Saturday, February 20, 2021

 

Notes from our discussion of session 8, pages 275-333

The core of what we discussed on 18/2/21 (session 8, pages 275-333) can, I think, be summed up in two extracts from the Grundrisse.

On labour vs labour-power

"The worker cannot become rich in this exchange [with the capitalist], since, in exchange for his labour capacity as a fixed, available magnitude, he surrenders its creative power, like Esau his birthright for a mess of pottage. Rather, he necessarily impoverishes himself, as we shall see further on, because the creative power of his labour establishes itself as the power of capital, as an alien power confronting him. He divests himself [entäussert sich] of labour as the force productive of wealth; capital appropriates it, as such…"

On capital as "productive"

The great historic quality of capital is to create this surplus labour, superfluous labour from the standpoint of... mere subsistence; and its historic destiny [Bestimmung] is fulfilled as soon as, on one side, there has been such a development of needs that surplus labour above and beyond necessity has itself become a general need arising out of individual needs themselves – and, on the other side, when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations [Geschlechter], has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species [Geschlecht] – and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, and of the sole conditions in which this mania can be realized, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased...

Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness [Naturbedürftigkeit], and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. [Emphasis in original].


Thinking back to Marx's comment in The Poverty of Philosophy that "it is the bad side that produces the movement which makes history, by providing a struggle", will, I think, help us understand here.

Capital is "productive" for Marx because it creates a "bad side" which generates richer struggles, with more potential.

Some of that, I guess, is also to do with "good sides" (in the sense that Marx cited knightly virtues, balance of rights and duties, etc. as "good sides" of feudalism). Capitalist production, for example, makes its workers literate as feudal and slave modes did not.

But the gist is the production of a richer "bad side" with more potential.


Lev asked how much "disposable income" workers had at the time Marx was writing?

Little compared to today, to be sure. The conditions of the majority of the working class were wretched, as Engels describes in The Condition of the Working-Class in England.

Nevertheless we find that Marx takes it as a rule of thumb that workers' wages in England are about twice the level (at his time) of wages in France in Germany, and workers' wages in the USA are twice the level in England. Workers in France and Germany had a hard time, but they didn't generally starve to death, so compared to their level (or, as Marx puts it, to the level of the lowest-paid in England then, generally Irish immigrant workers) the majority, and even more so better-off workers in good times, had some "disposable" income.

Advertising was beginning to flourish (the billboard was invented in the 1830s and spread from the 1860s). Workers bought and read newspapers and books. More of them had "Sunday best" clothes in addition to their work clothes. Some rented or even owned cottages which were a great improvement on the tenement rooms where worse-off workers lived. And some, of course, spent a lot of money on gin.

All that was meagre, but important in its time, and a break from the more stereotyped consumption of previous exploited classes.


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Sunday, February 14, 2021

 

Notes from our discussion of session 7, pages 266-274

The part of our discussion on 11 February 2021, on pages 266-274, which I will pursue further below, is the one about the passage noted by Penny on p.266.

"The labour which stands opposite capital is alien [fremde] labour, and the capital which stands opposite labour is alien capital".

In my view, all Marx means here is that in the exchange between capitalist and worker, the capitalist deals with someone else's labour, and the worker with someone else's capital.

"Alien", or in German fremd, here just means "someone else's". Fremd can be translated as alien, but it is a more common and matter-of-fact word in German than alien is in English, and without the same emotional weight.

Thus:

She has visited many foreign countries. Sie hat viele fremde Länder bereist. Ships from foreign lands... Schiffe aus fremden Ländern...

Fremd here has no more connotation of hostility or opposition than the English word "foreign". Maybe less.

Entfremdet, alienated, or Entfremdung, alienation, are a different matter. They have more connotation of opposition, of contrived distancing, etc.

Entfremdung does appear in Hegel's writings, but much more often in his Phenomenology of Spirit (which, as far as I know, Marx never referred to or cited) than in the Science of Logic (which we know Marx was glancing through at the time he wrote the Grundrisse) or other later writings.

Unlike with many other words, Hegel gives no special connotation to Entfremdung different from what other writers would give it. He got the idea mainly from the Romantics, who were influential when he was young. Hegel himself, especially when he was young, was a harmonistic liberal, believing in a society which would combine some measure of individual freedom with togetherness and "everyone in their place".

Although in many other aspects Hegel's use of terminology was very distinctive, he was like other German writers of his time in using the word Entfremdung as part of a cluster of words with overlapping meanings.

