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is that the personifications
are made very clear.

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When Marx speaks in the
voice of a commodity,

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when capitalism speaks,

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you can see exactly the maneuver,

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the Marxian maneuver.

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This is the system that's in
charge and makes the decisions

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so he treats it like
the only person around,

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the only person left, capital.

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But we shouldn't capitulate to this

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and start asking it out on dates

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or feeding it dinner.

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We should be suspicious

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also because even though
Marx personifies it

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as a critical gesture,

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it is an impersonal
machine, it doesn't care,

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so it's missing some personal gestures,

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it does not care.

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It doesn't care about anything, in fact.

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It has a very high degree
of impersonal necessity,

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the system, it keeps going,

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it wants to keep going,

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but it doesn't really have affect.

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So Marx's capital venture

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is the adventure of finding the system

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and putting it on display in all its parts

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and its interactions,

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showing where the necessities
are and how they're made

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and where the contingencies are.

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Obviously, his aim is
ultimately revolutionary,

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but as you may know,

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if you've read "The Communist Manifesto"

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and you've now read the
first chapter of this,

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it's a very different tone.

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He is not calling for
people to gather together

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and overthrow anything.

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First of all, you can't see
what there is to overthrow.

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He hasn't described it yet,

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so maybe after these books are done,

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someone could come along,

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and people have come along, as you know,

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to say, "Okay, now that we see this,

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here's how we overthrow it."

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But Marx came to a point late in his life

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in which after many
revolutionary disappointments,

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many, that he wasn't gonna
work on that anymore.

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What he was gonna do
is describe the system

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in a sense to show why the revolutions

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had not been successful.

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So in that regard,

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you have to put your activist
hope a little bit to the side

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and accept this as the
most pessimistic book

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you'll ever read.

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I'm sorry to say that,

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but I like to think that
pessimism leads to realism,

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and realism can lead to real change.

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Marx certainly thought so.

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He also spends a lot of time

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putting on display the
way capitalism hides

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because that's just one of its functions.

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Does that make sense?

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You can't respond by
debunking and exposing,

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that's not a revolutionary activity.

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But it is part of the analysis

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to see how the parts that hide

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and the parts that show

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are related to one another,

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and how it motivates certain
actors in capitalism,

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like labor, like owners,

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like the apologists for capital,

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what he calls sometimes vulgar economists.

00:13:19.980 --> 00:13:23.940
The best way to do this is unfortunately

00:13:23.940 --> 00:13:25.500
I just realized that the subtitle

00:13:25.500 --> 00:13:27.000
didn't make it onto the cover,

00:13:27.000 --> 00:13:28.950
but in fact the original title for this

00:13:28.950 --> 00:13:30.750
was "Critique of Political Economy,"

00:13:30.750 --> 00:13:32.466
and then later he decided,

00:13:32.466 --> 00:13:34.620
"Well, this is about capital too."

00:13:34.620 --> 00:13:37.289
But you can see both activities

00:13:37.289 --> 00:13:39.719
that he wants to take care of there.

00:13:39.720 --> 00:13:41.970
He wants to deal with the way

00:13:41.970 --> 00:13:44.220
it's been thought of in the past

00:13:44.220 --> 00:13:48.480
and show you how capital works.

00:13:48.480 --> 00:13:51.240
He thought the best way
to do it was to critique

00:13:51.240 --> 00:13:53.913
the accounts of capital
that had come before.

00:13:56.429 --> 00:13:59.250
I'm gonna say this is just preliminary

00:13:59.250 --> 00:14:04.250
is leading us towards looking
into the first chapter, okay?

00:14:04.259 --> 00:14:06.159
How many of you managed to get a book?

00:14:07.740 --> 00:14:08.572
Yeah, it's so funny,

00:14:08.572 --> 00:14:09.689
this like capitalist model,

00:14:09.690 --> 00:14:12.490
they said, "Oh, we only
order half of the books

00:14:13.350 --> 00:14:14.550
because we don't know who's gonna stay."

00:14:14.549 --> 00:14:15.809
I said, "It's a Capital course.

00:14:15.809 --> 00:14:17.369
You know, they're off,
they have to be committed,

00:14:17.370 --> 00:14:19.289
they would never do it otherwise."

00:14:19.289 --> 00:14:20.669
So they claim that they're getting

00:14:20.669 --> 00:14:22.469
the rest of the books for next week.

00:14:26.460 --> 00:14:28.350
Marx couldn't write this book

00:14:28.350 --> 00:14:31.019
because he was some sort of
special kind of individual,

00:14:31.019 --> 00:14:34.862
although he was unique,

00:14:35.970 --> 00:14:37.290
a kind of unique freak.

00:14:37.289 --> 00:14:38.789
In fact, this book is the product

00:14:38.789 --> 00:14:41.012
of about 30 years of work,

00:14:41.850 --> 00:14:45.810
40 if you count the very
beginning to the very end

00:14:45.809 --> 00:14:46.802
of his work.

00:14:48.330 --> 00:14:50.940
It takes an enormous
amount of sitzfleisch,

00:14:50.940 --> 00:14:52.143
as they say in German,

00:14:53.009 --> 00:14:55.870
butt flesh, that is the
ability to sit in a chair

00:14:57.659 --> 00:14:58.492
to do that.

00:15:00.389 --> 00:15:01.649
It's not that he could write this book

00:15:01.649 --> 00:15:04.079
because he was a special person,

00:15:04.080 --> 00:15:06.480
he understood the world
better than anyone else.

00:15:07.350 --> 00:15:09.330
And it wasn't because the capital system

00:15:09.330 --> 00:15:11.283
was brand new when he started to write.

00:15:12.210 --> 00:15:13.043
It wasn't,

00:15:13.043 --> 00:15:15.990
it was already 100 years old, let's say,

00:15:15.990 --> 00:15:17.432
as a full-fledged system.

00:15:19.259 --> 00:15:20.580
And on top of that, you can't really see

00:15:20.580 --> 00:15:22.650
what's brand new when it's brand new.

00:15:22.649 --> 00:15:25.350
Wait 50 years to see
what all of this garbage

00:15:25.350 --> 00:15:27.990
about AI is worth.

00:15:27.990 --> 00:15:29.340
Maybe AI will be something big,

00:15:29.340 --> 00:15:31.180
maybe one of these pieces of writing

00:15:32.279 --> 00:15:33.480
will be the key to it,

00:15:33.480 --> 00:15:35.399
but we won't really know for 50 years.

00:15:35.399 --> 00:15:40.399
And so Marx came at a perfect
time about 100 years later

00:15:40.559 --> 00:15:42.299
after the thing had happened

00:15:42.299 --> 00:15:44.732
and its first theorists had theorized it.

00:15:46.019 --> 00:15:48.419
So it wasn't because he
had an inspired vision,

00:15:48.419 --> 00:15:51.029
he was situated at a juncture.

00:15:51.029 --> 00:15:53.309
That juncture was when the capital system

00:15:53.309 --> 00:15:56.399
had consolidated itself
in the 18th century,

00:15:56.399 --> 00:15:58.529
had ramped up in the early 19th century

00:15:58.529 --> 00:16:00.062
into industrial fury,

00:16:01.769 --> 00:16:04.860
and the first theorists had started.

00:16:04.860 --> 00:16:08.850
Interestingly, capitalism was theorized

00:16:08.850 --> 00:16:12.540
for the first time between 1776 and 1817

00:16:12.539 --> 00:16:16.199
between Adam Smith's "An
Inquiry into the Nature

00:16:16.200 --> 00:16:17.970
and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,"

00:16:17.970 --> 00:16:19.500
known as "The Wealth of Nations,"

00:16:19.500 --> 00:16:21.299
and David Ricardo's "On the Principles

00:16:21.299 --> 00:16:24.629
of Political Economy
and Taxation" in 1817,

00:16:24.629 --> 00:16:26.490
which is strangely coeval

00:16:26.490 --> 00:16:29.519
with the American Revolution, 1776,

00:16:29.519 --> 00:16:33.360
and the opening of the New
York Stock Exchange, 1817,

00:16:33.360 --> 00:16:35.759
whatever you want to say
about the birth of capital

00:16:35.759 --> 00:16:39.389
and the US American way of life.

00:16:39.389 --> 00:16:41.340
It is true that those were the poles

00:16:41.340 --> 00:16:44.280
of the first theorization of capital

00:16:44.279 --> 00:16:45.632
between Smith and Ricardo,

00:16:46.559 --> 00:16:47.609
which Marx knew well

00:16:47.610 --> 00:16:50.190
and both had spawned schools

00:16:50.190 --> 00:16:54.150
of political economic study.

00:16:54.149 --> 00:16:57.120
What's the good of the
first theorists of anything?

00:16:57.120 --> 00:16:59.340
Well, they name the topic,

00:16:59.340 --> 00:17:00.600
they say it's a thing,

00:17:00.600 --> 00:17:03.090
and they give you a first approximation

00:17:03.090 --> 00:17:06.509
of what it might look like to study it.

00:17:06.509 --> 00:17:07.890
They invented this course,

00:17:07.890 --> 00:17:10.170
and Marx more than anything,

00:17:10.170 --> 00:17:11.009
not more than anything,

00:17:11.009 --> 00:17:13.259
but in addition to writing in German

00:17:13.259 --> 00:17:15.059
is writing in English.

00:17:15.059 --> 00:17:16.230
Even though in German,

00:17:16.230 --> 00:17:18.720
he's using the terms and the phrases

00:17:18.720 --> 00:17:21.839
and the grammar of English
political economy in this book.

00:17:21.839 --> 00:17:24.149
He does use a lot of terms in English

00:17:24.150 --> 00:17:26.300
and leaves them in
English in the original.

00:17:28.380 --> 00:17:30.420
What he liked about the
political economists

00:17:30.420 --> 00:17:33.580
was the unhealthy mixture
of rightness and wrongness

00:17:34.619 --> 00:17:35.869
in what they wrote about.

