33 Lessons on Capital: Reading Marx Politically

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Introduction

Thirty-three lessons on the 33 chapters of Volume I of Karl Marx’s Capital. What?! Yet another book on Capital? Why read this one, among so many? Well, if you are looking for a scholarly text that interprets Capital as a work of economics or philosophy, this one is probably not for you. If you are seeking an interpretation designed to justify some partisan political platform, skip this one. If you need a philological treatise that draws on all editions and translations, look elsewhere. But, if you want to discover how what Marx wrote 150 years ago can help us understand our struggles and figure out what to do next, then this particular appropriation might provide some of what you are looking for.

The basic premise behind this book is the notion that Marx wrote Capital to put a political weapon into the hands of those of us opposed to capitalism and struggling to get beyond it. What kind of weapon? Above all, a theoretical one, designed to vivisect capitalism in ways that reveal how it dominates, exploits and alienates us, but also its vulnerabilities. Although committing surgery on living animals for research, testing or education is vile, vivisecting capitalism theoretically to figure out how to disrupt it, defeat it and create real alternatives, is all too necessary.1 Fortunately, Marx has not only given us tools for just such a purpose but has also shown us how to use them. This book aims to sharpen those tools—by demonstrating how even the most abstract concepts in Capital designate aspects of the antagonistic social relationships of capitalism in ways that help us resist and escape them. Capital was written as a political document; we do well to read it as such and put it to use.

At the time of its publication in 1867, Marx’s long-time engagement in the workers’ movements of the mid-nineteenth century made the political character of Capital quite clear.2 Yet, unlike earlier works, such as the relatively short and pithy Communist Manifesto of 1848, written with Engels for the Communist League at the beginning of the Revolutions of 1848, Capital is a massive tome, rivaling in length and complexity such classic works as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) or Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807). So, it is not surprising that economists have taken Capital to be offering an alternative economic analysis of capitalism and philosophers have read it as proposing an alternative philosophical science. But for those being exploited by capitalists at the time and doing their best—often with Marx’s support—to organize resistance, Capital provided both historical perspective and analytical tools. True then; still true today.

An example of his history-telling can be found in Chapter 10, where he sketches how capitalists, as they gained power, extended the length of the working day, forcing workers to work longer and longer. But he also sketches how workers, supported by social reformers, pushed back—forcing the government to create factory inspectors and then to pass Factory Acts imposing shorter hours. For workers, these were battles over how much of their lives they had to give up to their employers and how much they could retain for their own purposes. But his history is framed by his theory of absolute surplus-value (Chapters 7–11), which showed them how central such struggles were, not only to how much of their lives they were giving up, but how success in forcing down the length of the working day opened new possibilities for struggle. By creating more and more free time, successful work reduction made it possible to allocate more of their time and energy to exploring alternatives to capitalist ways of organizing their lives. By the time workers in the United States were fighting for a working day of eight hours, their slogan was Eight hours of work, eight hours of sleep and eight hours for what we will!

Similarly, his historical analysis of the increasing displacement of workers by machinery (Chapters 12–15) emphasized how it was a response to their struggles to work less. Against capitalists and their political economists who touted the use of machinery as making it possible to produce more with less work (higher productivity), Capital shows how capitalists use machines in a strategy of relative surplus-value to undermine workers’ self-organization and increase profits by intensifying work! Armed with Capital, workers could argue, Sure, we’ll go along with new machines, but only if the increased productivity results in our having to work less! Machines should make our work both shorter and less onerous, not longer and more intense!

Against employer and political economists’ arguments that increases in wages were impossible given the limits of the Wages Fund or would reduce the wages of other workers, Chapter 24 of Capital provided an analysis that permitted workers to argue how, within the context of rising productivity, not only were increased wages compatible with increased profits but wages could rise at the same time that work was reduced. Enough with the bosses arrogating the entire fruits of increased productivity to themselves, they must share!

But that was 150 years ago, give or take. What about today? How relevant are these issues and these analytical categories now? Unfortunately, struggles over the time of labor and the use of machines are still very much with us, not only in factories and offices but throughout society.

For the first half of the twentieth century, workers continued to hammer down the length of the working day, forcing capitalists to rely more and more on machines. Prototypical of the latter were the scientific management methods of Frederick Taylor (1856–1915) applied on the assembly lines of Henry Ford (1863–1947).3 So iconic were these that some analysts characterize the whole period as one of Fordism. For a while, in the 1940s and 1950s, work time was stabilized for a great many at about 40 hours a week and deals cut over productivity won higher wages but not less work. But a new cycle of struggle in the 1960s, often by workers wanting more free time to enjoy their higher wages, not only undermined absolute surplus-value through absenteeism and wildcat strikes but also undermined the capitalist use of machines through playing on the job and sabotage. The growth in productivity slowed and then declined, subverting relative surplus-value. The capitalist counterattack was multipronged but ultimately, by the beginning of the 1980s, they succeeded in reducing wages and increasing working hours. The decades-long, on-again, off-again march of workers toward zerowork was reversed and ever since capitalists have been using every ploy possible to increase work time.

Similarly, as computers—in both manufacturing and service industries—have become the most ubiquitous machines of our time, capitalists have deployed them systematically both to raise productivity and to extort more work. Early on, this extortion was obvious as personal computers displaced typewriters and programs were written to count secretarial keystrokes per minute, providing overseers with the means of pressuring typists to work faster, much as control over the speed of Ford’s assembly line provided the means to force manufacturing workers to work harder. Today, the widespread use of computers to compile data, metrics, is aimed at providing employers with new tools to increase workloads. At the same time, the deregulation of finance, the use of computer algorithms to guide speculation and the manipulation of debt have combined to enrich some capitalists while undermining workers’ income and wealth (mostly dependent on home ownership), forcing workers into longer hours or second jobs.