Inwood, in his Hegel Dictionary comments:

1. Entfremdung corresponds to entfremden ("to make alien")... It primarily indicated the estrangement of persons from one another.

2. Entäusserung corresponds to entäussern, "to make OUTER or external (ausser)", and means "surrender" or "divestiture". (Hegel uses Entäusserung, but not Entfremdung, to refer to the alienation, i.e. voluntary disposal, of one's own property)

Other words in the same area are: Entzweiung (from zwei, "two"), "bifurca­tion", "disunion"; Zerrissenheit (from zerreissen, "to tear, rend, dismember, disconnect"), "dismemberment", "disjointedness"; Zwiespalt (also from zwei), "discord", "conflict", "discrepancy"; Diremtion ["diremption"]; and Trennung, "separation" (from trennen, "to separate").

Undoubtedly Marx in his younger years was influenced by the Romantic legacy, and possibly in part as it was filtered through Hegel's Phenomenology. Engels even more so. In his Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels wrote:

"The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels. The hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? And have they not, in the end, to seek happiness in the same way, by the same means? And still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest, becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space. And, however much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking, is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city".

Remember, Engels grew up in a small town, where everyone would have known everyone else they met on the street. Partly out of such thoughts, I guess, Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto and in later writings, supported the then-common idea of the abolition of the division of town and country by way of the distribution of the population into a large number of small settlements.

Socialists have quietly let that idea drop, and I think rightly. There are great social advantages in having both dense big cities and sizeable patches of unurbanised countryside, rather than a whole country defined by a uniform spread of suburbia.

In the Grundrisse Marx criticises the greedy, indifferent individualism of bourgeois society - but also, and more harshly, the yearnings of romanticism.

"Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal [gemeinschaftlich] relations, are hence also subordinated to their own communal control, are no product of nature, but of history. The degree and the universality of the development of wealth where this individuality becomes possible supposes production on the basis of exchange values as a prior condition, whose universality produces not only the alienation of the individual from himself and from others, but also the universality and the comprehensiveness of his relations and capacities. In earlier stages of development the single individual seems to be developed more fully, because he has not yet worked out his relationships in their fullness, or erected them as independent social powers and relations opposite himself. It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end.)"

To put it in provocative terms: bourgeois alienation is much "preferable" to the pre-capitalist forms of togetherness, and the socialist future will build on positive contributions from that bourgeois alienation.


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Saturday, February 06, 2021

 

Notes from our discussion of session #6, pages 250-266

The "Loi Agraire"

Marx in these pages frequently asserts that the exploitative relations of capital and labour-power are an inescapable consequence of commodity relations dominating in society. To end exploitation we must make those commodity relations wither away, rather than seeking to purify them and make them correspond more to an ideal abstracted from one side of how they appear.

The argument is all put in quite abstract terms, but can I think be equated with the argument made by communists in the French Revolution that a common idea of the left then, the "Agrarian Law", was insufficient.

The idea of the "Agrarian Law" was derived from the Lex Agraria of the Gracchi in Rome in 133 BC. It meant dividing up the land (in Rome, some of the land; in France at the height of the French Revolution, I think, all of the land) so that each household would have an equal patch of land.

Jacques Granus declared in 1793: that he wanted a republic which "would be the culmination of equality and freedom. I cannot conceive of the republic in any other way. It is not the agrarian law, which will not last twenty-four hours from the moment you permit the free play of individual ambitions. Communism, that is the fundamental and guiding principle of the republic".

I believe that a similar argument was made by Babeuf in his trial.

Why would the equality "not last 24 hours"? The "un-labour theory of value", as we discussed it a couple of weeks ago - the inescapable divergence of prices from individual labour times - would ensure that.

A is more energetic, healthy, deft, lucky, or whatever than B. So A, in a day, produces more monetary wealth than B. The inequality is self-reinforcing. Soon B will be able to get a better deal from selling their labour-power to A, who in the meantime will have acquired better equipment, more productive techniques, etc. Then A acquires the advantages given by cooperation against C, D, etc…


"The depths"

On page 247 Marx has developed a first version of the argument which he will spell out in more precise terms at the end of chapter 6 of Capital volume 1, and which will lead him to give the core of Capital (chapters 7 to 15) to studying how labour is shaped and reshaped in the workplace (a theme not really studied at all in the Grundrisse.