00:17:37.680 --> 00:17:40.380
Because when faced with
a giant impersonal system

00:17:40.380 --> 00:17:41.580
that's difficult to see,

00:17:41.579 --> 00:17:43.409
that was taking over the world,

00:17:43.410 --> 00:17:46.170
making labor look totally different,

00:17:46.170 --> 00:17:47.850
making wealth look totally different,

00:17:47.849 --> 00:17:49.799
making all your decision
making look different,

00:17:49.799 --> 00:17:52.649
making agricultural work look different,

00:17:52.650 --> 00:17:55.350
there was nowhere to exactly look for it

00:17:55.349 --> 00:17:57.212
except in the books,

00:17:58.349 --> 00:18:01.139
in the people who had
started to theorize it.

00:18:01.140 --> 00:18:03.210
So what he meant by critique,

00:18:03.210 --> 00:18:05.400
this is the first meaning
of critique for Marx,

00:18:05.400 --> 00:18:08.940
was finding the blind spots, the stubs,

00:18:08.940 --> 00:18:10.680
the unworked out ideas,

00:18:10.680 --> 00:18:14.793
the lacking logic in the
political economists.

00:18:17.069 --> 00:18:19.789
That's why you have "Critique
of Political Economy"

00:18:19.789 --> 00:18:22.470
as really an important part of the title.

00:18:22.470 --> 00:18:24.480
They overstated things,
they made mistakes,

00:18:24.480 --> 00:18:26.069
but they saw a lot.

00:18:26.069 --> 00:18:30.240
For example, they saw
how important labor was

00:18:30.240 --> 00:18:31.532
to the capital system.

00:18:33.329 --> 00:18:36.059
He then compared those blind spots

00:18:36.059 --> 00:18:38.429
to the best evidence of his day,

00:18:38.430 --> 00:18:40.019
which in some ways is a lot better

00:18:40.019 --> 00:18:42.569
than the evidence we have today.

00:18:42.569 --> 00:18:46.230
There aren't that many anthropologies,

00:18:46.230 --> 00:18:48.539
ethnographic studies of work anymore.

00:18:48.539 --> 00:18:50.389
There were a lot in the 20th century.

00:18:53.549 --> 00:18:56.430
He compared the political economists

00:18:56.430 --> 00:18:58.500
to newspapers, to novels,

00:18:58.500 --> 00:19:01.440
which you'll see he
quotes and reminds us of,

00:19:01.440 --> 00:19:03.779
to ethnographies of factories,

00:19:03.779 --> 00:19:06.210
especially the one by his
friend Friedrich Engels,

00:19:06.210 --> 00:19:08.819
who wrote "The Condition of
the Working Class in England"

00:19:08.819 --> 00:19:11.133
in 1844, and opened Marx's eyes.

00:19:12.809 --> 00:19:13.950
It's a great book.

00:19:13.950 --> 00:19:15.870
Engels, as you probably know,

00:19:15.869 --> 00:19:18.209
was the son of a factory owner

00:19:18.210 --> 00:19:21.059
who owned factories in
Germany and in England,

00:19:21.059 --> 00:19:26.059
and he sent the 18 or 19-year-old
Engels out to Manchester

00:19:26.369 --> 00:19:27.449
to work in the factory.

00:19:27.450 --> 00:19:29.403
And Engels was like, "Whoa,

00:19:30.539 --> 00:19:32.486
this is awful, dad."

00:19:34.319 --> 00:19:35.399
Not the only time

00:19:35.400 --> 00:19:40.140
that being against your
parents changed world history,

00:19:40.140 --> 00:19:41.432
there was Oedipus,

00:19:42.569 --> 00:19:44.269
but this was a very important one.

00:19:47.549 --> 00:19:50.069
In this book, you will notice

00:19:50.069 --> 00:19:52.409
that there is one set of heroes.

00:19:52.410 --> 00:19:55.290
It isn't Marx, it isn't even the workers,

00:19:55.289 --> 00:19:57.210
it is the factory inspectors.

00:19:57.210 --> 00:20:00.273
They are the David Copperfields
of this gothic novel.

00:20:01.710 --> 00:20:03.870
They went out to the factories in England

00:20:03.869 --> 00:20:05.459
and they wrote the most scathing reports.

00:20:05.460 --> 00:20:07.650
The irony of this, just so you know,

00:20:07.650 --> 00:20:08.910
was that the factory inspectors

00:20:08.910 --> 00:20:11.009
were empowered by the House of Lords,

00:20:11.009 --> 00:20:12.539
which was the old aristocracy

00:20:12.539 --> 00:20:14.159
who wanted to get the wealth back

00:20:14.160 --> 00:20:16.140
from the rotten capitalists.

00:20:16.140 --> 00:20:20.880
So if they exposed their dastardly
treatment of the workers,

00:20:20.880 --> 00:20:22.470
they thought they could climb back up

00:20:22.470 --> 00:20:25.170
to social hegemony,

00:20:25.170 --> 00:20:27.120
obviously didn't work,

00:20:27.119 --> 00:20:31.409
but the factory inspectors
provide the most scathing,

00:20:31.410 --> 00:20:34.920
searing, clear sighted review

00:20:34.920 --> 00:20:37.680
of child labor, for example,

00:20:37.680 --> 00:20:40.320
of long hours, of disease,

00:20:40.319 --> 00:20:43.829
of injury, of hopelessness,

00:20:43.829 --> 00:20:47.069
of the immiseration of the workers,

00:20:47.069 --> 00:20:48.179
no matter how much they worked,

00:20:48.180 --> 00:20:49.920
they couldn't feed themselves,

00:20:49.920 --> 00:20:51.810
of malnutrition.

00:20:51.809 --> 00:20:54.000
The factory inspectors are the heroes

00:20:54.000 --> 00:20:57.240
and they served the purpose

00:20:57.240 --> 00:21:00.543
of socialism unknowingly.

00:21:02.130 --> 00:21:06.120
Okay, so between the descriptive accounts

00:21:06.119 --> 00:21:08.279
and the theoretical accounts,

00:21:08.279 --> 00:21:11.490
with the help of a bigger
philosophical framework,

00:21:11.490 --> 00:21:13.349
a different logic and
a different ontology,

00:21:13.349 --> 00:21:14.669
which we'll talk about today,

00:21:14.670 --> 00:21:16.529
Marx could describe the capital system

00:21:16.529 --> 00:21:19.379
in a way that it still operates today.

00:21:19.380 --> 00:21:20.730
I will maintain this.

00:21:20.730 --> 00:21:23.250
You will look around and see
if that's true for yourselves.

00:21:23.250 --> 00:21:25.769
In essence, it still
operates in the same way

00:21:25.769 --> 00:21:27.873
as is described starting in Chapter 1.

00:21:29.460 --> 00:21:30.960
What does a capital system do?

00:21:32.430 --> 00:21:35.670
We wanna talk about it in a
way that isn't just logical,

00:21:35.670 --> 00:21:38.250
that isn't just about its contradictions

00:21:38.250 --> 00:21:40.289
in the sense that it doesn't make sense.

00:21:40.289 --> 00:21:43.376
Oftentimes you think, "This
just doesn't make sense."

00:21:45.210 --> 00:21:46.590
It's not a matter of making sense,

00:21:46.589 --> 00:21:51.449
but the toxic effect it has
on people who live under it.

00:21:51.450 --> 00:21:52.980
Capitalism is a strange,

00:21:52.980 --> 00:21:55.170
the capital system is a strange mix

00:21:55.170 --> 00:21:57.870
of a toxin and a remedy.

00:21:57.869 --> 00:22:00.509
Sometimes it poisons you

00:22:00.509 --> 00:22:02.339
and then offers you the cure,

00:22:02.339 --> 00:22:04.112
which poisons you even worse,

00:22:05.190 --> 00:22:06.023
as we know.

00:22:07.680 --> 00:22:09.840
It feeds and clothes most of the planet,

00:22:09.839 --> 00:22:11.589
we have to concede this right away.

00:22:12.809 --> 00:22:14.609
There isn't a way you
could snap your fingers

00:22:14.609 --> 00:22:16.829
and have some central organization

00:22:16.829 --> 00:22:20.220
that suddenly took over the distribution,

00:22:20.220 --> 00:22:24.269
production of food and
all other necessities,

00:22:24.269 --> 00:22:26.049
but this comes at a cost

00:22:27.000 --> 00:22:30.960
of poisoning sociality according to Marx,

00:22:30.960 --> 00:22:32.549
that's called wage labor,

00:22:32.549 --> 00:22:34.832
that's the poison of human sociology.

00:22:37.410 --> 00:22:39.483
It generates unprecedented wealth,

00:22:41.160 --> 00:22:42.360
but it distributes that wealth

00:22:42.359 --> 00:22:46.500
in terribly uneven and
frankly preposterous ways

00:22:46.500 --> 00:22:47.970
that makes no sense

00:22:47.970 --> 00:22:49.809
and it redounds on our lives

00:22:50.759 --> 00:22:54.359
to the extent that we
have to do crazy things

00:22:54.359 --> 00:22:55.649
just to survive.

00:22:55.650 --> 00:22:57.509
It gives work to billions

00:22:57.509 --> 00:23:01.019
and is constantly about to
throw millions out of work,

00:23:01.019 --> 00:23:02.639
and you never know whether you're the one

00:23:02.640 --> 00:23:04.650
who's gonna be thrown out of work today

00:23:04.650 --> 00:23:06.873
or you're gonna be promoted.

00:23:07.710 --> 00:23:09.360
Right now in any present,

00:23:09.359 --> 00:23:11.609
you are in this precarious position,

00:23:11.609 --> 00:23:12.839
so much so,

00:23:12.839 --> 00:23:15.990
and that is kept from you

00:23:15.990 --> 00:23:18.599
in the form of our language and ideation

00:23:18.599 --> 00:23:19.469
where you say,

00:23:19.470 --> 00:23:21.450
I run one of the colleges here

00:23:21.450 --> 00:23:24.090
and students are always worried
about, "Will I get a job?"