Finally, all these phenomena can be found far beyond the walls of factories and offices. They permeate schools, homes and everyday life in ways Marx never dreamed of, but whose character can still be illuminated by applying his theories. And this is true not only of capitalist methods but of our resistance. Against Fordist methods which had provided a template for the organization of schools, students in the 1960s rebelled, demanding less work and more time for self-defined, even self-organized studies. One result was grade inflation or higher grades for less work. Another was the creation of whole new fields, e.g., Black, Mexican-American or Women’s Studies. As schools substituted programmed, handheld computers for slide rules or calculators, students who were once asked to solve only one or two problems are today expected to solve dozens. Not less work, but more work. As with metrics in offices and factories, computer tracking of grades has given professors and administrators a tool to fight grade inflation and impose speed-up and more schoolwork. As women resisted subservience to housework, capital responded with household appliances, increasingly programmed and operated by built-in software. Although such equipment might be expected to result in less work, studies show that media-promulgated, ever-increased standards of cleanliness and expectations of beautiful homes and gardens have resulted in more housework rather than less.4 While the Internet and social media have provided workers, students and housewives with the means to organize against all this work, it has also provided capital with the means to track and subvert such organization, while spreading propaganda designed to accentuate well-known methods of dividing and conquering, i.e., the use of race, gender, ethnicity and national identity.

In short, what we have today are new forms of old conflicts. In an age where capitalists have sought to convert all of society into a social factory, resistance and struggle are everywhere and Capital still provides us with many tools for understanding the strategies arrayed against us and some insight into how the resistance of those who came before us may still be relevant to our actions today. The obvious question is what are those tools and how do we discover their usefulness?

If, as I argued in Reading Capital Politically (RCP), capital is not a thing but an antagonistic set of social relationships analyzed by Marx in Capital, then each and every category he deploys in the development and presentation of his theory denotes some aspect of those relationships.5 Above I mentioned his concepts of absolute and relative surplus-value. My formulation of the phenomena these two categories denote are the result of my particular—some say idiosyncratic—understanding of what Marx means by value, a much-disputed concept among both Marxists and their critics.

In RCP, I dissected Chapter 1 of Volume I on The Commodity and showed how each of the abstract concepts of the substance, measure and form of value can be understood not only as designating aspects of commodities, commodity exchange and money, but also as revealing aspects of the class struggles of capitalism—of the antagonistic conflicts between capitalist efforts to subordinate life to commodity production and our resistance to such subordination. This new book systematically extends that kind of analysis to the other chapters of Volume I of Capital.

Both RCP and this book are byproducts of some four decades of teaching, first at the L’Université de Sherbrooke in Quebec, then in the graduate program of the New School for Social Research in New York City and then at the University of Texas at Austin. The notes that became RCP were drafted in New York and turned into a book in Austin. As years went by and time permitted, to help students work their way through the first volume of Capital, I supplemented my undergraduate lectures by creating outlines and writing commentaries on Chapters 2–33, amplifying what I had time to say in the classroom for students to study at their leisure, independently of class times or office hours.

When the World Wide Web became available and RCP went out of print, I scanned the book, used OCR to create a digital version, used basic HTML to code it, and uploaded it, along with my existing outlines and commentaries to the course website as a study guide, illustrated with images, excerpts from literature, songs and textbook-like concepts and questions for review (http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/357k/357ksg.html). From that point on, I prepared new outlines and commentaries directly in HTML.

Convinced by many folks that I should meld RCP’s treatment of Chapter 1 with my notes on all the other chapters and publish the lot in the form of a hard-copy book, I decided to try. I copied and pasted the study guide webpages into MSWord documents and edited them, removing course-specific material, revising the text to reduce the number of words to a count consistent with an editor’s notion of a reasonably sized book. In the process, I realized that I also needed to revise the substantive chapters of RCP to correspond to the mode of my treatment of the other chapters. In the process, I found myself writing an entirely new book, not merely an expansion of RCP. Eventually, the contents of this book will be merged with the fully illustrated versions of the commentaries and course materials on the web.

The notes and commentaries on each chapter reflect the multiple objectives that I pursued in teaching Marx’s ideas. I came to study Marx, as I believe many do, as the result of dissatisfaction with alternative approaches to struggles in which I was personally engaged and to others I judged significant. I discovered, bit by bit, diverse Marxist interpretations of Capital—a diversity that reflects the contradictory politics of his interpreters. Trying to sort out those contradictions led me to examine their common source. As Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) said of history, so I have come to say of Marx, the best reason to study the man’s writings is because they can enrich our lives, by informing our efforts to free ourselves of the constraints that limit us and by helping us discover freer ways to live, as individuals and as a society.6

OBJECTIVES AND ELABORATIONS

My primary objectives in my courses on Marx were twofold: rejecting the roundabout approach of a survey course, I offered students who wanted to study his ideas: 1) the opportunity to read his original writings; and 2) what I judged to be one useful interpretation. Because I had come to believe that the indispensable core of his theory is his labor theory of value, I also decided that the most appropriate place to start was Volume I of Capital, his most systematic presentation of that theory, where he deploys it to reveal the nature of capitalism, the struggles to which it inevitably gives rise and the possibilities for transcending it.