"In present bourgeois society as a whole, this positing of prices and their circulation etc. appears as the surface process, beneath which, however, in the depths, entirely different processes go on, in which this apparent individual equality and liberty disappear…" ["The depths" are… the production process].

The "surface" contains a real measure of "liberty and equality", but also the cramping domination of what in Capital chapter 6 Marx will call "property and Bentham", the pointers to the "depths".

"It is forgotten, on one side, that the presupposition of exchange value, as the objective basis of the whole of the system of production, already in itself implies compulsion over the individual, since his immediate product is not a product for him, but only becomes such in the social process, and since it must take on this general but nevertheless external form; and that the individual has an existence only as a producer of exchange value, hence that the whole negation of his natural existence is already implied; that he is therefore entirely determined by society; that this further presupposes a division of labour etc., in which the individual is already posited in relations other than that of mere exchanger, etc...."


Capital: not a thing but a relation; and not just a relation, but also a process

On page 257 Marx refers to Adam Smith saying that capital "is accumulated labour… which serves as the means for new labour".

That is true in the sense that all capital is embodied, at various stages in its circuit, in products of past (dead) labour. But then all products are products of past labour! And all production, whether capitalist or not, depends on using products of past labour to help with present labour. (Even for hunting and gathering you need a strong arm developed through past labour…)

Defining capital that way means that "the specific form of capital is abstracted away".

So far Marx is reworking a comment he had already made in Wage Labour and Capital in 1849.

"What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is worthy of the other. A Negro is a Negro. Only under certain conditions does he become a slave. A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it become capital…"

Capital, he argues, is not a thing, but "a social relation of production".

In the Grundrisse Marx goes further:

"Capital is not a simple relation, but a process, in whose various moments it is always capital" (p.258).

We cannot understand capital from looking at the individual things and people in a snapshot of bourgeois society, nor even from looking at the individual things and people and the relations between at that snapshot time. We can understand only by looking at what Marx calls "value in movement".


The Walrasian auctioneer

Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, famously developed the idea of the "invisible hand".

Book IV ch.2: "By directing [his] industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, [the individual] intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it".

Book I ch.2: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages".

These days Smith is often presented as an unconditional free-marketer. But he wasn't. He also wrote:

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices".

And the passages above say only that it is not always the worse for society that the individual seeks maximum individual gain, and it frequently turns out that this search of individual gain has promoted a common good. That's true. Up to a point market relations do allow efficient coordination. Marx argued that capitalist market economies would have recurrent crises of "overproduction", but also that they had mechanisms for recovering from crises, and the crises weren't permanent.

Much later than Smith was the argument that market relations (if smooth-flowing, not tampered with by governments, etc.) would always and comprehensively bring a harmonious and optimal outcome.

A "general equilibrium" theory on those lines was first developed by Léon Walras at the end of the 19th century. Oddly, Walras himself was a sort of socialist (although a market socialist), but ideas about free-market capitalism being the best possible society were quickly spun out of his ideas. Walras's approach was further developed and made more rigorous by Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu in 1954. (Again, Arrow himself was a sort of socialist).

The "Walrasian auctioneer" was a theoretical fiction developed by Walras, of an auctioneer simultaneously "auctioning" all commodities across society to set exactly the prices that would balance supplies and demands. His argument was that the actual process approximated what that "auctioneer" would do.

He knew very well that it was a fiction. The essential point about all these theoretical constructions is that they apply only to economic life as seen in a snapshot, on an idealised market day for example.

Thus they miss out what we can only see by studying the economic processes in movement.

There have been attempts to develop Walrasian theory further beyond snapshots. I studied a university course in 1969 delivered by one of the most determined and clever theorists to make such an attempt, Christopher Bliss, then writing his book Capital Theory and the Distribution of Income. But I don't think the attempts hold up.


The emergence of capitalism from limited commodity exchange

In the Grundrisse Marx is still unclear about the decisive steps which make the movement from limited commodity exchange (very old) to general commodity exchange and capitalism.

He would sum up a more developed view in Capital chapter 6.

"We know by experience that a circulation of commodities relatively primitive, suffices for the production of all these forms [of money]. Otherwise with capital. The historical conditions of its existence are by no means given with the mere circulation of money and commodities. It can spring into life, only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence meets in the market with the free labourer selling his labour-power. And this one historical condition comprises a world’s history. Capital, therefore, announces from its first appearance a new epoch in the process of social production".

