The Conspiracy is Capitalism's Reviews > Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

De-mystifying the Left’s “Bible”:

Preamble:
--Friedrich Engels apparently called this book “the Bible of the working class” (which I believe was, in part, tongue in cheek, coming from a secular historical materialist), so I’m also referencing this tongue in cheek. I might add that Marx's “opium of the people” quote on religion had nuance, and my favourite quote comes from an advocate of Liberation Theology (Hélder Câmara):

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.
When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.

--When COVID shutdowns started, my “Economic Development” class with Jim Glassman was in its last weeks. Foreseeing that I would really miss the campus group-learning environment, I decided to start a Goodreads study group. I’ve always been disappointed with how little engagement there is on Goodreads for critical nonfiction compared with fiction. Where else can you find folks from all over the world reading the same obscure books?! Members who read critical nonfiction tend to just track their reading, while the few extended discussions are often siloed in one-on-one messaging.
--So, I really wanted a project for us to work on together, in depth, and what better book than Marx’s infamous Capital Volume 1 to bring us together? We ended up dividing into 3 meeting groups for different time-zones and reading paces, and each group has provided rewarding experiences. Check out Carlos Martinez’s interviews to inspire our efforts:
-with Vijay Prashad: https://youtu.be/BgiKOlMjUoo
-with Radhika Desai: https://youtu.be/8EkpdYH0Bhg
--Many leftists only read the The Communist Manifesto (indeed, same goes for the opposition, at least those who bother to read), a political pamphlet Marx/Engels wrote when they were age 29/27 in the wake of the Revolutions of 1848 (“A specter is haunting Europe”… “you have nothing to lose but your chains!”); after the revolutions were co-opted by the bourgeoisie, Marx/Engels’ later preface explains how they left the Manifesto unaltered as a historical record.
--Marx’s Capital project, on the other hand, was a sober, lifelong academic pursuit. Marx had planned some 5-6 “books”, each with multiple volumes. He only finished Volume 1 (1,000+ pages) of the 1st book, with Engels piecing together Volume 2, 3, and 4(?) from Marx’s mountain of notes. The minority who make it through Volume 1 really drop off for the subsequent volumes, which are fragmented and dominated by Marx’s dry accounting style (whereas Volume 1 also features Marx’s literary depth and biting critique).
--Academic: which opposition has taken Classical political economy idols Adam Smith/David Ricardo etc. more seriously/extensively than Marx? …Certainly not today’s “mainstream Economics”, i.e. Neoclassical (“anti-Classical” according to Michael Hudson/Anwar Shaikh), where status quo shilling devolves into simply quoting the “Invisible Hand” passage without context (Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, not to mention capitalism evolving beyond petty shopkeepers of butchers/bakers/brewers, face-palm) while deliberately rejecting Classical foundations (class distinctions/struggle, labour theory of value, economic rent, historical change, turbulent competition, etc.).

Highlights:

--I ended up splitting Volume 1 into 2 halves: Market Circulation and Production. Throughout, Marx is particularly interested in uncovering capitalism’s:
(i) Abstractions: historical social relations (i.e. power relations, interactions for social needs) that are hidden, where the surface appears as natural (physical/human nature) thus inevitable (crucial for social consent!).
(ii) Contradictions: potential sources of crises.

1) Capitalism’s Value system; Market Circulation of Capital:

--With the first sentences, we immediately get a sense that we’re reading the interaction between a science textbook (chemistry’s Periodic Table) and philosophical treatise (theory of value): “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.”
--Note: Marx mimics scientific reductionism where simplifying assumptions are made to “turn off” certain parts in order to isolate and discover other parts (see The New Economics: A Manifesto for a useful distinction between this vs. the “constructionism” of utopic mainstream economics making “domain assumptions”). Thus, it’s a crucial challenge to keep track of what assumptions are at play throughout the book (and the entire Capital project).