But teaching Capital raised other pedagogical problems. In small graduate classes, everyone could read the same material, sit around a table and discuss it, with individuals’ contributions informed by their own preoccupations, e.g., other things they were studying or the subject of their thesis or dissertation. In large undergraduate classes, for the most part lecturing dominated. In both cases, my contributions—in discussions or lectures—reflected my reading of the material being covered. Because I agree that all readings involve interpretation, I never pretended that mine was a true and accurate exposition of what Marx really meant. On the contrary, I presented my reading/interpretation as one of many possible alternatives. Therefore, I suggested to my students that their studies could most usefully proceed through two stages. First, read and study Capital on their own, interpreting his words in terms of their own experience and knowledge of the world. Second, listen to and study my interpretation offered in discussions, in lectures and in answers to their questions, while juxtaposing their interpretation to mine. That process would not only help maintain a critical distance from both Marx and my reading of him but also provide a basis for studying the writings of other Marxists, should they so choose.7

A third objective was to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Marx’s theory, despite it being formulated in the mid-nineteenth century and based on observation and analysis of relationships and events of that period. Ever since first reading it, I have taken his Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, like Nietzsche’s verdict on history, as fundamental. The point of studying the world—including the past and others’ writings—is not just to understand it but to use that understanding to change it.8 I originally approached Marx skeptically. In a graduate course on the history of economic thought, I was taught all the usual reasons for rejecting his theory. Nevertheless, I came to conclude that although much has changed since he wrote, the core of his theory of capitalism still illuminates its essential characteristics and helps us see clearly not only what we are fighting against, but how it impedes our efforts to craft real alternatives.

A fourth objective derived from teaching in North America, given that most of Marx’s examples and illustrations are drawn from the history of British and European capitalism. Sadly, given the usual superficiality of high school history courses in the US, for most of my students that history was largely unknown. Therefore, in my commentaries I presented what I hoped were more familiar local examples. So, for example, where Marx analyzed the enclosures and anti-vagrant legislation in England and Scotland, I pointed to the dynamics of enclosure on the Western frontier and the anti-vagrancy laws in the post-Civil War South that forced freed slaves into near-slave labor.

A fifth objective responded to students finding much of Capital abstract, dry and dense. Although for those with the necessary background, both his text and footnotes are quite rich in literary and cultural illustrations and allusions, they often proved obscure to my students, whose course loads rarely left them time to seek out and study the original material. To partially compensate, I included in the web version of these notes colorful illustrations, drawn sometimes from historical or contemporary analyses, sometimes from literature, art, poetry or music dealing with the class struggles of capitalism in the past and in the present. I drew illustrations from nineteenth-century novels portraying the capitalist crimes against which Marx wrote and fought in the Britain of his time and others from US novelists addressing more recent but parallel conflicts closer to home.9 I also included poems and songs that lament those crimes—against humanity and nature—or celebrate the struggles against them. In the web notes, where possible, I included hyperlinks to performances. However, to reduce those notes to book length, most illustrations have been eliminated or sharply abbreviated.

A sixth objective was to amplify the material in Volume I with other writings by Marx that I felt made explicit things that are only implicit in Capital. For example, although I discover therein an exploration of the concrete forms of alienation caused by the capitalist subordination of life to work within industry, I also find it useful to draw upon his earlier writings that provide a framework for organizing our understanding of such alienation—a framework that he did not explicitly evoke in Capital. Therefore, in these notes you will sometimes find discussions of other writings.

EXTENSIONS

Composed in the 1860s and published in 1867, Volume I of Capital is clearly dated.10 Therefore, I have sought, in a limited way, to examine the relevance of his analysis to aspects of capitalism to which he paid scant attention, but which have since become extremely important. I address its relevance to developments that I have found to be either fundamental to the reshaping of the capitalist world in the years since Marx wrote or most immediately familiar because of our common experiences at home and in schools.

For example, Marx recognized how from its very beginning capitalism created a labor force, or working class, that included both the waged and the unwaged. In Part Eight on primitive accumulation, he points to the enclosures that drove people from their homes, tools and land, leaving them without any source of income and putting pressure on them to seek a wage in the labor market. Some got jobs and a wage, many did not. In Chapter 25, dealing with ongoing accumulation, he analyzed those without a wage as part of a reserve army. As capitalism rampaged across the face of the earth, through colonialism and then neo-colonialism down to contemporary neoliberal globalization, it has repeatedly enclosed commons and imposed waged labor; but it has simultaneously imposed many kinds of unwaged work. Understanding those impositions, and finding effective forms of resistance, I argue, can be usefully informed by extending Marx’s analysis to their study.

One of the most important early forms of unwaged labor within capitalism was slavery. Putting unwaged, enslaved Africans to work—providing raw materials for manufacturing factories manned by waged labor—shaped the entire subsequent history of capitalism. Even today, illegal slavery persists in forms such as human trafficking, and prisons impose de facto slavery by forcing prisoners to work for little or nothing. Moreover, racial discrimination and racist ideologies and behaviors continue to be widespread vehicles of capitalist domination, limiting the efforts of African-Americans and others to improve their lives.

Two other important sectors of the mostly unwaged have been peasants or small farmers in the countryside (often surviving on as yet unenclosed commons and part-time waged labor) and unwaged workers in cities—frequently migrants from rural areas or from other countries—who make up what is often called the informal sector of those who manage to get by with little or no access to wages. Indeed, the majority of those involved in the great uprisings of the twentieth century—the Mexican, Russian and Chinese Revolutions—were mostly unwaged peasants. So too with virtually all anti-colonial struggles such as those of the Vietnamese against French, Japanese and American domination. So too with the Zapatista indigenous rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico against racism, cultural genocide and capitalism at the end of the twentieth century, which catalyzed what are now ongoing struggles for democracy in that country and the global rise of both an indigenous renaissance and an anti-capitalist movement. Therefore, I show the ways, and the degree to which, Marx’s analysis of the unwaged can be extended to peasants, small farmers and so-called urban marginals and deepened by drawing upon the rest of his work.