00:23:24.089 --> 00:23:25.559
I'm like, "Get a job?

00:23:25.559 --> 00:23:28.559
You're giving them some,
they're getting you."

00:23:28.559 --> 00:23:30.000
Obviously, it doesn't work that way,

00:23:30.000 --> 00:23:32.069
but we believe we're
lucky when we get a job

00:23:32.069 --> 00:23:34.529
and we believe we should
not only have that job

00:23:34.529 --> 00:23:36.843
and give them everything but love it.

00:23:37.740 --> 00:23:39.272
You must love your work.

00:23:42.359 --> 00:23:44.009
As Marx says, "You're free.

00:23:44.009 --> 00:23:46.166
Free to sell your or die."

00:23:49.470 --> 00:23:52.799
The capital system divides
everything up in a different way

00:23:52.799 --> 00:23:54.539
and it conquers.

00:23:54.539 --> 00:23:57.599
It forms classes, social classes,

00:23:57.599 --> 00:24:00.059
it re-skills labor in the factory,

00:24:00.059 --> 00:24:03.089
it de-skills labor in factories,

00:24:03.089 --> 00:24:05.279
it occupies lands and peoples,

00:24:05.279 --> 00:24:06.809
it extracts resources,

00:24:06.809 --> 00:24:07.919
all this stuff we know.

00:24:07.920 --> 00:24:10.289
It uses race, gender, ethnicity,

00:24:10.289 --> 00:24:15.089
country of origin to distribute
wealth in different ways,

00:24:15.089 --> 00:24:18.689
unevenly, and not just wealth but labor.

00:24:18.690 --> 00:24:22.470
We should think not only of the
distribution of the outcome,

00:24:22.470 --> 00:24:26.190
but the distribution of the input,

00:24:26.190 --> 00:24:27.299
so labor.

00:24:27.299 --> 00:24:29.549
And the affective
distribution of suffering

00:24:29.549 --> 00:24:32.047
is another thing we should consider.

00:24:32.047 --> 00:24:34.650
"Capital is what makes live and lets die,"

00:24:34.650 --> 00:24:35.973
to quote Foucault.

00:24:37.170 --> 00:24:39.690
It builds and destroys,

00:24:39.690 --> 00:24:42.269
it gives rise to immense
technological change

00:24:42.269 --> 00:24:44.430
such that you might be dreaming

00:24:44.430 --> 00:24:48.480
of what's the technology
from your childhood

00:24:48.480 --> 00:24:49.559
that's no longer around?

00:24:49.559 --> 00:24:50.909
The DVD.

00:24:50.910 --> 00:24:52.650
You might be dreaming of the DVD at night,

00:24:52.650 --> 00:24:54.810
but you'll never see one in the day

00:24:54.809 --> 00:24:57.419
that has been totally
vanquished from the Earth,

00:24:57.420 --> 00:24:58.413
that technology.

00:24:59.460 --> 00:25:01.890
And we know the ways in
which it makes life on Earth

00:25:01.890 --> 00:25:05.853
precarious to the point of extinction.

00:25:07.650 --> 00:25:09.900
It builds and destroys.

00:25:09.900 --> 00:25:13.777
It is, to quote Wendy Brown
in her preface to the book,

00:25:13.777 --> 00:25:16.047
"World making and world destroying."

00:25:20.940 --> 00:25:23.519
There's much more we
can say about the ills

00:25:23.519 --> 00:25:25.079
and the goods of capital,

00:25:25.079 --> 00:25:27.663
but maybe we can do that
as we go through the book.

00:25:30.059 --> 00:25:31.980
Let's open the book

00:25:31.980 --> 00:25:33.039
or open your PDF

00:25:35.670 --> 00:25:37.470
and begin to look at it.

00:25:37.470 --> 00:25:40.170
I wanna start today

00:25:40.170 --> 00:25:44.670
from the first sentences,

00:25:44.670 --> 00:25:45.993
very famous sentences,

00:25:47.970 --> 00:25:51.393
but we need to look into it a little more.

00:25:55.656 --> 00:25:57.509
"The wealth of society is dominated

00:25:57.509 --> 00:25:59.460
by the capitalist mode of production,

00:25:59.460 --> 00:26:00.569
appears in the form

00:26:00.569 --> 00:26:03.480
of an enormous accumulation
of commodities."

00:26:03.480 --> 00:26:05.103
There Marx is quoting himself.

00:26:06.630 --> 00:26:08.737
Why not? He's an authority.

00:26:08.737 --> 00:26:10.590
"The individual commodity appears

00:26:10.589 --> 00:26:12.480
as the elementary form of that wealth.

00:26:12.480 --> 00:26:16.170
Hence, our investigation begins
by analyzing the commodity."

00:26:16.170 --> 00:26:17.580
Let's just take a look at these words

00:26:17.579 --> 00:26:21.000
because they will help us
figure out where Marx is going,

00:26:21.000 --> 00:26:22.173
starting with wealth.

00:26:24.059 --> 00:26:25.470
What is wealth?

00:26:25.470 --> 00:26:28.329
Anyone wanna bore me

00:26:29.819 --> 00:26:30.722
an explanation?

00:26:35.849 --> 00:26:36.682
Shout it out.

00:26:39.809 --> 00:26:41.279
I got a room full of people

00:26:41.279 --> 00:26:44.579
either who are so wealthy
they never thought about it

00:26:44.579 --> 00:26:46.949
or so poor they're too
mad to say anything.

00:26:46.950 --> 00:26:48.297
Yeah.

00:26:48.297 --> 00:26:49.747
- An accumulation of capital.

00:26:51.420 --> 00:26:52.253
- No.

00:26:52.252 --> 00:26:53.879
Yes, no.

00:26:53.880 --> 00:26:55.080
Yes and no.

00:26:55.079 --> 00:26:57.480
It is certainly an accumulation,

00:26:57.480 --> 00:26:58.920
but wealth is not capital.

00:26:58.920 --> 00:27:00.810
Wealth is a pre-capitalist form,

00:27:00.809 --> 00:27:02.159
an extra capitalist form.

00:27:02.160 --> 00:27:05.430
We call things wealth under capital,

00:27:05.430 --> 00:27:09.210
but wealth is simply an
accumulation of possessions

00:27:09.210 --> 00:27:11.430
and maybe you could say an
accumulation of possessions

00:27:11.430 --> 00:27:13.289
that have some purchasing power

00:27:13.289 --> 00:27:15.182
that allow you to get something else.

00:27:16.710 --> 00:27:18.992
Capital is not wealth,

00:27:30.042 --> 00:27:33.089
it is a term that belongs
to a different system.

00:27:33.089 --> 00:27:36.329
For example, it comes from the system

00:27:36.329 --> 00:27:39.419
where you think of the wellbeing
of the whole community.

00:27:39.420 --> 00:27:42.810
In fact, the word comes
from the word weal or well,

00:27:42.809 --> 00:27:46.169
which means to not be ill,

00:27:46.170 --> 00:27:47.343
to keep your health.

00:27:48.960 --> 00:27:52.019
And is used frequently in the 18th century

00:27:52.019 --> 00:27:54.720
in the compound commonwealth.

00:27:54.720 --> 00:27:56.819
There's no such thing as common capital.

00:27:56.819 --> 00:27:58.980
You couldn't say common capital.

00:27:58.980 --> 00:28:00.480
So when we say wealth management,

00:28:00.480 --> 00:28:02.460
they're really not thinking
of the meaning of the term.

00:28:02.460 --> 00:28:06.120
It is another form of appearance,

00:28:06.119 --> 00:28:07.349
a way of talking about it.

00:28:07.349 --> 00:28:10.230
And Marx would say this is
not a necessary form of,

00:28:10.230 --> 00:28:13.380
this is misleading way to talk about it.

00:28:13.380 --> 00:28:15.520
And you'll see that he talks about

00:28:16.589 --> 00:28:18.089
what he calls the vulgar economists

00:28:18.089 --> 00:28:19.829
or the bourgeois economists

00:28:19.829 --> 00:28:21.449
in these terms all the time.

00:28:21.450 --> 00:28:22.620
They're not taking up

00:28:22.619 --> 00:28:24.659
capital's necessary forms of appearance

00:28:24.660 --> 00:28:27.273
where value appears as money, for example.

00:28:28.680 --> 00:28:30.660
What they're doing is deceiving you

00:28:30.660 --> 00:28:31.500
and they're just (indistinct)

00:28:31.500 --> 00:28:33.539
because they're deceived themselves.

00:28:33.539 --> 00:28:35.399
Capital is not wealth.

00:28:35.400 --> 00:28:37.320
When your wealth is being managed,

00:28:37.319 --> 00:28:39.542
it's being used as capital, not wealth.

00:28:40.500 --> 00:28:42.690
And we're going to get to what capital is.

00:28:42.690 --> 00:28:45.660
Capital has a whole other operation.

00:28:45.660 --> 00:28:46.860
You notice in the first sentence,

00:28:46.859 --> 00:28:47.819
the wealth of society

00:28:47.819 --> 00:28:50.582
is dominated by the
capitalist mode of production.

00:28:52.170 --> 00:28:54.840
He talks about societies

00:28:54.839 --> 00:28:58.919
and he talks about something
that takes them over

00:28:58.920 --> 00:29:01.470
at a certain moment in a certain way

00:29:01.470 --> 00:29:02.853
under certain conditions.

00:29:05.190 --> 00:29:07.830
We have to be wary of thinking of capital

00:29:07.829 --> 00:29:10.230
as something that is natural

00:29:10.230 --> 00:29:12.509
that exists longer in history.