…Starting with the commodity, Marx distinguishes its:
(i) Use-value: satisfies human wants/needs; a quality.
(ii) Exchange-value: the economic gain from selling something on the market, represented by price; a quantity.
…How these contradicting natures manifest in various scenarios is carefully unraveled, where market exchange prioritizes exchange-value while abstracting use-value (it’s difficult to compare heterogeneous qualities).
--Given the heterogeneous qualities of the commodities exchanged, the (general) commonality between commodities is both are products of labour; thus, Marx starts with the Classical Smith/Ricardo “labour theory of value”. However, Marx emphasizes that labour here must also be abstracted (heterogeneous labour becomes homogeneous; Marx calls the result “value”).
--We can theoretically measure “value” as “socially necessary labour-time” (the normal labour-time the society requires to produce the commodity), foreshadowing another contradiction: increase productivity = increase use-value produced (more commodities) but decrease “value” (shorter socially necessary labour-time needed, thus labour-power and the commodity are cheapened; see later).

--Private labour becomes social labour since it is now producing for social use (sold on ever-expanding market), but this social labour is contradicted by the relation only being via market exchange, thus indirect (sold to strangers). This stranger-to-stranger relation is mediated by the commodity sold/bought, resulting in “commodity fetishism” where social labour is concealed/objectified in the commodity itself. Just think of how visible the commodity/its price are, compared to all the labour relations/conditions throughout the commodity chain (let alone environmental conditions)!
--Let’s add some anthropology: despite economists trying to naturalize market exchange (esp. convenient thought-experiments of how human social relations started with barter), the actual mechanisms of market exchange (instantaneous exchange between strangers competing to maximize their own gain) is clearly not what built human sociability (families/tribes/communities). Not stopping to realize this shows how close our social assumptions are to anti-social Randian zealots; to dispel Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? and revive social imagination, see Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
…This abstraction of labour (“value”) involves the Great Transformation from a “society with markets” (precapitalist, where markets were on the periphery) to a “market society” (capitalism); here I’m referring to the accessible intro Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails, channeling The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, on how capitalism required State violence during the Enclosures' privatization of the Commons to create the land market (to grow wool for the rising global market) and thus the labour market (from those dispossessed of land thus forced to sell their own labour).
...Marx describes how precapitalist personal landed property (“no land without its master”) became capitalist impersonal property (“money has no master”). Marx returns to this in the last part of the book, critiquing Smith’s so-called “primitive accumulation” (convenient assumption that capitalists got their capital from savings/hard work, thus the idyllic original accumulation) by describing the top-down violent dispossession of the domestic Enclosures (The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation) and even colonial enclosures (Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital).

--Another way to conceptualize the Great Transformation:
(i) C-M-C: precapitalist exchange of Commodity-for-Commodity (facilitated by Money). This is “selling in order to buy” because the end goal is the consumption of the Commodity (consuming its use-value). This end goal means the circulation stops, thus the inherent limits.
(ii) M-C-M’: “General Formula of Capital” where Money is invested for more Money (via producing and selling Commodity). This is “buying in order to sell” (speculation!) where the end is exchange-value (more Money), which starts another circulation of capital if re-invested. As David Harvey stresses, capital is a process that must be endless to survive (endless accumulation). Thus, the endless growth driving our existential ecological crises is at the heart of capitalism’s logic; economic growth = economic health under capitalism, even when the growth is viral/cancerous/self-destructive (must-read: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World).
…speaking of speculation, M-M’ is also mentioned in the context of interest-bearing capital, and the contradictions of money fetishism: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and [the capitalist] might just as well have intended to make money without producing at all” (see: Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present and The Bubble and Beyond).
...Note: the contradictions of money as means-of-exchange vs. store-of-wealth are surprisingly central in the Patnaiks’ Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present.
--Capitalism’s value system treats the environment as a free gift (see The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power on capitalism externalizing costs by dumping it onto the environment). During Marx’s time, soil depletion was a major concern, where England was forced to import guano (seabird droppings from colonized islands) as fertilizer; Marx also mentions the disturbance of the metabolic relationship between humans and the environment from capitalist urbanization, spurring Ecological Marxism (Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System).

…see the comments below for the 2nd half of the review (Volume 1’s focus on Capitalist Production)!