But those have not been the only important sectors of the unwaged. When Marx was writing, men, women and children were all being driven into factories and other capitalist-organized waged work sites. But the struggles he describes in Chapter 10 to reduce the working day of wage labor eventually bore fruit in some parts of the world and resulted in substantial reductions in the time of waged work, e.g., in the US from 75 to 80 hours/week in 1880 down to approximately 40 hours/week in 1940. Over that same period, reformers succeeded in getting laws passed against most child labor and restrictions were placed on waged jobs for women. The resulting liberation of children and women—together constituting over half of the population—from waged labor, posed serious problems for a capitalist system that bases most of its control on the imposition of work.

Faced with the loss of the ability to control women and children directly, capitalists had to find other organizational ways of managing them. What it found and propagated were the nuclear family and public schooling, both structured to produce and reproduce the population as endlessly subordinated to the capitalist organization of life around work. In other words, capital invaded and colonized the time liberated from waged labor to make sure that women and children continued to work for it, but without a wage. Women would work as mothers and wives to procreate and reproduce the labor force (both waged and unwaged) and children would be incarcerated and disciplined for future roles as waged or unwaged workers. The relegation of most women to unwaged domestic work together with most waged women being limited to low-waged jobs, reinforced gender as an essential means by which capital has divided people to control them. Like racism and racial discrimination, sexism and gender discrimination predated capitalism but have been systematically reproduced and cultivated for purposes of social control. Therefore, I return again and again to the relevance of Marx’s analysis of waged labor for analyzing and understanding unwaged housework and unwaged schoolwork, and the racial and gender divisions that characterize unwaged as well as waged work.

Finally, because Marx was primarily analyzing the characteristics of capitalism (the book, after all, is titled Capital) the bulk of the text is concerned with what capitalists have sought to impose: their own modes of organizing social life. He does make clear, however, that from the beginning and continuing throughout the history of the capitalist era, people have resisted having their lives subordinated to those modes and have fought to liberate themselves and to create alternatives. Unfortunately, he devoted relatively few words to describing or analyzing those struggles. There are exceptions, such as Chapter 10 which includes a discussion of the struggles to limit and then reduce the time of waged labor; but for the most part his analyses of capitalist ways of organizing every aspect of life are not accompanied by equally detailed treatments of the struggles against those ways and for alternatives. To overcome this limitation, I have sought to do two things: first, to bring in some of his writings that do address such struggles, and second, to amplify what he did write with the studies of others who have investigated and analyzed, in greater detail, the efforts of people to avoid being reduced to the status of mere worker both individually and collectively. So, for example, to complement Marx’s discussion in Chapter 27 of enclosure in England, I have brought in some of the work of bottom-up British Marxist historians who have unearthed long-buried stories of resistance to enclosure and of struggles to reverse it.

The degree to which I have pursued these multiple objectives varies from chapter to chapter depending on their content and my familiarity with both the subject and relevant treatment by other authors. But in general, in each case, a brief outline of the content of Marx’s analysis is followed by a commentary addressed to an elucidation of some aspects of his theory and to an examination of the degree to which that theory can be usefully extended to domains and times that neither he nor Engels sufficiently explored.

SITUATING MYSELF

These objectives and efforts have been shaped by a half-century of political engagement within universities, first as a student, then as a professor. During those years, I was either directly involved in various struggles, on and off campus, or supporting those of my students. My last extended, direct participation was in the networks of solidarity supporting the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, the pro-democracy movement it catalyzed in that country and the alter-globalization movement to which it gave birth around the world.

Because of that personal history, I have struggled to avoid—not always successfully—the tendency of academics to situate themselves as outside observers and objective analysts of the world and its conflicts. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, as when you are writing about historical events in which you did not participate. You can make your sympathies clear, but that’s about it. Having been inside various struggles, however, has had consequences for my teaching, research and writing. First, as a salaried professor, I have always shared—with my mostly unwaged students—my analysis of the situation in which we found ourselves, with all its carefully arranged structures of power, including the hierarchical relationships among professors, students and administrators. Whether in graduate seminar conversations or in lectures to huge classes, I would ask students to consider the constraints on our ability to share knowledge and learn from each other. Second, my choice of both course content and research topics has always been determined by my politics, beginning with my early work on the Green Revolution, an outgrowth of a study group trying to understand the non-military aspects of the US government’s war against Vietnamese independence. That study, which revealed how capitalists have used money to subordinate scientific research to the political needs of policymakers, led me to gear my own work to helping those they were trying to control. So, I created courses in response to student demands and pursued research to contribute either to particular struggles or to the development of what I judged theory useful to such research. Third, believing that authors should not hide behind some pretended objectivity, I have tried to speak and write in ways that make my own political position explicit. Adopting Marxian analytical tools helps to achieve that objective, because they embody a critique of capitalism. But given the diversity of interpretations of Marx mentioned above, I have sometimes critiqued other’s writings and analyses to differentiate my own position. Fourth, having chosen what to research and which theory to deploy, I have repeatedly faced the problem of how to write in ways that make my own position and politics clear.11 I addressed this problem in my preface to Rupturing the Dialectic (2017) and have tried, in this book, to follow the approach chosen there:

Frequently in this book I use the first-person plural pronouns we and our—despite recognizing them as problematic. Sometimes they refer to all living beings, as in our very existence is threatened by the way capitalist industry poisons land, air and water; sometimes they refer to all of us who struggle against the way capitalism organizes society, as in we struggle against the subordination of our lives to capitalist-imposed work. My use of these terms, however, should not be read as a reductionism that ignores the complex heterogeneity of either living beings or of those of us who struggle. As I hope will be clear in what follows, I am not only acutely aware of those complexities but make no pretense of speaking for specific groups of which I am clearly not a member. Yet, I use these terms because I want to avoid the academic practice of analyzing conflict from outside and above, as if an objective observer, by being clear that what I have to say here is one expression of my political stance among those opposed to capitalism and striving to create alternatives. I also use these pronouns, where it seems reasonable to do so, to emphasize how capitalist ways of organizing the world impose common problems on us and how we have often found in the past, and can hopefully find in the future, complementary ways to struggle.12