00:29:12.509 --> 00:29:17.069
Capital itself as a technique
is a kind of social technique

00:29:17.069 --> 00:29:20.279
for taking money, putting it to work

00:29:20.279 --> 00:29:21.452
and getting more money out of it,

00:29:21.452 --> 00:29:24.750
it's a contract in which you
take a certain amount of value

00:29:24.750 --> 00:29:26.039
and you say, "I'll give this to you now

00:29:26.039 --> 00:29:29.970
if you give me more later
along with the original."

00:29:29.970 --> 00:29:34.500
That started to be a social
technique in the 15th century,

00:29:34.500 --> 00:29:37.470
so still not that old
when it comes down to it,

00:29:37.470 --> 00:29:39.273
certainly much younger than wealth.

00:29:41.039 --> 00:29:45.569
Anyone in the European context
in the last 2,000 years

00:29:45.569 --> 00:29:50.279
could amass possessions

00:29:50.279 --> 00:29:52.349
and then use them as they wanted to.

00:29:52.349 --> 00:29:54.990
The idea that they would then grow

00:29:54.990 --> 00:29:57.212
is an absurd and very new idea,

00:29:59.700 --> 00:30:02.403
new to the tune of about 500 years.

00:30:04.380 --> 00:30:05.310
The wealth of society

00:30:05.309 --> 00:30:08.549
is dominated by the
capitalist mode of production.

00:30:08.549 --> 00:30:11.399
Wealth gets transformed

00:30:11.400 --> 00:30:14.820
when capitalist ways

00:30:14.819 --> 00:30:17.339
of doing things take over.

00:30:17.339 --> 00:30:18.299
It's no longer wealth,

00:30:18.299 --> 00:30:19.409
it gets translated,

00:30:19.410 --> 00:30:22.140
as many, many things do under this system.

00:30:22.140 --> 00:30:23.460
It takes old things.

00:30:23.460 --> 00:30:25.079
That is why the persistence

00:30:25.079 --> 00:30:27.000
of old ways of understanding them,

00:30:27.000 --> 00:30:28.529
as in the political economists,

00:30:28.529 --> 00:30:31.559
is worrisome because the names carry over

00:30:31.559 --> 00:30:32.639
other social systems

00:30:32.640 --> 00:30:35.673
and ignore the newness of this system.

00:30:40.049 --> 00:30:41.909
What is a mode of production?

00:30:41.910 --> 00:30:43.009
Let's talk about that.

00:30:43.980 --> 00:30:45.360
So we talk about wealth,

00:30:45.359 --> 00:30:46.769
dominate is important

00:30:46.769 --> 00:30:48.970
because Marx is already thinking here

00:30:50.039 --> 00:30:52.262
that there's power involved,

00:30:53.339 --> 00:30:56.609
that the mode

00:30:56.609 --> 00:30:57.629
or the way of living

00:30:57.630 --> 00:30:59.190
or the form of life

00:30:59.190 --> 00:31:02.070
takes over and kicks other things out.

00:31:02.069 --> 00:31:03.480
You will see in later chapters,

00:31:03.480 --> 00:31:06.180
especially in the original
accumulation chapters,

00:31:06.180 --> 00:31:10.080
how that happened through violence and law

00:31:10.079 --> 00:31:12.903
and deceit and treachery.

00:31:14.460 --> 00:31:16.529
So it came to be,

00:31:16.529 --> 00:31:20.190
it came to hegemony or
came to power, capital,

00:31:20.190 --> 00:31:23.940
through a domineering way.

00:31:23.940 --> 00:31:25.950
I don't think it's the
case that every social form

00:31:25.950 --> 00:31:28.920
comes to be through domination,

00:31:28.920 --> 00:31:30.570
through taking over and
kicking everything out,

00:31:30.569 --> 00:31:32.309
but capital has that quality,

00:31:32.309 --> 00:31:34.710
and historically it had that quality.

00:31:34.710 --> 00:31:37.207
It was like, to personify it,

00:31:37.207 --> 00:31:38.100
"You're out of here.

00:31:38.099 --> 00:31:39.149
The rest of you are out of here.

00:31:39.150 --> 00:31:41.640
We're gonna marshal all our resources

00:31:41.640 --> 00:31:45.657
to push out collective
farming or feudal relations."

00:31:46.950 --> 00:31:48.090
It dominates.

00:31:48.089 --> 00:31:50.849
So the trace of power
goes through capital,

00:31:50.849 --> 00:31:53.500
even though he doesn't have
an analysis of the state,

00:31:54.660 --> 00:31:57.540
there are power relations at stake.

00:31:57.539 --> 00:31:59.609
In fact, the main relation,

00:31:59.609 --> 00:32:01.069
the capital relation,

00:32:01.069 --> 00:32:03.329
is something you'll get to down the line,

00:32:03.329 --> 00:32:05.222
which is the core of his analysis,

00:32:06.390 --> 00:32:07.980
the core of his critique.

00:32:07.980 --> 00:32:11.610
This is what exactly the
political economists missed.

00:32:11.609 --> 00:32:15.959
And the thing that remains
steadfast in our capitalism,

00:32:15.960 --> 00:32:20.160
even though some of the forms
of exchange have changed,

00:32:20.160 --> 00:32:22.320
the commodities, of course, have changed,

00:32:22.319 --> 00:32:23.879
is the capital relation,

00:32:23.880 --> 00:32:25.780
and that is a relation of extortion

00:32:26.759 --> 00:32:31.170
in which the owners hold
back the means of production

00:32:31.170 --> 00:32:34.019
from the very ones who can
use the means of production

00:32:34.019 --> 00:32:36.480
and force them to sign a
contract to give over their labor

00:32:36.480 --> 00:32:40.799
and its product to the owners.

00:32:40.799 --> 00:32:42.269
That's the capital relation,

00:32:42.269 --> 00:32:45.180
and it's a relation of domination.

00:32:45.180 --> 00:32:48.029
So keep your eye on domination

00:32:48.029 --> 00:32:50.343
and other modes of power,
including extortion.

00:32:51.269 --> 00:32:52.410
Mode of production

00:32:52.410 --> 00:32:55.950
is a term that comes up a
lot in Marxist discourse.

00:32:55.950 --> 00:32:57.900
You probably will notice

00:32:57.900 --> 00:33:02.310
that I don't give that dogmatic view

00:33:02.309 --> 00:33:03.329
of Marxist discourse,

00:33:03.329 --> 00:33:06.179
maybe some of you are
better at it than I am.

00:33:06.180 --> 00:33:08.519
For a long time I was
saying, "I'm not a Marxist."

00:33:08.519 --> 00:33:10.259
You know, Marx said this famously,

00:33:10.259 --> 00:33:12.336
his son-in-law, Paul Lafargue quotes,

00:33:12.336 --> 00:33:14.156
"Je ne suis pas marxiste."

00:33:16.799 --> 00:33:18.750
But you know strategically
in the right moment

00:33:18.750 --> 00:33:20.547
you're like, "I'm a Marxist."

00:33:24.450 --> 00:33:25.710
We leave that question open,

00:33:25.710 --> 00:33:27.600
and you'll leave that
question open for yourselves

00:33:27.599 --> 00:33:29.129
where you fall on this.

00:33:29.130 --> 00:33:33.450
But mode of production is
a typical phrase in Marxism

00:33:33.450 --> 00:33:35.220
and it implies a number of things.

00:33:35.220 --> 00:33:39.990
First of all, it implies that
production is not natural.

00:33:39.990 --> 00:33:42.359
You don't always make
things in the same way.

00:33:42.359 --> 00:33:43.979
It has modes,

00:33:43.980 --> 00:33:48.420
so it is modal or modular

00:33:48.420 --> 00:33:50.880
or plastic or elastic.

00:33:50.880 --> 00:33:53.370
And one of the ways you
could do a revolution,

00:33:53.369 --> 00:33:55.619
one of the ways capitalism
does its revolutions

00:33:55.619 --> 00:33:59.369
is by plastifying the mode of production,

00:33:59.369 --> 00:34:01.469
changing the mode of production

00:34:01.470 --> 00:34:05.579
from hand work to machine
work to digital work.

00:34:05.579 --> 00:34:08.880
That is a transformation
of the mode of production.

00:34:08.880 --> 00:34:12.539
There are potentially

00:34:12.539 --> 00:34:13.650
modes of production

00:34:13.650 --> 00:34:15.420
and transformations of
the modes of production

00:34:15.420 --> 00:34:18.750
that could lead out of
the capital relation,

00:34:18.750 --> 00:34:19.949
that's possible.

00:34:19.949 --> 00:34:22.829
It upholds it as we think about it.

00:34:22.829 --> 00:34:24.059
And capital is very good,

00:34:24.059 --> 00:34:24.989
the capital system,

00:34:24.989 --> 00:34:27.599
Mr. Capital. Mrs. Capital, Sir Capital,

00:34:27.599 --> 00:34:28.432
what should we call it?

00:34:28.432 --> 00:34:30.360
King Capital? King Capital.

00:34:30.360 --> 00:34:31.443
King Capital,

00:34:33.239 --> 00:34:35.309
we are writing a kind of fairytale,

00:34:35.309 --> 00:34:38.579
King Capital excels

00:34:38.579 --> 00:34:41.159
in changing the mode of production

00:34:41.159 --> 00:34:43.899
to increase profit

00:34:46.260 --> 00:34:47.620
and not to decrease profit

00:34:49.079 --> 00:34:54.079
is why kind of hand work movements fail

00:34:54.719 --> 00:34:55.832
as big movements.

00:34:57.840 --> 00:35:00.512
Okay, what other words
are we dealing with here?

00:35:03.000 --> 00:35:04.800
Appears in,

00:35:04.800 --> 00:35:07.410
you'll notice that the first four chapters

00:35:07.409 --> 00:35:09.690
are about appearances.

00:35:09.690 --> 00:35:11.190
It starts very close to you

00:35:11.190 --> 00:35:13.682
in the thing that appears
to you first every day.