He adds in a footnote: "The capitalist epoch is therefore characterised by this, that labour-power takes in the eyes of the labourer himself the form of a commodity which is his property; his labour consequently becomes wage-labour. On the other hand, it is only from this moment that the produce of labour universally becomes a commodity" (emphasis added).


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Tuesday, February 02, 2021

 

Notes from our discussion on session #5, pages 172-250

Much of our discussion in session 5 (28 January 2021: pages 172-250) centred around Marx's comment (page 161) that a "social bond" or a "real community" mediated by money "is preferable to the lack of any connections, or to a merely local connection, resting on blood ties, or on primeval, natural, or master-servant relations".

Marx's critique of a society where money becomes "the social bond", "the real community", and "the god among commodities" is very different from the railing against "the money power" from, for example, US president Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), who managed to abolish the USA's central bank.

That sort of agitation against money, or at least against big money, as the evil disrupting an otherwise benign (capitalist) economy, has often been a staple of the populist and antisemitic right.

But it was those whom Marx was arguing against in these pages of the Grundrisse who were closer to such agitation. In the 20th century, a Cercle Proudhon (Proudhon Circle), 1911-25, would become an incubator for fascist groups in France.

Darimon and the other Proudhonists focused on inequities in distribution, abstracting them wrongly (so Marx argued) from relations of production which they left relatively uncriticised. They argued that society could be made fair and equal by reforming the money system, in particular curbing the privileges of big money (free credit), and introducing "labour money".

Marx argued that they were taking ideals generated by a society of generalised commodity exchange - "Liberty, Equality, Property, and Bentham", as he would put it in Capital - noticing that this society also contradicted those ideals, and trying vainly to mend the society by lopping off the non-ideal elements.

Far from the workplace and production and the family household being the "good side" of capitalist society, requiring only to be rid of the "bad side", the sphere of circulation is the "good side", the sphere of at least a relative liberty and equality.

The"bad side", "the depths" as Marx puts it in the Grundrisse, is exploitation, subjugation, and alienation in the workplace. Only, the "good side" and the "bad side" are inseparable. And, as Marx had put it in The Poverty of Philosophy, "it is the bad side that produces the movement which makes history, by providing a struggle". In capitalist society, it is the organisation and struggle of workers in the workplaces that underpins "the movement which makes history".

And when the workers become able to "make history", we will build a society of "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their need", without money, or with only a very limited role for money, rather than a reformed money-society.

So Marx is very "against" money, but in a historical perspective, of looking towards it being superseded, but also seeing it as having been an element in previous progress.

When Marx writes of a "real community" mediated by money being "preferable to the lack of any connections, or to a merely local connection, resting on blood ties, or on primeval, natural, or master-servant relations", he does so in rough notes. The word "preferable" cannot be exact or literal. Marx has already commented that money does not result from a "convention" or some sort of agreed social contract: it develops and confronts societies as a system of relations outside their control.

No individual, no society even, can "prefer" money relations by choosing them off a shelf in preference to tributary relations of different sorts, in the way that one might "prefer" apples to pears, or skirts to shorts.

The inexact use of the word "preferable" provokes fruitful discussion just because it is jarring.

In the early pages of the Communist Manifesto, Marx does not use the word "preferable" to compare bourgeois society to earlier tributary forms. But it is clear that he considers bourgeois society to represent advance, progress, an expansion of emancipatory potentialities, beyond tributary societies.

As Rosa Luxemburg would later put it: "The capitalist victory parade and all its works bear the stamp of progress in the historical sense". That side of Marxist theory, and the consequent recognition of "reactionary anti-capitalism" as a constant real potential and threat, got pushed aside somewhat in the 20th century. I wrote some polemics, under the pen-name Chris Reynolds, in a debate about this in 2000-2: https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2013/05/27/capitalism-our-times.

I think sober reading of the economic history of living conditions for the working majority in older societies compels the conclusion that capitalism today - even with Covid, with shanty-towns and slums, and all the rest of it - is "preferable" in an everyday sense to those older societies. But that is not Marx's point. We cannot, individually or collectively, choose whether to live in the 21st century or the 14th century.

His argument is that bourgeois society - and, even more so, developed bourgeois society - has more potentialities for further development. It has a richer "bad side".

One implication is that Marx (not just as a matter of personal "preference", but as a matter of the material possibilities) sees a future "free association of producers" not as negating bourgeois individualism but as developing it to more individual freedom, variety, and multifariousness.


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