Although minimal in my commentaries on the history laid out in Part Eight, but more frequently in Parts One through Seven, I explicitly situate myself as a worker, as a member of the working class. I recognize that doing so is controversial. Throughout most of the history of Marxism, neither students nor professors have been seen as members of the working class, often defined purely as waged factory workers. At best, with Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), students and professors might aspire to becoming organic intellectuals allied with workers, but still apart. Only recently, for reasons that will appear in my commentaries, have universities been seen as edu-factories and professors as one sort of white-collar worker laboring within them and struggling against their constraints.

A final note: neither this book, nor my online study guide, attempts to confront everything written in Capital. The book is an amazingly rich compendium of history and analysis, informed and illuminated by a wealth of references. There is no adequate substitute for reading and studying the original.

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1. Visit the website of the US National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS).

2. Indeed, recognizing its subversive character, the French government sought to impede the publication of Capital and eventually put the publisher out of business. Note des Éditeurs, Karl Marx, Le Capital: critique de l’économie politique, Livre Premier, Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1969, p. 8.

3. See Frederick Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, London: Harper & Brothers, 1911; and Henry Ford, My Life and Work, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1922.

4. Homes & Gardens magazine, published since 1919, is prototypical of a wide range of such efforts, in print, television, Instagram, etc., to set standards for making homes beautiful—standards that require ever-increased expenditure of time, energy and money.

5. Reading Capital Politically (1979), 2nd edn., Leeds: Antithesis; and Brooklyn, NY: AK Press, 2000.

6. See On the Use and Disadvantages of History for Life in Friedrich Nietzsche", Untimely Meditations (1874), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 59–123.

7. That suggestion grew out of the work-minimizing efforts of some students to just read my notes instead of studying Capital, in the mistaken belief that on tests or in essays all I wanted to find were my own words repeated back to me. I will make the same suggestion to readers of this book. It should be read critically as one person’s appropriation of the ideas in Capital, not as a substitute.

8. "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." MECW, vol. 5, p. 5.

9. Commenting on extensive passages from Jacques Peuchet (1758–1830) on suicide, Marx argued, It is by no means only to the French ‘socialist’ writers proper that one must look for the critical presentation of social conditions; but to writers in every sphere of literature, and in particular of novels and memoirs. Peuchet: On Suicide, MECW, vol. 4, p. 597. To appreciate Marx’s own use of cultural material, see S. S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature, 2nd edn., London: Verso, 2011.

10. Marx did make a few changes in subsequent editions of Capital, especially the French translation, and Engels added notes to the German and English versions that reflected some subsequent experience in the nineteenth century.

11. There is yet another problem, namely that of the capitalist appropriation of Marxian theory. Recognizing that it happens raises the problem of how to minimize the likelihood that what we write will be of use to our enemies. See H. Cleaver, Karl Marx: Economist or Revolutionary?, in Suzanne W. Helburn and David F. Bramhall (eds.), Marx, Schumpeter & Keynes, Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1986, pp. 121–146.

12. Harry Cleaver, Rupturing the Dialectic: The Struggle against Work, Money and Financialization, New York: AK Press, 2017, p. 1.

2

Capital: A Critique of Political Economy

Famous, because it provides the most detailed and systematic critique of capitalism ever written1 and because it has inspired generations of rebels in their thinking and actions, Capital, Volume I, has nevertheless been cited, condemned or praised far more often than it has been read. Although Marx did warn, in his Preface to the book, that Beginnings are always difficult and The understanding of the first chapter... will therefore present the greatest difficulty,2 he also thought that he had organized it in a way that would make it accessible to everyone, including young people, etc., who are thirsting for knowledge.3 He was also delighted when it was published serially in France for workers (August 1872–May 1875).4 But over the years since his time, it has become a commonplace that most of those who start at the beginning—Part One, Chapters 1–3, containing the basics of his labor theory of value—fail to read the rest of the book.

The usual explanation for that failure attributes it to the way in which he presented his theory. Despite his good intentions, instead of some clever hook to draw readers in, he filled those first pages with abstract categories deployed in a dense analysis of commodities (things bought and sold) and money. Although both commodities and money are familiar to everyone, neither the abstract categories of his theory nor his method of presentation are well known. While the logic of the presentation is clear enough—gradually adding determinations to move from the more abstract to the more concrete—why it is worthwhile to work through the abstractions and figure out what they all add up to has not been clear to generations of those who have tried but given up. Those who have struggled through the first chapters and then continued through the book, have discovered how vitally important all those abstractions are, a discovery that inevitably leads one back to rereading the opening chapters in the light of all that follows, and then rereading all that follows in the light of a clearer understanding of the basic concepts.