00:35:14.789 --> 00:35:16.440
What's the thing that appears
to you first every day?

00:35:16.440 --> 00:35:18.179
It's not your toothbrush anymore,

00:35:18.179 --> 00:35:19.079
it's here like this.

00:35:19.079 --> 00:35:22.139
He's like, "This is how
capitalism appears to me."

00:35:22.139 --> 00:35:23.312
It's a very,

00:35:24.210 --> 00:35:25.829
it's materialist in a sense

00:35:25.829 --> 00:35:28.199
that you're looking at
the actual things you use,

00:35:28.199 --> 00:35:30.062
Marx starts with this in the book,

00:35:31.170 --> 00:35:34.200
but it's something you can't see

00:35:34.199 --> 00:35:35.519
because iPhone is a perfect

00:35:35.519 --> 00:35:36.840
or a smartphone is a perfect example

00:35:36.840 --> 00:35:38.539
because it's so close to your face

00:35:39.539 --> 00:35:42.090
you can't see it for what it is.

00:35:42.090 --> 00:35:44.130
You can't see it as a commodity, for sure,

00:35:44.130 --> 00:35:45.150
while you're using it.

00:35:45.150 --> 00:35:48.480
You also can't see its constitution.

00:35:48.480 --> 00:35:50.639
It is constituted by all its connections

00:35:50.639 --> 00:35:51.869
to everything else in the world:

00:35:51.869 --> 00:35:52.772
what made it,

00:35:54.570 --> 00:35:57.090
its parts, the labor, the ideas,

00:35:57.090 --> 00:35:59.250
the history of technology
that led up to it.

00:35:59.250 --> 00:36:02.829
Actually, Marx says
somewhere, "If you take a pen

00:36:04.380 --> 00:36:05.940
and you started to enumerate

00:36:05.940 --> 00:36:07.800
all the labor that went into it,

00:36:07.800 --> 00:36:10.080
you would become nauseous very quickly,"

00:36:10.079 --> 00:36:11.969
because in fact every made object

00:36:11.969 --> 00:36:14.069
is connected to every bit of work

00:36:14.070 --> 00:36:15.420
that was ever done in human history

00:36:15.420 --> 00:36:18.782
plus all of nature and
evolution back to the Big Bang.

00:36:20.369 --> 00:36:21.389
These are the kinds of thoughts

00:36:21.389 --> 00:36:23.759
we're dealing with in this class.

00:36:23.760 --> 00:36:25.020
The world of commodities

00:36:25.019 --> 00:36:27.070
is an immense accumulation

00:36:28.230 --> 00:36:30.599
of diverse things,

00:36:30.599 --> 00:36:33.750
and Marx will say, "There's
one way to hold onto them."

00:36:33.750 --> 00:36:35.039
Capitalism does this.

00:36:35.039 --> 00:36:37.710
It holds onto them by value.

00:36:37.710 --> 00:36:39.990
That's the thing they all
have in common for capitalism.

00:36:39.989 --> 00:36:42.929
But if you look at the
world of commodities,

00:36:42.929 --> 00:36:44.579
it is dizzying.

00:36:44.579 --> 00:36:49.579
Someone sent me recently
a Rosa Parks bikini.

00:36:50.110 --> 00:36:51.420
Okay, they didn't send me the bikini,

00:36:51.420 --> 00:36:53.940
they send me a link to the bikini,

00:36:53.940 --> 00:36:55.679
which is like 19.95,

00:36:55.679 --> 00:36:58.079
but you can commodify anything,

00:36:58.079 --> 00:37:00.389
everything can be commodified.

00:37:00.389 --> 00:37:03.480
We'll talk about the
processes of commodification,

00:37:03.480 --> 00:37:07.559
but if you look at one commodity,

00:37:07.559 --> 00:37:10.019
you don't see its commodity character,

00:37:10.019 --> 00:37:11.789
you don't see its relationship to labor

00:37:11.789 --> 00:37:13.563
and the history of all labor,

00:37:15.030 --> 00:37:18.660
and you don't see its relations
to the immense diversity,

00:37:18.659 --> 00:37:22.259
the mind-boggling, infinite,
potentially infinite diversity

00:37:22.260 --> 00:37:24.390
of all the commodities that are out there.

00:37:24.389 --> 00:37:25.710
Very hard to see.

00:37:25.710 --> 00:37:27.512
We're gonna be enumerating this.

00:37:31.619 --> 00:37:33.089
Where are we?

00:37:33.090 --> 00:37:34.710
Appears in the form of.

00:37:34.710 --> 00:37:37.619
Marx sticks with a kind of Aristotelian

00:37:37.619 --> 00:37:40.259
philosophical distinction
between form and matter

00:37:40.260 --> 00:37:41.460
or form and material.

00:37:41.460 --> 00:37:42.630
This comes up a lot,

00:37:42.630 --> 00:37:44.849
but he's gonna switch around
what those things are.

00:37:44.849 --> 00:37:47.279
And unlike Aristotle,

00:37:47.280 --> 00:37:48.900
form is not natural,

00:37:48.900 --> 00:37:51.480
it's not given by God or born with nature.

00:37:51.480 --> 00:37:52.829
The forms of things,

00:37:52.829 --> 00:37:55.739
capitalism, the capital system,

00:37:55.739 --> 00:38:00.059
specializes in transformation of forms,

00:38:00.059 --> 00:38:04.199
which you will have seen
in Section 3 of Chapter 1,

00:38:04.199 --> 00:38:05.949
which we will talk about on Friday.

00:38:07.500 --> 00:38:10.079
Form of, this is a very
important phrase to hold onto,

00:38:10.079 --> 00:38:13.110
you will see something
that you want to understand

00:38:13.110 --> 00:38:14.370
changing its form a lot.

00:38:14.369 --> 00:38:17.699
It takes the form of this
and the form of that, right?

00:38:17.699 --> 00:38:19.980
Don't be nervous about it.

00:38:19.980 --> 00:38:22.440
If the material content of the commodity

00:38:22.440 --> 00:38:26.039
is use or use value,

00:38:26.039 --> 00:38:28.532
its form is exchange value.

00:38:30.420 --> 00:38:32.220
A very strange way of
understanding things,

00:38:32.219 --> 00:38:33.419
he takes this from Hegel,

00:38:33.420 --> 00:38:37.690
really moves it around to
make us able to understand

00:38:38.880 --> 00:38:40.653
this world of commodities.

00:38:43.590 --> 00:38:45.030
It takes the form of an enormous

00:38:45.030 --> 00:38:46.680
accumulation of commodities.

00:38:46.679 --> 00:38:48.750
Well, this is a very flat phrase,

00:38:48.750 --> 00:38:51.510
enormous accumulation of commodities.

00:38:51.510 --> 00:38:52.743
What's an accumulation?

00:38:55.079 --> 00:38:57.179
Nothing, it's just a bunch of things.

00:38:57.179 --> 00:39:00.599
It's a bunch of things with
no relation to one another.

00:39:00.599 --> 00:39:02.699
That's what wealth is and accumulation,

00:39:02.699 --> 00:39:05.669
that hides the fact that all
those things are related.

00:39:05.670 --> 00:39:06.960
Somebody made them,

00:39:06.960 --> 00:39:08.099
somebody bought them,

00:39:08.099 --> 00:39:09.119
somebody sold them,

00:39:09.119 --> 00:39:11.279
somebody extracted the
materials from the Earth,

00:39:11.280 --> 00:39:12.990
the Earth produced those materials,

00:39:12.989 --> 00:39:14.009
the Earth is gonna get back

00:39:14.010 --> 00:39:17.100
the disjecta membra of that thing

00:39:17.099 --> 00:39:20.793
in some form that ruins it, most likely.

00:39:22.710 --> 00:39:24.960
All of the relations are
gone in an accumulation,

00:39:24.960 --> 00:39:27.059
so this is the first appearance,

00:39:27.059 --> 00:39:28.210
two first appearances

00:39:29.099 --> 00:39:32.822
that this is the elementary
form, the commodity,

00:39:33.869 --> 00:39:35.819
and that it shows up

00:39:35.820 --> 00:39:38.583
as an enormous accumulation
of them, right?

00:39:39.900 --> 00:39:41.369
Especially if you are,

00:39:41.369 --> 00:39:44.279
you know, when my partner
Catalina came from Argentina

00:39:44.280 --> 00:39:46.019
and we went to Target,

00:39:46.019 --> 00:39:51.019
maybe if some of you come from
a less consumerized culture,

00:39:51.059 --> 00:39:53.096
she was like, she couldn't believe it,

00:39:53.097 --> 00:39:55.110
she just walked around like.

00:39:55.110 --> 00:39:56.640
Now we bring everyone who comes to visit

00:39:56.639 --> 00:39:57.900
for the first time to Target

00:39:57.900 --> 00:40:00.450
or one of those places.

00:40:00.449 --> 00:40:01.379
I don't go into Walmart,

00:40:01.380 --> 00:40:03.690
but I imagine it's even bigger,

00:40:03.690 --> 00:40:05.250
and you're just like, "It's astounding.

00:40:05.250 --> 00:40:06.690
It looks like an immense accumulation.

00:40:06.690 --> 00:40:09.483
It's just like it grew,
it's like paradise.

00:40:10.349 --> 00:40:13.886
A very fluorescent paradise."

00:40:15.900 --> 00:40:17.880
But it is not an accumulation

00:40:17.880 --> 00:40:19.923
and it doesn't have an elementary form.

00:40:21.030 --> 00:40:25.080
It's a set of dynamic
relations in which people live,

00:40:25.079 --> 00:40:27.632
expend their energies and die.

00:40:28.980 --> 00:40:31.769
Nourish themselves,
interact with one another,

00:40:31.769 --> 00:40:34.650
it's not an economy, it's a social system.

