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