One result of this perception—by those of us who have found reading and studying the whole book worthwhile—has been recurrent admonitions to start reading, not from the beginning, but from some later point in the text. For example, French Communist Party philosopher Louis Althusser (1918–90) advised readers to skip Part One, begin with Part Two, Chapters 4–6, read the whole book through and then return to Part One.5 Although the order I suggested to my students differed, it was nevertheless very much in the same spirit. For those new to Volume I, I recommended beginning with Marx’s analysis of the historical origins of capitalism in Part Eight on Primitive Accumulation (Chapters 26–33) and then taking up his theory in Parts One through Seven. I suggested that order, and organized my lectures and discussion accordingly, because material in Part Eight consists of vivid historical analyses that make the abstractions of Part One easier to understand. While reading everything in the book after Part One, as Althusser recommended, would certainly make it obvious where Marx was going in those first three chapters, reading only Part Eight is enough, I have found, to reveal why he developed a labor theory of value and therefore why it is worth the trouble of studying his detailed but abstract presentation of that theory in Part I. Moreover, because the rest of the book, Parts Two through Seven, deploys the categories developed in Part One to analyze all of the different aspects of capitalism addressed, how you understand those categories shapes how you understand those subsequent analyses. The same is true with respect to the second and third volumes of Capital. Compiled from his notebooks, by his friends and followers after his death in 1883, the material assembled in those two volumes use the same concepts presented in Volume I to analyze whole new aspects of the class relationships of capitalism. This book follows the same suggested order as my lectures and my online study guide. Because the bulk of my commentaries were written and organized on the basis of that order, comments on a given chapter often assume previous discussions or allude to later ones.

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1. There are other books on capitalism just as long and detailed—such as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations—but despite containing a few criticisms of this or that aspect of the system, they have been dedicated to solving its problems and offering policy recommendations for its promulgation, the very opposite of Marx’s critique, which is aimed at helping find ways to transcend it.

2. Preface to the First Edition, Capital, Volume I, p. 89; MECW, vol. 35, p. 7. Marx offered a similar warning in his Preface to the French edition: the method of analysis I have employed. . . makes the reading of the first chapters rather arduous. . . [But] there is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits. Capital, Vol. I, p. 104.

3. Marx to Engels, June 22, 1867, MECW, vol. 42, p. 384.

4. Note des Éditeurs, p. 7. To the publisher, Marx wrote "I applaud your idea of publishing the translation of Capital as a serial. In this form the book will be more accessible to the working class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else. Preface to the French Edition", Capital, Vol. I, p. 104.

5. Louis Althusser, Avertissement aux Lecteurs du Livre I du Capital, in Karl Marx, Le Capital: critique de l’économie politique, p. 13.

3

Part Eight

So-called Primitive Accumulation

These last chapters, 26–33, provide an easy-to-understand historical context for the more theoretical analysis in Chapters 1–25. Those earlier chapters spell out, step by step, Marx’s analysis of the antagonistic social relationships of capitalism, beginning with a quite abstract presentation of his labor theory of value and building, gradually to a more concrete analysis of how those relationships are reproduced on an ever-expanding scale. What these final chapters make clear is why Marx formulated a labor theory of value as his primary theoretical tool. He shows us how capitalism came into the world as a new form of social domination whose most fundamental method of controlling society was the endless imposition of work. In Marx’s analysis, that imposition generated an antagonistic two-class structure: a capitalist class that imposes work and a working class that resists. The chapters in Part Eight are organized in a way that highlights the creation of these two classes:

Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation. This introductory chapter reveals the hidden secret of the creation of a new kind of class society, how most people were stripped of their means of living independently, forcing them to work for a new class of overlords.

Chapter 27: The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land. Sketching the first step in the historical creation of the working class, Chapter 27 analyzes and illustrates how and when people’s pre-capitalist ways of life were violently destroyed. Most of the examples are from England and Scotland, for which Marx had the most material. The violence of the expropriation lay both in the use of physical force to overcome resistance to being dispossessed and in the wholescale destruction of traditional ways of living.

Chapter 28: Bloody Legislation Against the Expropriated. In the second step of creating a working class, the expropriated were forced into the labor market to sell their ability and willingness to work to some capitalist. Here again, violence was required because even stripped of the means of independent livelihood a great many people turned to vagabondage or direct appropriation, rather than selling their abilities to capitalists.

Chapter 29: The Genesis of the Capitalist Farmer. Marx’s analysis of the emergence of the capitalist class, a new ruling class whose power to impose work was progressively based on having enough money to hire workers and purchase the means of production necessary to put them to work producing commodities, begins with the appearance of agrarian capitalists. Instead of merely collecting rents from tenants, the owners of great landed estates or those hired by such landowners, reorganized agriculture to produce for the market.

Chapter 30: Impact of the Agricultural Revolution on Industry. The Creation of a Home Market for Industrial Capital. Expropriated and dispossessed, people were forced to buy what they needed to live, creating markets for the commodities many of them now produced for their capitalist employers.

Chapter 31: The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist. Alongside agrarian capitalists came captains of industry, capitalists able to amass sufficient fortunes to hire workers and purchase the means of production necessary for manufacturing and then large-scale industry. Their means included state subsidies, profitable loans to the government and colonial pillage and exploitation.

Chapter 32: The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation. This chapter provides both a historical summation and a logical conclusion, not only to Part Eight, but to the whole book. It provides sweeping overviews of the rise of capitalism as a new historical phenomenon, of how its methods of imposing work and exploiting people generates resistance and, finally, of how that resistance has the potential to become revolution, overthrowing and transcending it.

Chapter 33: The Modern Theory of Colonialism. In what amounts to an appendix to Chapter 31’s brief evocation of colonialism as one of the means through which capitalists amassed enough money to finance investment, Marx analyzes the writings of one economist who not only understood how capitalism requires the creation of a working class but proposed some policies for achieving it.

CHAPTER 26: THE SECRET OF PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION

Outline of Marx’s Analysis

The myth of political economy:

– frugal elite (who accumulated wealth) vs lazy rascals (who spent it all and were left with nothing but their skins to sell)

Actual history:

– capitalists replaced guild masters (or feudal lords) and created:

– a working class, displaced from the soil, stripped of their tools and autonomy

– capitalists gained control of the means of production via conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force1

– primitive accumulation, therefore is the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.2

– workers are freed in a double sense:

1. neither are they owned as means of production, i.e., as slaves

2. nor do they own the means of production: they suffer a change in form of servitude

– capitalist era dates from the sixteenth century.