00:40:34.650 --> 00:40:36.480
This is the main aim of this book

00:40:36.480 --> 00:40:39.603
is to say economy has its place,

00:40:40.949 --> 00:40:43.439
but we need to move beyond
economistic thinking

00:40:43.440 --> 00:40:46.920
towards what Marx calls social thinking.

00:40:46.920 --> 00:40:48.119
We can see what that is.

00:40:50.668 --> 00:40:53.313
(hums) We're getting there.

00:40:54.510 --> 00:40:57.780
The main mode,

00:40:57.780 --> 00:41:01.380
especially in these first
chapters, is analysis.

00:41:01.380 --> 00:41:02.970
Just to say what analysis is.

00:41:02.969 --> 00:41:04.349
It's very hard to read this book.

00:41:04.349 --> 00:41:06.029
It switches around a lot.

00:41:06.030 --> 00:41:08.310
You'll find he'll be
telling a joke one minute,

00:41:08.309 --> 00:41:10.469
he'll be doing dialectics another minute,

00:41:10.469 --> 00:41:11.519
what's dialectics?

00:41:11.519 --> 00:41:12.619
We'll talk about that.

00:41:14.579 --> 00:41:17.969
But the first chapters are about analysis

00:41:17.969 --> 00:41:21.599
because he thinks he can
take you to the falsity

00:41:21.599 --> 00:41:23.849
of what you think a commodity is

00:41:23.849 --> 00:41:25.619
and your relationship to it

00:41:25.619 --> 00:41:27.420
by breaking it down into its parts,

00:41:27.420 --> 00:41:29.519
which is what analyzing is.

00:41:29.519 --> 00:41:32.163
So he does a lot of
operations in this book,

00:41:33.030 --> 00:41:35.430
critique of the political economists,

00:41:35.429 --> 00:41:38.669
analysis of what we take
to be the basic forms.

00:41:38.670 --> 00:41:40.110
He will do dialectics,

00:41:40.110 --> 00:41:41.940
which is a synthetic operation

00:41:41.940 --> 00:41:44.280
so that we can get from
the elementary form

00:41:44.280 --> 00:41:47.070
and its false appearance
as an accumulation

00:41:47.070 --> 00:41:49.320
to the whole,

00:41:49.320 --> 00:41:50.700
which is the only perspective

00:41:50.699 --> 00:41:53.129
from which to understand capital.

00:41:53.130 --> 00:41:55.829
So if you feel lost at the beginning,

00:41:55.829 --> 00:41:57.900
I think it's the best
way to start the book

00:41:57.900 --> 00:42:00.302
for people who are reading
it 150 years later.

00:42:02.130 --> 00:42:02.970
Why?

00:42:02.969 --> 00:42:04.319
Because it starts exactly

00:42:04.320 --> 00:42:06.450
with the false position that you're in

00:42:06.449 --> 00:42:07.679
and moves you very slow.

00:42:07.679 --> 00:42:09.000
This is what he thought he was doing,

00:42:09.000 --> 00:42:10.829
moves you slowly to the whole,

00:42:10.829 --> 00:42:12.150
which is the only perspective

00:42:12.150 --> 00:42:15.480
from which to know that
these are false appearances

00:42:15.480 --> 00:42:19.079
because the iPhone is a the product,

00:42:19.079 --> 00:42:21.630
I mean, so much you could
say about the iPhone.

00:42:21.630 --> 00:42:22.507
I always tell students,

00:42:22.507 --> 00:42:24.539
"You should do an analysis of the iPhone."

00:42:24.539 --> 00:42:25.529
I'm sure there are good ones.

00:42:25.530 --> 00:42:27.640
If you know one, send it to me

00:42:31.409 --> 00:42:34.829
because it is a temporary,

00:42:34.829 --> 00:42:36.210
in so many ways,

00:42:36.210 --> 00:42:40.983
embodiment of drives of the system.

00:42:42.900 --> 00:42:45.090
And only when you know
the system and its drives

00:42:45.090 --> 00:42:49.773
can you understand how
this is just a part.

00:42:52.199 --> 00:42:54.272
False to look at it as a thing.

00:42:55.320 --> 00:42:57.510
Commodities are not things.

00:42:57.510 --> 00:42:59.260
Oh, we didn't talk about commodity.

00:43:00.659 --> 00:43:01.492
What is a commodity?

00:43:01.492 --> 00:43:03.210
And then I'm gonna open up to questions.

00:43:03.210 --> 00:43:04.260
Does that sound good?

00:43:06.449 --> 00:43:08.042
Yes? Okay.

00:43:10.920 --> 00:43:12.900
By analyzing the commodity, right?

00:43:12.900 --> 00:43:14.760
So that's already a kind of false move.

00:43:14.760 --> 00:43:16.613
What you would wanna do is
start with the capital system.

00:43:16.612 --> 00:43:19.230
I would be like, "What's that?

00:43:19.230 --> 00:43:20.460
There's no capital system,

00:43:20.460 --> 00:43:21.293
there's no system.

00:43:21.293 --> 00:43:22.470
I just go to work,

00:43:22.469 --> 00:43:23.399
I have this thing,

00:43:23.400 --> 00:43:24.720
I go shopping, right?"

00:43:24.719 --> 00:43:26.789
I know somebody picked this,

00:43:26.789 --> 00:43:28.739
but you don't know all the
steps that happened in between,

00:43:28.739 --> 00:43:31.169
including the pressures on the farmers

00:43:31.170 --> 00:43:32.610
to put out a certain amount

00:43:32.610 --> 00:43:35.610
and to buy genetically modified seeds

00:43:35.610 --> 00:43:37.863
that are copyrighted, et cetera.

00:43:38.940 --> 00:43:40.440
You have to know the whole system

00:43:40.440 --> 00:43:43.079
to be able to understand
even one of its phenomena.

00:43:43.079 --> 00:43:44.699
So he starts with one of its phenomena

00:43:44.699 --> 00:43:46.259
to show you that you can't understand it

00:43:46.260 --> 00:43:48.003
without moving well beyond it.

00:43:49.619 --> 00:43:53.849
A commodity is, this is important,

00:43:53.849 --> 00:43:55.980
it's like a spoiler,

00:43:55.980 --> 00:43:58.320
it's like we've got to the end of,

00:43:58.320 --> 00:43:59.673
what did I watch recently?

00:44:01.110 --> 00:44:03.210
We just watched "Stranger
Things" for like the 10th time.

00:44:03.210 --> 00:44:04.829
It's like you get to started with the end

00:44:04.829 --> 00:44:07.170
of the first season of
"Stranger Things," right?

00:44:07.170 --> 00:44:08.003
So here it is,

00:44:08.003 --> 00:44:11.913
a commodity is a product
produced for exchange.

00:44:19.289 --> 00:44:22.920
Oh, that was a long exposition

00:44:22.920 --> 00:44:25.833
of the first two
sentences, three sentences.

00:44:27.809 --> 00:44:29.253
How about some questions?

00:44:34.889 --> 00:44:36.150
- You said that something,

00:44:36.150 --> 00:44:37.050
I don't know what it was,

00:44:37.050 --> 00:44:38.789
that doesn't have an elementary form.

00:44:38.789 --> 00:44:40.769
You said something doesn't
have an elementary form,

00:44:40.769 --> 00:44:41.820
maybe accumulation,

00:44:41.820 --> 00:44:43.180
you just explain what you meant by that?

00:44:43.179 --> 00:44:46.289
- Yeah, the capital system
has no elementary forms.

00:44:46.289 --> 00:44:50.969
Marx does not think that
at least social forms,

00:44:50.969 --> 00:44:53.489
and actually if you think about
the science he was reading

00:44:53.489 --> 00:44:56.012
in the 19th century, also natural forms,

00:44:56.880 --> 00:44:59.910
start from elements
which then build them up.

00:44:59.909 --> 00:45:01.199
That's something you might think of

00:45:01.199 --> 00:45:02.792
in physics or in chemistry,

00:45:04.139 --> 00:45:06.779
but it's also false.

00:45:06.780 --> 00:45:08.700
We break out the table of elements,

00:45:08.699 --> 00:45:10.049
but when you look at a compound,

00:45:10.050 --> 00:45:13.710
it has all of these characteristics

00:45:13.710 --> 00:45:15.960
that aren't reducible to their elements.

00:45:15.960 --> 00:45:17.670
So I would say that the capital system

00:45:17.670 --> 00:45:19.440
is not reducible to its elements

00:45:19.440 --> 00:45:22.619
and it's not explainable by its elements.

00:45:22.619 --> 00:45:25.049
For that reason, he turns to Hegel

00:45:25.050 --> 00:45:28.410
and you need a mode of discourse

00:45:28.409 --> 00:45:30.099
that starts from the whole

00:45:31.199 --> 00:45:32.969
because the parts all existed

00:45:32.969 --> 00:45:35.250
in one form or another
beforehand in history.

00:45:35.250 --> 00:45:36.869
There was money,

00:45:36.869 --> 00:45:38.940
there was exchange,

00:45:38.940 --> 00:45:41.943
there were dirty merchants
trying to get more for less.

00:45:42.869 --> 00:45:45.089
There was exploitation, for sure,

00:45:45.090 --> 00:45:46.233
there was extortion.

00:45:47.280 --> 00:45:51.570
It's only this whole that puts
them in a certain position

00:45:51.570 --> 00:45:54.423
and makes them do certain
things vis-a-vis one another.

00:45:55.679 --> 00:45:56.942
Why do we need an iPhone?

00:45:57.809 --> 00:46:00.599
Because of the way work turns out really,

00:46:00.599 --> 00:46:02.549
or because you're far away from home

00:46:02.550 --> 00:46:04.743
because of the way work turns out really,

00:46:06.179 --> 00:46:10.079
or because students need to
contact me while I'm walking.

00:46:10.079 --> 00:46:11.329
I don't know why that is.

00:46:14.010 --> 00:46:15.840
Only explainable by the whole.