Commentary

What makes capitalism a new kind of society has been the creation of two new classes: a capitalist one made up of those who seek to organize most people’s lives around the work of producing commodities and another, a class of workers, made up of those whose lives are subordinated to that organization. The secret of this creation—hidden by pro-capitalist political apologists in the telling of history—is that the emerging class of capitalists imposed this social order with brutality and violence, forcibly separating people from their means of livelihood and destroying their ways of life. Those means included: privately owned tools, formal and informal land tenure and commons, such as pastures, fishing waters, forests and often language and culture to which everyone in a community had access. Although this forcible separation created a situation where the reality (and threat) of destitution and starvation would largely replace the lash as a coercive instrument of control, violence has continued to provide capitalists with a supplementary weapon for keeping people subordinated, right down to the present. This is true whether the violence has been wielded by corporate goons, paramilitary thugs or by government police and military.

Marx both critiques political economy by showing it to be at once apologetic and false and gives an overview of the actual processes through which capitalism emerged as a new kind of social order—an outline of the history he examines more thoroughly in the subsequent chapters.3

His analysis temporarily ignores the central subjects of political economy—the interactions of money and commodities—to focus on the social conflicts that shaped the new world in which those things came to figure so centrally. The violence that capitalists required to impose their order reveals the depth of resistance. The agents of this new order, the knights of industry, exploited every opportunity to achieve power, to subordinate the exploited classes of the old order in a new way and to usurp the power of the feudal lords, the knights of the sword.

The Myths of Political Economy

Myths about the class structure of capitalism have served to justify both its historical origins and ongoing class disparities. The central myth, still promulgated today, is a morality tale that portrays capitalists as obtaining their wealth by frugally saving and investing. It suggests that everyone has always been able to become a capitalist by the same means, and those who do not, have no one to blame but themselves.

In nineteenth-century English literature, this myth was already the object of ridicule far more acerbic than Marx’s. For example, in Charles Dickens’s (1812–70) 1854 novel Hard Times, which narrates the lives and tragedies of several people in a fictional Manchester-style, manufacturing city called Coketown, we find many passages where various persons are repeating this myth. Examples include the self-praising speeches of Mr. Josiah Bounderby—the novel’s central capitalist—constantly bragging (falsely it turns out) about how he raised himself out of the mud to his present august position as mill owner and banker.4 More concise is a pretty exchange between Bounderby’s ex-housekeeper Mrs. Sparsit and Bitzer, his light porter, general spy and informer at the bank, in which the repetition of the myth reveals both a disdain for those irrational creatures (workers) who put human relationships before personal profit and a self-delusion about the origins of wealth. Both, of course, are merely repeating the self-justifying truisms of Bounderby in an almost ritual, and mutually reinforcing, manner.5 The effect is both comic and appalling.

A subtler, but even more biting indictment of the myth of the self-made man, is contained in The Professor by Charlotte Brontë (1816–55), written in 1846. The protagonist, a young man who becomes a school teacher, only achieves success by fully participating in a dog-eat-dog world fully shaped by the laissez-faire, competitive capitalism of the nineteenth century. The novel portrays the necessary combination of aggressiveness and defensiveness required for survival, as well as the ultimate loneliness and isolation of even the most successful competitors for status and love. It is an amazingly modern treatment of the psychological consequences of what Marx in his 1844 Manuscripts and social critics in the twentieth century call the alienation of individuals in capitalist society. The pressures to which the young professor succumbs and the behaviors that he adopts continue to be depressingly widespread in contemporary academia where academics are pitted against each other in an endless struggle for publication, research funds and promotion.

In American literature and popular culture, this myth has taken many forms, including the novels for young adults of Horatio Alger (1832–99). With the rise of the modern corporation with its many-leveled wage and salary hierarchy, the myth has taken the form of stories of energetic individuals who work hard and scheme their way up that hierarchy, perhaps even to the top. From Horatio Alger’s young men to Michael J. Fox in The Secret of My Success (1987) or Melanie Griffith in Working Girl (1988), the myth has changed little. It has, however, also been repeatedly critiqued, in novels such as Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922) or poems such as Edwin Robertson’s Richard Cory (1897), made famous in Simon and Garfunkel’s musical interpretation (1966).6 I return to these critiques in my commentary on Chapter 7.

Controversy: Was Marx an Historical Materialist?

Declining to take on the history of capitalism everywhere, Marx announces that he will take the example of England as the classic case. Indeed, throughout Capital most of Marx’s examples are drawn from British history although from time to time, including in this section on primitive accumulation, he brings in experiences in other countries. However, since Capital was published in 1867, there are many—including his best friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820–95)—who have tried to turn Marx’s analysis of the rise of capitalism into a general theory of history, i.e., historical materialism. Engels’s efforts in this direction built on a few generalizations that he and Marx had made in their early joint works The German Ideology (c. 1846) and The Communist Manifesto (1848). In the former, they insisted on the material foundations of human life in the genesis of ideology. In the latter, aimed at differentiating their communist movement from a variety of socialist efforts, they famously wrote: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. A decade later, in his brief preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx wrote:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.7

Given the generic character of this passage, characterizing human history in general, it is easy enough to understand why some would see it as a first step toward a general theory of human history. Engels, but not Marx, went on to attempt the elaboration of such a general theory in writings such as Anti-Dühring (1878) and in The Dialectics of Nature (1883), where he pushed beyond a general theory of history, to sketch a virtual cosmology—a dialectical materialism encompassing all of nature as well as human history, a cosmology in which historical materialism constituted a subset of a broader vision.