00:46:15.840 --> 00:46:18.720
But that's a real conundrum
for a scientist of capital

00:46:18.719 --> 00:46:23.009
because how do you explain
the whole as a whole?

00:46:23.010 --> 00:46:24.600
To explain the whole as a whole.

00:46:24.599 --> 00:46:26.099
Describe the whole as a whole.

00:46:27.750 --> 00:46:28.829
Yeah.

00:46:28.829 --> 00:46:30.719
- I was wondering if you
could talk a little bit about

00:46:30.719 --> 00:46:34.619
translation means and its use
in this version of the text

00:46:34.619 --> 00:46:36.150
because I noticed you referenced

00:46:36.150 --> 00:46:38.340
in bold, black and key rule,

00:46:38.340 --> 00:46:40.019
but used writing, machine, journaling,

00:46:40.019 --> 00:46:42.659
you were image it by
many times crazy a bit-

00:46:42.659 --> 00:46:44.129
- Yes.
- Into English.

00:46:44.130 --> 00:46:46.650
And there was one phrase particular,

00:46:46.650 --> 00:46:48.389
the power of production

00:46:48.389 --> 00:46:50.507
or the productiony power,

00:46:50.507 --> 00:46:53.018
I've lost it on (indistinct)
productive power.

00:46:53.018 --> 00:46:53.920
- Yes.
- But I wonder if it

00:46:53.920 --> 00:46:56.550
could also be read as
like productive potential

00:46:56.550 --> 00:46:58.750
and how much something
like that would shift

00:46:59.610 --> 00:47:01.773
capitalism of indifferently seen.

00:47:02.610 --> 00:47:03.443
- It's a great question,

00:47:03.443 --> 00:47:07.620
a question about translation
and Marxist language,

00:47:07.619 --> 00:47:09.359
how much English changes it

00:47:09.360 --> 00:47:12.720
and how many other languages
Marx was working with.

00:47:12.719 --> 00:47:16.439
Marx knew, I don't know,
six or seven languages.

00:47:16.440 --> 00:47:18.059
He was a 19th century intellectual,

00:47:18.059 --> 00:47:19.799
that's what you did.

00:47:19.800 --> 00:47:22.890
Aren't we weak in comparison?

00:47:22.889 --> 00:47:23.909
I encourage you to go out.

00:47:23.909 --> 00:47:25.652
I managed like five,

00:47:27.630 --> 00:47:28.890
but many of them badly.

00:47:28.889 --> 00:47:30.089
I encourage you to go out,

00:47:30.090 --> 00:47:31.200
and he could read in all of them

00:47:31.199 --> 00:47:33.119
and quote in all of them
and remember all of them,

00:47:33.119 --> 00:47:36.092
it was really astounding,
really astounding.

00:47:38.369 --> 00:47:42.029
About how translation affects the text,

00:47:42.030 --> 00:47:44.250
it of course has a big effect.

00:47:44.250 --> 00:47:46.679
And let's take the word
term you mentioned,

00:47:46.679 --> 00:47:48.329
produktivkraft, productive power,

00:47:49.920 --> 00:47:53.430
or arbeitskraft, labor power.

00:47:53.429 --> 00:47:55.960
Not only are those

00:47:57.989 --> 00:48:00.389
hard to understand conceptually,

00:48:00.389 --> 00:48:04.170
but Marx is actually inventing
labor power as a term.

00:48:04.170 --> 00:48:07.349
In fact, he considered that
to be his biggest contribution

00:48:07.349 --> 00:48:09.239
or one of his biggest contributions,

00:48:09.239 --> 00:48:11.889
the idea that there is this
thing called labor power.

00:48:13.710 --> 00:48:17.730
I think it would be going
beyond the translation

00:48:17.730 --> 00:48:22.652
to imagine that that would be
something like a potential,

00:48:23.610 --> 00:48:25.200
but that doesn't make it wrong,

00:48:25.199 --> 00:48:26.909
that would be an interpretation.

00:48:26.909 --> 00:48:30.992
Marx was very precise with
his terms most of the time,

00:48:33.389 --> 00:48:36.719
but he did have a bit of
an Aristotelian background,

00:48:36.719 --> 00:48:38.730
so he likes matter and form,

00:48:38.730 --> 00:48:43.440
and he also likes
potentiality and actuality

00:48:43.440 --> 00:48:46.079
as a set of terms that
describe how things work.

00:48:46.079 --> 00:48:48.299
And it is true that when
you sell your labor power,

00:48:48.300 --> 00:48:49.830
you're selling a potential.

00:48:49.829 --> 00:48:53.639
And the big joke on workers

00:48:53.639 --> 00:48:55.199
is a terrible way to put it,

00:48:55.199 --> 00:48:58.679
the big deception is you
sell them your labor power,

00:48:58.679 --> 00:49:01.139
but they're getting your actual labor.

00:49:01.139 --> 00:49:02.759
So you have a certain
quantity of labor power,

00:49:02.760 --> 00:49:04.950
like, "I could do this much, here it is."

00:49:04.949 --> 00:49:05.782
But then you go in there

00:49:05.782 --> 00:49:07.529
and they're like, "Well,
sorry, you're doing this much,"

00:49:07.530 --> 00:49:09.690
you're actually doing a lot more.

00:49:09.690 --> 00:49:12.300
So labor power is a tool of capitalism

00:49:12.300 --> 00:49:16.053
to make it work out such that
more comes from the same.

00:49:17.730 --> 00:49:21.900
So you could do a good
interpretation of arbeitskraft

00:49:21.900 --> 00:49:25.349
or produktivkraft as a kind of potential

00:49:25.349 --> 00:49:28.469
that when it's actualized is
different than its potential,

00:49:28.469 --> 00:49:32.189
so that would be also moving
beyond Aristotle or Hegel.

00:49:32.190 --> 00:49:33.360
Yeah.

00:49:33.360 --> 00:49:35.460
- I had a question
about the different ways

00:49:35.460 --> 00:49:36.900
that bridged Marxist writing

00:49:36.900 --> 00:49:39.570
because you mentioned he
was also very a satirist

00:49:39.570 --> 00:49:42.600
and also wrote stern and
also political economists,

00:49:42.599 --> 00:49:45.239
so like how does the
style itself try to work

00:49:45.239 --> 00:49:47.219
oh, would capital against (indistinct)?

00:49:47.219 --> 00:49:48.052
- Yes.

00:49:48.989 --> 00:49:50.309
Oh, that's a great question.

00:49:50.309 --> 00:49:51.750
I've thought about this a lot,

00:49:51.750 --> 00:49:56.750
and you should think of Marx
and Engels as genre geniuses.

00:49:57.510 --> 00:49:59.138
These were like the Rupert Murdochs

00:49:59.137 --> 00:50:01.500
of the left in the 19th century.

00:50:01.500 --> 00:50:03.809
They tried everything

00:50:03.809 --> 00:50:06.393
to liberate labor,

00:50:07.559 --> 00:50:09.179
first to bring about liberal changes

00:50:09.179 --> 00:50:10.589
and also to move towards socialism.

00:50:10.590 --> 00:50:12.420
They tried every genre imaginable.

00:50:12.420 --> 00:50:14.909
One of them you know, "The Manifesto,"

00:50:14.909 --> 00:50:18.420
another one you might know the
"Thesis," remember that text?

00:50:18.420 --> 00:50:21.150
Famous text, "Theses on Feuerbach."

00:50:21.150 --> 00:50:22.619
They wrote letters, they gave speeches.

00:50:22.619 --> 00:50:26.789
Marx was up in 1871 in La
Commune on the barricades

00:50:26.789 --> 00:50:29.313
giving a speech to the Communards.

00:50:30.179 --> 00:50:31.980
He gave founding speeches,

00:50:31.980 --> 00:50:34.740
which included a lot of
theory at the inauguration

00:50:34.739 --> 00:50:37.439
of the International
Working Men's Association.

00:50:37.440 --> 00:50:42.179
They sent sometimes shameful,

00:50:42.179 --> 00:50:45.539
insulting letters about
other people to one another.

00:50:45.539 --> 00:50:46.440
They really tried everything.

00:50:46.440 --> 00:50:47.789
He wrote, of course, he was a journalist

00:50:47.789 --> 00:50:49.949
and he wrote hundreds of articles.

00:50:49.949 --> 00:50:52.409
They wrote encyclopedia entries,

00:50:52.409 --> 00:50:56.339
Engels writes long entries about arms

00:50:56.340 --> 00:50:58.920
and how they're useful
for popular uprisings.

00:50:58.920 --> 00:51:01.019
He has a great article on the rifle.

00:51:01.019 --> 00:51:02.190
So they were trying everything,

00:51:02.190 --> 00:51:05.280
and in this text, Marx
is doing the same thing.

00:51:05.280 --> 00:51:08.190
I mean, what's the difference
if you take capitalism

00:51:08.190 --> 00:51:10.079
that bourgeoisie down by logic

00:51:10.079 --> 00:51:12.599
or you take them down by yelling at them,

00:51:12.599 --> 00:51:13.739
doesn't matter,

00:51:13.739 --> 00:51:15.329
so he tried everything

00:51:15.329 --> 00:51:18.449
and I think that goes to an
important theoretical point,

00:51:18.449 --> 00:51:22.949
which is even though he found
ways to analyze the system,

00:51:22.949 --> 00:51:27.482
he did not find the way
that it would disintegrate.

00:51:28.710 --> 00:51:31.139
And he was constantly trying
all the way up to the end,

00:51:31.139 --> 00:51:35.039
including in his last years

00:51:35.039 --> 00:51:36.630
learning calculus

00:51:36.630 --> 00:51:39.873
so that he could better
understand business cycles.

00:51:41.760 --> 00:51:42.930
Yeah.