These works became essential references for official Soviet ideology, referred to in shorthand as histomat and diamat. At their nadir, during Stalin’s regime, both were reduced to a virtual catechism to which all Soviet intellectuals were forced to adhere. They were also used to justify—when it suited Soviet interests—demands that members of the Soviet-organized Third International in regions of the Global South support the development of capitalism against so-called feudal forces. In the wake of Stalin’s death in 1953 and of the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, the theory was refurbished as an elaborate structural model by Althusser and his collaborators. The ongoing appeal of one version of historical materialism or another is evident in the continuing publication of the academic journal Historical Materialism (1997–), its conferences and its book series.

Unfortunately for those attached to the idea of a general theory of history, Marx wrote his own commentary on this kind of interpretation of his work. One author to whom Marx took exception was Nicolai K. Mikhailovski (1842–1904) who had used Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation to argue the historical necessity for all countries, including Russia, to pass through the stage of capitalism. Yes, the czar should be overthrown, but that overthrow must be followed by accelerating capitalist industrialization of the country. This was a highly political issue in Russia in the 1870s and remained so right through the Russian Revolution when the Bolsheviks seized power and pursued precisely such a policy. Others, such as the populists, recognized no such inevitability, argued and organized for a revolution of workers and peasants that would undercut the beginnings of capitalism in Russia and permit a direct passage from the traditional village mir (a communal form of organization) to communism. In the process of rejecting Mikhailovski’s interpretation, Marx refused the conversion of his theory into historical materialism:

It is absolutely necessary for him to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of general development, imposed by fate for all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they are placed.8

Elsewhere in the same letter, to illustrate his objection to applying his analysis willy-nilly, Marx points out how the expropriation of peasants in ancient Rome led not to wage labor but to slavery.

Four years later, in a letter to Vera Zasulich (1849–1919), one of his translators, he again rejected the generalization of his theory and insisted on the open-ended possibilities of the Russian village mir as the possible basis of a new society:

The historical inevitability of this process [the genesis of capitalist production] is expressly limited to the countries of Western Europe. . . Hence, the analysis presented in Capital does not adduce reasons either for or against the viability of the rural commune, but the special study which I have made of it, and the material which I drew from original sources, has convinced me that this commune is the fulcrum of the social regeneration in Russia.9

He hoped, we now know, vainly, that revolution might give the mir a chance to become the point of departure for the growth of an alternative, more attractive culture and civilization.10

From these notes and from the treatment in Capital, I draw two conclusions: first, this section on primitive accumulation shows the conditions and processes through which capitalism emerged and which it must maintain to reproduce its social order. People must be separated from alternative means of livelihood and driven into the labor market, where they can gain their bread only by working for business.11 Second, it is a mistake to see this analysis as a linear stages theory that says all peoples must pass through these processes.

Even today, when it can be argued that all countries have long been caught up in the capitalist web and their people fitted into its net of exploitation, there is nothing in Marx that argues each subordinated group must progress through predetermined stages of development before they can fight to be free of capitalism. In a world organized around an extremely complex multinational division of labor, it makes no sense to interpret the call for a universal development of productive forces as a call for universal industrialization. Marx shows us how capitalist development has always involved underdevelopment, both as a process and as a strategy. The development of capitalism is not only based on the underdevelopment and impoverishment of all other modes of life but in the process, it generates a poverty it can never abolish because it provides an ongoing threat that not being directly exploited by capitalism can be worse than being exploited by it.12 The division of labor, a corresponding income hierarchy and the promise of upward mobility have provided capitalists with carrots to induce acceptance of its rules of the game, but also with the sticks of unemployment and poverty to club people into line when the carrot does not provide sufficient motivation.

Extensions: Capitalism Can Not Eliminate the Alternatives

As he argues here, and again in Chapter 25 on accumulation, capitalist development never means giving everyone a living wage in exchange for work. On the contrary, many, perhaps most (on a world scale) of those whose ways of life are progressively destroyed are doomed to remain unwaged and poor.

This is one reason why so many people have resisted and fought to preserve their independence as communities and their uniqueness as cultures. In the United States, as in other so-called developed capitalist countries, most people have lost that struggle and been swept into the world of factories, offices, ghettos and suburbs. Some have preserved unique cultural attributes by forming rural or urban communities. We have the Amish in the countryside, Native Americans on reservations, and ethnic communities in cities. Others, from time to time, have broken away to form intentional communities that escape, to some degree, subordination to wage labor. But most people have been integrated into the waged/unwaged hierarchies of capitalist society. In the Global South, where factories have been fewer and capitalist development has concentrated its poverty, a higher percentage of people have had better luck in preserving some land, some control over their means of production and more of their traditional culture. They are not outside of capitalism, they too are exploited, as we will see, in a variety of ways, yet they still have some space that supports their ongoing struggle for autonomy. In Capital, Marx does not talk much about these situations because his historical examples are mostly drawn from the British Isles, where very little of pre-capitalist social forms and culture survived.13

One place where access to land and community cohesion have made possible resistance to total subsumption to capitalism and a certain degree of autonomy is Mexico. In the early 1990s, in the run-up to the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Mexican government pushed through a constitutional amendment aimed at undercutting one of the few fruits of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) won by peasants and the indigenous: the collective ownership of land in the form of ejidos where the land belonged to communities and not to individuals and could not be bought and sold. While not organized like the Russian mir, the ejidos nevertheless provided the material foundations for peasant, especially indigenous, communities to survive and preserve elements of their languages, music, dress and self-organization quite different from the institutions of the centralized Mexican state. Thus, they have formed unwanted rigidities to Mexican and American business with an interest in expanding their