00:51:42.929 --> 00:51:46.230
- So, you began the
lecture you said to be wary

00:51:46.230 --> 00:51:48.900
thinking of capital as natural,

00:51:48.900 --> 00:51:50.700
but you also brought up how,

00:51:50.699 --> 00:51:51.809
at least from ours,

00:51:51.809 --> 00:51:52.980
what matters about capital

00:51:52.980 --> 00:51:54.960
is less about quadruple contradictions

00:51:54.960 --> 00:51:56.699
and more about the negative effects

00:51:56.699 --> 00:51:58.859
of the people way under it.

00:51:58.860 --> 00:52:00.599
I guess like two questions.

00:52:00.599 --> 00:52:02.346
One, maybe when God is just like,

00:52:02.347 --> 00:52:03.660
"What do you mean by natural?

00:52:03.659 --> 00:52:04.920
Is history natural?"

00:52:04.920 --> 00:52:06.990
But also assuming that people

00:52:06.989 --> 00:52:09.359
can set their by natural (indistinct),

00:52:09.360 --> 00:52:11.927
why does it matter whether capital is at?

00:52:11.927 --> 00:52:13.559
- That's a great question.

00:52:13.559 --> 00:52:14.619
The question was

00:52:16.469 --> 00:52:19.319
why did I say capital is not natural

00:52:19.320 --> 00:52:21.870
or the capital system is not natural?

00:52:21.869 --> 00:52:25.202
And the question is why does it matter?

00:52:26.400 --> 00:52:28.410
And for Marx it mattered,

00:52:28.409 --> 00:52:32.789
first of all, within the theory
that there's a separation

00:52:32.789 --> 00:52:35.192
between social things and natural things.

00:52:36.480 --> 00:52:40.173
Social things modify natural things.

00:52:41.610 --> 00:52:42.690
He was aware,

00:52:42.690 --> 00:52:46.289
in fact, he read Darwin's
"Origin of Species,"

00:52:46.289 --> 00:52:49.050
and there's a footnote to it, praising it.

00:52:49.050 --> 00:52:51.720
He was aware that nature
was being understood

00:52:51.719 --> 00:52:53.139
itself as having a history

00:52:54.570 --> 00:52:58.140
and as being a kind of
self-modifying thing.

00:52:58.139 --> 00:52:59.940
One word for that is organism,

00:52:59.940 --> 00:53:02.010
self-sustaining, self-modifying,

00:53:02.010 --> 00:53:06.030
and that's a word that Marx
likes to use for capital too.

00:53:06.030 --> 00:53:08.820
But this has to be separate and malleable

00:53:08.820 --> 00:53:11.130
in a different way than nature.

00:53:11.130 --> 00:53:14.463
Social things, in fact, they
have to be made by humans.

00:53:16.559 --> 00:53:18.900
So history for Marx,

00:53:18.900 --> 00:53:20.190
you could have natural history,

00:53:20.190 --> 00:53:22.409
but social history was the history

00:53:22.409 --> 00:53:25.449
of the way human beings
make their means for living

00:53:27.210 --> 00:53:30.179
and produce for themselves
their wants and needs.

00:53:30.179 --> 00:53:32.369
Only if it's not natural for him

00:53:32.369 --> 00:53:34.199
in the sense of being fixed

00:53:34.199 --> 00:53:37.532
and given outside of human activities,

00:53:38.460 --> 00:53:41.429
only if it's not natural,
is it criticizable for him.

00:53:41.429 --> 00:53:44.849
Things that are natural or not
thought of as criticizable,

00:53:44.849 --> 00:53:47.342
you know, criticize a comet,

00:53:48.449 --> 00:53:50.402
criticize a tiger,

00:53:51.510 --> 00:53:53.432
criticize a tectonic plate,

00:53:54.329 --> 00:53:55.650
and then come back and tell me about it.

00:53:55.650 --> 00:53:56.483
Yes.

00:53:56.483 --> 00:53:58.710
- Do you find it more helpful

00:53:58.710 --> 00:54:00.720
or more insightful to read "Capital"

00:54:00.719 --> 00:54:02.309
as kind of an accumulation,

00:54:02.309 --> 00:54:04.230
I guess, of Marx's previous styles,

00:54:04.230 --> 00:54:07.409
be that German idealism

00:54:07.409 --> 00:54:10.109
or journalism or what have you?

00:54:10.110 --> 00:54:12.180
Or do you find it more
helpful to kind of read it

00:54:12.179 --> 00:54:15.149
as a turning away to something new,

00:54:15.150 --> 00:54:16.050
to a (indistinct)?

00:54:19.920 --> 00:54:22.710
- The question is about Marxist styles,

00:54:22.710 --> 00:54:25.650
is it a kind of compendium
of previous styles

00:54:25.650 --> 00:54:27.960
or is it something new?

00:54:27.960 --> 00:54:31.829
He had been working in political
economy since about 1843.

00:54:31.829 --> 00:54:34.949
He writes the first draft of this in 1867.

00:54:34.949 --> 00:54:37.589
The first draft of this set of drafts,

00:54:37.590 --> 00:54:40.110
the Latin American

00:54:40.110 --> 00:54:43.380
Marx philosopher Enrique Dussel

00:54:43.380 --> 00:54:45.390
calculates that this book

00:54:45.389 --> 00:54:48.809
is about 1/72nd of all the
manuscripts he produced

00:54:48.809 --> 00:54:51.449
around the "Capital" project.

00:54:51.449 --> 00:54:53.132
The "Capital" project is huge.

00:54:54.090 --> 00:54:54.923
It goes on and on.

00:54:54.922 --> 00:54:56.039
It starts from the "Grundrisse"

00:54:56.039 --> 00:54:59.730
and ends with notes he
was making towards changes

00:54:59.730 --> 00:55:01.532
all the way up into the late '70s.

00:55:03.269 --> 00:55:05.699
So the project was ongoing,

00:55:05.699 --> 00:55:09.719
and my sense is as he got
more of an understanding

00:55:09.719 --> 00:55:13.289
of the intractability of capitalism,

00:55:13.289 --> 00:55:16.440
he started to marshal
more of his own forces.

00:55:16.440 --> 00:55:19.019
I think it's great that
he had all this practice

00:55:19.019 --> 00:55:20.820
in different genres.

00:55:20.820 --> 00:55:22.769
For example, he wrote hundreds of articles

00:55:22.769 --> 00:55:26.969
for the New York Daily Tribune in English,

00:55:26.969 --> 00:55:29.459
which were during the Civil War

00:55:29.460 --> 00:55:32.970
reports of Europe's
reactions to the Civil War.

00:55:32.969 --> 00:55:35.969
Marx was a staunch abolitionist,

00:55:35.969 --> 00:55:38.163
and so this was important work for him,

00:55:39.179 --> 00:55:43.259
but it trained him in
approaching things of the day

00:55:43.260 --> 00:55:46.890
with a certain kind of attitude.

00:55:46.889 --> 00:55:48.150
And you'll find that
all throughout the book,

00:55:48.150 --> 00:55:51.240
especially in Chapter
8 on the working day.

00:55:51.239 --> 00:55:55.439
So I think what I would like
to say is he saw this task

00:55:55.440 --> 00:55:58.920
as requiring these specific resources

00:55:58.920 --> 00:56:00.720
at these specific times

00:56:00.719 --> 00:56:03.629
to understand, for example, how capital

00:56:03.630 --> 00:56:06.273
as an organism that eats its limits,

00:56:08.010 --> 00:56:09.990
how it does this,

00:56:09.989 --> 00:56:11.969
you have to look at worker struggles

00:56:11.969 --> 00:56:14.099
and you need to do that
in a documentary fashion.

00:56:14.099 --> 00:56:14.932
And that's Chapter 8,

00:56:14.932 --> 00:56:16.500
it's 100 pages, I'm sorry,

00:56:16.500 --> 00:56:18.480
I think we're doing it in a week.

00:56:18.480 --> 00:56:20.490
It'll be like a history class there

00:56:20.489 --> 00:56:21.509
or give up philosophy

00:56:21.510 --> 00:56:23.670
and you read all these
accounts of what it was like

00:56:23.670 --> 00:56:26.070
and how they fought and how
the legislation changed.

00:56:26.070 --> 00:56:27.600
And what he does is demonstrate to you

00:56:27.599 --> 00:56:29.880
that even if you get
a shorter working day,

00:56:29.880 --> 00:56:32.010
they're gonna get their pound of flesh,

00:56:32.010 --> 00:56:32.843
and they did.

00:56:33.840 --> 00:56:37.829
So he uses this historical
documentary style

00:56:37.829 --> 00:56:39.869
to make a point he couldn't
have made theoretically,

00:56:39.869 --> 00:56:41.190
or had he made it theoretically

00:56:41.190 --> 00:56:43.200
it would be like reading Hegel,

00:56:43.199 --> 00:56:45.206
you'd be like, "Is that really true?"

00:56:47.849 --> 00:56:51.269
Here's what I recommend, buy this book.

00:56:51.269 --> 00:56:54.362
Really it's mainly supporting
the Academic Press.

00:56:55.469 --> 00:56:57.599
We begged them to come out
with a paperback first,

00:56:57.599 --> 00:56:59.460
but they have to make their money back.

00:56:59.460 --> 00:57:01.559
But buy the book, it's a great book,

00:57:01.559 --> 00:57:04.289
and we will continue with Chapter 1

00:57:04.289 --> 00:57:06.779
all the way through Monday.

00:57:06.780 --> 00:57:08.310
Don't forget that Friday is Monday,

00:57:08.309 --> 00:57:11.190
so we will meet back here Friday at 11:35.

00:57:11.190 --> 00:57:13.470
And thank you all for coming.

00:57:13.469 --> 00:57:17.402
I hope you've liked this.

00:57:19.849 --> 00:57:21.551
(gentle music)

00:57:21.550 --> 00:57:22.697
(switch clicking)

00:57:22.697 --> 00:57:26.209
(air whooshing)
(suspenseful music)